Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Everybody loves the wild and wacky names that end up gracing releases of the various Linux distributions throughout the year, even if some of them — we're not going to name names, that might hurt our karma — have gotten a bit more bizarre of late. Among the more interesting processes for picking release names comes from the Fedora Project, where unlike most other distributions, the new name must share a unique link to its predecessor. Its time then to put your thinking caps on, as the race to make that most creative of links is underway.

Dell is readying a netbook for the K-12 educational market with a rubberized case and an optional touchscreen. Incorporating an Intel Atom N270 with 1GB RAM, the Latitude 2100 offers a 10.1-inch display, WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, up to 250GB storage, and Ubuntu Linux, says Dell.

Moblin.org has released the beta version of its open-source Linux "Moblin v2.0 for Netbooks and Nettops" stack. The Moblin beta shows extensive upgrades in the user interface (UI), including a new toolbar (pictured), and an "m_zone" home page that aggregates social networking content.

Novell's SUSE Studio brings a slick automation process to the world of Linux appliances. Paul Ferrill shows us how a few mouse clicks is all you need to create a fully bootable image in any of several formats, including a VMware image.

The Linux Foundation has announced the conference schedule for LinuxCon 2009. LinuxCon, originally announced in October of last year, will take place in Portland, Oregon from the 21st to the 23rd of September. Modelled after the Linux Plumbers Conference, the event will be held annually and is aimed at Linux developers and users, as well as hardware and software suppliers.

Optus may have scored the first Android-powered mobile phone in Australia (the HTC Dream) and the much-vaunted Kogan Agora may have faded into oblivion, but 3 says it'll have the second in about a month's time.

The second to the last planned maintenance update in the GNOME 2.26 series has been released. GNOME 2.26.2 just brings the usual assortment of bug fixes and translation updates, while all major work on this free software desktop environment is now focused on GNOME 2.28.

From WYSIWYG Web authoring to video surveillance to audio recording to book authoring, Linux offers a wealth of featureful, capable applications. Today in part 1 Carla Schroder reviews four of her favorites.

One of the big changes we made in the Open XML SDK v2 April 2009 CTP was improving the Low Level DOM component to include functionality related to Office 2007 SP2. With this improvement came a difference in how some elements were interpreted as a 1st class property of a parent class/element vs. as a child element. For example, SdtProperties is no longer a property off of the SdtXXX classes, but is rather interpreted as just a child element. Scouring through the different customer feedback channels, the Open XML SDK forum, http://www.openxmldeveloper.org, and the SDK Connect site, I've noticed that this change broke some of my previous posts and code samples. In today's post, I am going to show you a workaround to this issue and I'm going to point you to April 2009 CTP complaint versions of sample code that is currently broken.

Far from being the evil monopolist, Microsoft has in many ways become the cooperative giant—and it's all thanks to intellectual property. The company's IP czar takes us inside the corporate transformation in a new book, Burning the Ships, to show us how it happened (and to take a few potshots at Richard Stallman).

Microsoft and the Linux Foundation are unusually united in a joint letterPDF to the American Law Institute. The letter asks the ALI to "delay adoption" of its Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. The companies ask for wider consultation on the "Principles", specifically with developers and distributors of software.

Companies that traffic in free open source software don't make their money selling licenses. They make it by selling support. What's that really worth? What does a company get for support fees vs. just grabbing the software and using it with no help from the developer? What kind of company should pay for support, and what kind of company can do without it?

You'll remember my recent posting about the fine work journalist Brenno de Winter has been doing in his spare time, bringing a little healing daylight into local government in The Netherlands. Brenno has been trying to get details of local government procurement published on the web, so that the resulting transparency can drive better decisions. Since most local authorities haven't wanted to do that, he's been filing bulk Freedom of Information requests (the Dutch abbreviation is apparently WOB) to get the data.

It has been a while since I have played with Apache, I will admit that. The last time I used it, version 2.0 was the norm, and version 2.2 was just coming out of beta. Today of version 2.2.11 is the current version.

In April the Openmoko Project announced that after only ten months it was discontinuing production of the Neo FreeRunner phone and after drastic staff reductions would be moving forward with a 'Plan B' product. It seems Plan B has now been revealed as Openmoko is inviting the developer community to not only tinker with the software and the casing design of the open smartphone, but it's also now releasing the hardware design of the FreeRunner (GTA02) for anyone to join in, under the codename gta02-core. The aim is to develop a modified and completely open phone hardware for the FreeRunner within the next six to twelve months.

Among the biggest challenges for Linux developers — and one of the reasons we, at least, hear most often for not switching to Linux — is that Linux device support isn't as complete as some other operating systems. The reason for this, of course, has nothing to do with the abilities, inclinations, or availability of Linux developers — the reason Linux lacks support for many devices is because the device manufacturers refuse to provide the drivers, data, and design specs necessary for Linux compatibility.

Shawn Hardin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Flock, has announced the release of version 2.5 of the Flock social web browser based on Firefox 3. Flock automatically manages updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter. According to Hardin, Flock is "designed to be the essential browser for the most active 25 per cent of users".

Open source software (OSS) is not impenetrable, and will likely be an increasing target of hackers if it grows in adoption, said a security expert. Speaking at a briefing Wednesday, Rohit Dhamankar, director of security research, DVLabs at TippingPoint, said computer criminals tend to work for profit gain and will attack widely-deployed software to gain access to more terminals easily. But he noted that OSS is a harder target to attack, because of the speed at which bugs get patched. The visibility of code and mass participative nature of open source development helps bugs get discovered faster.

[You smell what I smell? - Scott]

According to the New Media & Technology Law Blog, the FSF legal action against Cisco, filed in December 2008 has been settled. The case was brought against Cisco for distributing GPL licensed code while, according to the FSF, failing to comply with the requirement of making the code available in source form.

Open source is answering the call at government agencies on all levels as they look for opportunities to carve out costs and improve security, transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Why? Open source is stable, trustworthy, and secure, and Red Hat solutions are being used across government agencies to create efficiencies, eliminate vendor lock-in, meet mission-critical IT demands, and improve service delivery.