Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If smooth-as-silk memory sharing and file caching bring joy to your heart, you know you're a Linux geek. And if you're a Linux geek, there's apparently no time like the summertime to indulge in the sheer pleasure of playing with cool stuff in the Linux universe. Some generous bloggers have tagged some of the shiniest treasures for us. What other gems are out there, friends? We'd love to know.

There are several ways to run Windows programs on Linux (virtualisation, WINE) and vice versa really isn't a problem either with Cygwin, or better yet, native ports thanks to the Windows variants of Gtk+ and Qt. Still, what if Windows support was built straight into the Linux kernel? Is something like that even possible? Sure it is, and the Chinese figured it'd be an interesting challenge, and called it the Linux Unified Kernel.

What does the U.N. and E.U. have in common with the World Bank and the European Central Bank? They want to exchange statistical data in an uncomplicated manner. Out of this need has grown the SDMX standard and its respective tools, as a case study by the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) information service has revealed.

PC/OS Developer Roberto J. Dohnert has announced the release of PC/OS 10 Open64 Workstation. The desktop distribution designed for 64-bit systems is based on Ubuntu 9.04 and includes all of the latest security and bug patches up to the 25th of May. All of the PC/OS editions, including OpenDesktop, OpenWorkstation and WebStation, utilise the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and focus on providing ease of use out-of-the-box.

Cobol, the venerable computer language so beloved of Y2K-fearing businesses, has hit 50 years young today, having been invented on the 28th of May 1959 at a meeting of the Sort Range Committee at the Pentagon. The news comes from Cobol specialists Micro Focus, who tell us that there are two hundred times as many Cobol transactions as there are Google searches ever day, and that here in the UK we're all using Cobol-powered applications a average of ten times daily.

The KOffice team is extremely pleased to finally announce version 2.0.0 of KOffice. This release marks the end of more than 3 years of work to port KOffice to Qt 4 and the KDE 4 libraries and, in some cases, totally rewrite the engine of the KOffice applications.

Just five years ago, Vic Gundotra argued that web apps could never rival their desktop brethren. But that's when he worked for Microsoft. He works for Google now. And he sees things quite differently. In 2004, Gundotra and his Microsoft team - responsible for driving developers to Windows - pointed to an application called Keyhole as a prime example of the sort of desktop goodness that could never be duplicated on the web. Then Google bought Keyhole, a Windows app that stitched satellite photos into a pan-and-zoom-able virtual landscape, and just months later, it turned the app into a web service.

Clement Lefebvre from the Mint development team has announced the release of Linux Mint 7 (code named Gloria). Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to be user friendly and provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and media codecs. The release is based on Ubuntu 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackalope), the 2.6.28 Linux Kernel, X.org 7.4 and GNOME 2.26.

Open source database vendor Ingres might stand a better chance at taking on the enterprise with Oracle fixing to swallow developers' favorite MySQL along with Sun Microsystems. To help, it's begun forging alliances with open-source operating-system companies. Red Hat and Ingres have been sniffing around each other for the past few weeks. Ingres in mid-April said it was signing up as a charter member of the Open Source Channel Alliance created by Red Hat and Synnex, an IT distributor with more than 15,000 channel partners in the US, Canada, and Mexico, to drive open source solution sales.

Last week we took a look at four great Linux/FOSS applications that are as good as any of their competitors, FOSS or proprietary. Today I'll wrap up with four more fine applications that I think are excellent and bragworthy, and that have not already been reviewed to death.

The Northern Territory has seen the formal launch of One Laptop Per Child deployments in Australia.

Open source may have had a late start in the realm of enterprise virtualisation, but the meticulous and attentive development of this technology has led to better products in the long run. Not only is open source virtualisation now fully enterprise-ready, but it offers greater cost-savings and more flexibility that its proprietary counterparts.

This year's JavaOne conference will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week. Sun's 14th annual JavaOne conference for Java developers will, as usual, lure approximately 15,000 developers to California. Times, however, have changed a little, in that this year's conference is the first at which a keynote speech will be given by Microsoft. The speech by Microsoft Vice President Dan'l Lewin will examine software and services cooperation between the two companies in the cloud computing field and in platform interoperability.

Back in February we were first to share the news that Linpus was going to launch a QuickOS Linux operating system. They did that, but we can now also tell you that next week Linpus Technologies will be launching a new version of their Linpus distribution that is based upon Moblin V2. One of their representatives decided to send us the information early again, and so we have it for you now.

Canonical is building an Android execution environment that will make it possible for Android applications to run on Ubuntu and potentially other conventional Linux distributions. The effort will open the door for bringing Android's growing ecosystem of third-party software to the desktop.

NASA is processing immense sets of images and data from Mars and the moon into a special Microsoft format for viewing in the Redmond company's WorldWide Telescope online program. But the U.S. space agency also plans to publicly release, as open-source software, the tools it's developing to make the conversion. That technological balancing act is among the details revealed in a federal Space Act Agreement establishing the terms of a collaboration announced by NASA and Microsoft earlier this year. The text of the agreement wasn't disclosed at the time, but NASA has now released the documents in response to a request made by TechFlash under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

A wireless mesh network lets you multiply a single wired Internet connection over as large an area as you care to manage, such as a farm with remote buildings, a school campus, a neighborhood, even marinas (Internet on your boat!). You can quickly quickly adapt to changing conditions without laying so much as a foot of cable. Eric Geier shows us how using Linux and open source management tools.

Canonical has unveiled the first fruits of a project that could put applications for Google's Android on a netbook sooner than the search giant can deliver itself. Ubuntu's chief sponsor has demonstrated an execution environment that lets applications built to fit the screen, power, and hardware of an Android smartphone on an Ubuntu-powered PC. The execution environment potentially lets these applications take advantage of features common to a PC such as support for mouse-based input instead of touch, multiple windows open simultaneously, and have an application run while the CPU is idle.

In the video last week I showed how to use the bash complete command for simple use cases. Today I'll show you some of the additional ways that you can use the command for more complex scenarios.

Canonical demonstrated a prototype version of an execution environment for Ubuntu that lets it run Android apps, says an industry report. The environment acts like a simulator, and is based on the Xorg X Window environment, says the story. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical demonstrated the Android emulator at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona, Spain, according to a Ryan Paul story in ArsTechnica. Based on the Xorg open source implementation of X Window, the execution environment functions like a simulator, enabling Android apps to run alongside conventional Linux applications, writes Paul.