Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The popular open-source Sugar Learning Platform, a Linux based OS that was developed for the OLPC project, is now available to run from a 1GB USB flash drive. Sugar Labs has announced that the rather splendidly monikered Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry is immediately available, and can be used to reboot any PC or netbook directly into Sugar.

Jennifer Schiff introduces us to Openfiler, the robust, enterprise open-source storage networks operating system. It is managed with a Web-based GUI, and works with any industry standard x86 or x86/64 server, and has a very attractive price tag.

The SCO Group, threatened with liquidation and still locked in a legal tangle with companies, including IBM, over alleged use of code from UNIX System V in Linux and with Novell over the copyright to UNIX, has published a list of FAQs on the takeover with which it hopes to avert liquidation, on its website. According to the information provided, the software business would be sold to unXis, whilst the SCO Group would continue the, so far highly unprofitable business of litigating against Novell, IBM, Red Hat and others. Revenues from the sale will reportedly restore SCO Group to financial health and allow it to continue to pursue its various legal disputes.

Apple Macs, iPhones, and other mobile devices are being pulled into the open-source tools universe of Eclipse, a group whose genesis was enterprise Java and C/C++. The project today released Eclipse 3.5, codenamed Galileo, which wraps 33 projects in an integrated release. For the first time, the bundle can be downloaded for development of Cocoa Mac applications destined for deployment on 32-bit and 64-bit Apple systems.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about a digital and analog circuit simulator called ksimus. One of my readers asked what the difference was between ksimus and ktechlab so I thought I'd take a look at ktechlab.

Last week we discussed the value of enunciating kernel design patterns and looked at the design patterns surrounding reference counts. This week we will look at a very different aspect of coding and see why the kernel has special needs, and how those needs have been addressed by successful approaches. The topic under the microscope today is complex data structures.

The ScummVM developers have agreed a settlement with Atari over GPL violations in three Nintendo Wii games developed by an Atari subcontractor. An official press release from the ScummVM developers "cyx" and "fingolfin" stated that a case over three games, "Freddie Fish: The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds", "Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside" and "Spy Fox: Dry Cereal" which used the ScummVM engine to run classic point and click adventure games, had been settled in May, with Misitic Software paying all legal fees and making a donation to the Free Software Foundation.

Intel and Nokia have announced a long-term relationship that will see the development of Intel-powered, Linux-based handheld mobile computing devices. The partnership between the chipmaker and handset manufacturer was announced on Tuesday. Under the deal, the companies will collaborate on several open source mobile Linux software projects, and Intel will license HSPA/3G modem intellectual property from Nokia.

The Eclipse Foundation's annual release train, this year dubbed Galileo, has now been released. According to Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation, the Eclipse release train brings together a large number of Eclipse projects and synchronises them into a single release with the aim of making "commercial adoption simple and straightforward". The idea is that rather than a commercial adopter trying picking up what could be dozens of separate projects, by using the release train, they can plan for one major annual update.

A survey by Actuate which looks at open source attitudes and adoption has included China for the first time. Surprisingly, according to the survey, 80.3 per cent of Chinese respondents were already using open source with the main benefit being perceived as the lack of licence costs. More surprisingly was the 72.6 per cent of those respondent s who cited access to the source code as a benefit. This is a far higher figure than in North America (39.9 per cent), the UK (35.2 per cent), Germany (41.1 per cent) or France(36 per cent).

Medical, the Universal Health information system, is finalist on Sourceforge 2009 Community Awards. With over 47,000 nominations, the community has chosen 85 finalists in 12 categories. Medical is among the best 10 projects this year for government.

Police data systems should be based on open source software, according to a data expert working with law enforcement. Ian Readhead, director of information for the U.K. Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), said Tuesday at a Unisys security event that emergency service data transferal systems should be open source, to help ensure interoperability between them.

In an article on its security blog, the Mozilla Foundation has presented a new security policy – known as content security policy (CSP) – intended to guard against the epidemic of cross-site scripting attacks (XSS) and other vulnerabilities. This allows web administrators, by sending special headers, to tell the browser which domains it should accept as sources for trusted code. Standard XSS attacks sometimes utilise vulnerabilities in web applications in order to execute JavaScript in the browser with the rights of trusted domains.

If you add Unix and Linux together as part of the same family, instead of seeing them as competitors, then Unix still accounts for more than half of all server spend. Paul Rubens takes a look at venerable old ancestor of modern computing.

A few days ago, version 4.0 of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) specification was released, weighing in at a hefty 727 pages. Lead by Intel, PC manufacturers as well as operating system, driver, BIOS, firmware and software developers have, for more than a decade, been working on this specification, which is designed to enhance the configuration management and power saving features of computer hardware. Despite this, there are still flaws in many implementations.

At the International Supercomputing Conference, Sun Microsystems is bringing a host of new and enhanced additions to its Sun Constellation supercomputer, touching on everything from software to storage to networking. In addition, Sun is previewing its upcoming Sun Blade systems that will be powered by AMD's new Opteron processors code-named Istanbul, which will complement the servers Sun rolled out in April based on Intel's new chip microarchitecture and chips code-named Nehalem EP.

The first ODF Plugfest was held on the 15th and 16th of June 2009 in the Royal Library in the Netherlands. The meeting was initiated by the Dutch government and the OpenDoc Society. Jos van den Oever, brand new employee of KO GmbH and Sven Langkamp, proud developer, went on behalf of the KOffice team. With over forty organisations and a total of sixty representatives from businesses, public sector organisations, open source projects and research institutions, the meeting was an incredible success.

For managing network and Internet connections from the Linux desktop, used by most distribution vendors is NetworkManager, which is a well rounded network connection manager from Red Hat for controlling wired, wireless, and mobile broadband devices. The ModemManager project was even spun off recently for furthering the mobile broadband support on Linux.

There are a variety of netbook distros out there, but you can have a little fun creating your own. Here are some software packages and tips worth considering:

On Debian based systems, or any that use Synaptic for package management, you can use Synaptic to help you setup multiple systems with the same software. On the first system select all the packages you want and then under the File menu use Save Markings or Save Markings as to save your selections to a file. If you save the file to a USB stick, you can then use Read Markings on subsequent installs to quickly duplicate your selections.