Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Could Intel and Nokia together make a success of the ‘Mobile Internet Device’ concept? The two companies announced plans to create what Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia calls “the next wave of mobile technology”; a new mobile device platform based on Linux and a range of open source technologies using Intel x86 Architecture chips and Nokia HSPA chipsets (which Intel is also licensing to use alongside Wi-Fi and WiMAX in other platforms).

ThinkFree announced the availability of a Linux-compatible office productivity suite designed for netbooks. ThinkFree Mobile Netbook ESD version offers word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, with "round-trip" Microsoft Office compatibility, synchronization and online document collaboration features, and 1GB of free online storage, says the company.

The 2009 Open World Forum (OWF) will take place on the 1st and 2nd of October at the Eurosite George V convention centre in Paris. The banner for the forum is "FLOSS: AT THE HEART OF THE DIGITAL RECOVERY" and it promotes free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) as a path to economic regrowth.

I was running Windows, and before it came along, MS-DOS, applications on Unix and Linux for ages. It was never especially easy, but experts could do it. With CodeWeavers' latest CrossOver Linux 8, though, it's become so easy that anyone should be able to do it. Now, if all your desktop needs are already being met by Linux applications, you don't need to worry with Crossover. But, if like many of us, you still want to use Quicken for your banking or you're stuck with a Web site that refused to work with any Web browser except Internet Explorer, then Crossover Linux 8 is for you.

LXer Feature: 22-Jun-2009

Is Mono an affliction that should be eradicated or a choice that should be respected? Does its inclusion in a distro reek of obeisance to Microsoft, or should the threat of a Microsoft claim to "ownership" be considered irrelevant to true FOSS believers? The debate over Mono continues to touch some raw nerves.

The editor Vim supports Unicode natively. If your X or console keymap is set up to enter unicode characters via the keymap, it will work fine in Vim. Alternatively, there are two other ways of entering these characters. The slow way is just to use their hex code. Hit Ctrl+V, then u, then type the hex code. For example, hex code 00BF will give you an inverted question mark, ¿. This is useful if you only very occasionally want to type one of these characters. Lists of UTF-8 character codes are available online.

The Remote Exploit Team has released a Pre Final version of the BackTrack 4 (BT4) security distribution (code named 'pwnsauce') as a 1.3 GB ISO image file. BackTrack offers a wide range of tools to enable users and administrators to test the security of items ranging from web applications to RFID systems. These include LAN and WLAN sniffers, password crackers, vulnerability scanners, the Metasploit exploit framework and several others.

The first alpha of Mandriva Linux 2010 has been released and includes several updates, boot time improvements and new features. The main focus of the 2010 release is to improve the user experience for daily tasks. In a blog posting, VP of Engineering at Mandriva – Anne Nicolas-Velu, provided an overview of the new features included in the development release and the current list of 2010 specifications.

In our last post, Deploying XO Laptops in USA Classrooms, we discussed the founding of OLPCsb last December, and provided a quick overview of our mission and objectives. In this post, we would like to share with the OLPC News Community how things have progressed over the past several months in regards to integrating the XOs into our local classroom!

The majority of people in the United States probably have no idea what is contained in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Similarly, most people are clueless about the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. Despite this, most of us who work in those fields are expected to not only know about them, but understand the security ramifications behind them. This gets to be even more complicated when you have to take into account that a number of the systems that are part of HIPAA or PCI based purchases are connected to the web.

We're on the verge of a serious evolution on the web. Right now, the common way to include video on the web is by use of Flash, a closed-source technology that is a massive resource hog. The answer is the HTML5 video tag, which allows you to embed video into HTML pages without the use of Flash or any other non-HTML technology; combined with open video codecs, this could provide the perfect opportunity to further open up and standardise the web.

Clutter, the open-source toolkit designed to develop rich user interfaces with OpenGL and OpenGL ES but without the complexity of programming to such APIs, is nearing version 1.0. This toolkit, which was used to create the very impressive Moblin V2 interface, is backed by Intel and continues to gain steam. Version 0.9.4 was released just this morning, which is serving as the Clutter 1.0.0 Release Candidate 1 build.

I can talk until I'm blue in my space about the technical advantages of Linux and open-source software. Forget about that for now though. Let me give you a reason for your office to use them that may strike home: It can save jobs, including, just maybe, your job. This simple fact was brought home to me over the weekend when I was at the SouthEast Linux Fest at Clemson University. There, I saw Chad Wollenberg, a network administrator who focuses on the integration of free and open technologies in education. The point of his talk was really quite simple: "Why should our school systems be paying for proprietary software when teachers are being laid off?"

The Linux Plumbers Conference 2009 is now accepting proposal submissions. Proposals can be edited and created until Monday 22 June 2009 PDT (7 AM Tuesday June 22 2009 GMT). Submissions are invited for speakers in our microconference tracks as well as the general track session.

A home-cooked Microsoft license has carved out a small but growing following among the open-source community in less than two years. Microsoft's Public License (MS-PL) is used by 1.03 per cent of open-source projects less than two-years after it was officially recognized by the Open-Source Initiative and is poised to overtake the Mozilla Public License (MPL) in terms of popularity.

The OpenSource World conference — previously known as LinuxWorld — is fast approaching &mdsah; it convenes in San Francisco from August 12 - 13, showcasing everything Open Source and more. Conference organizers this week drew back the curtain on one of the conference's main attractions, its keynote speakers, and the lineup promises to be an interesting listen.

As I wrote a few days ago, I replaced Kubuntu and Ubuntu on several of my home PCs with PCLinuxOS and 64 Studio. I was intending to wait a couple of months to post a followup because long-term performance is what matters. But a few things have impressed me so much these two newcomers to my little computing empire deserve an extra mention.

I've written quite a bit about using Linux to help educate people. In the past, I've discussed using Linux to teach astronomy, programming and computer logic design. So today, I'm writing about using the KDE Interactive Geometry (Kig) program to teach mathematics. Kig allows you to use various tools to diagram and demonstrate different mathematical concepts. With Kig, you can draw points, lines, line segments, half lines, vectors, circles and various other conic sections. When Kig refers to a “half line”, it means what I was taught was a ray—essentially a line with one endpoint. Drawing hyperbolic curves on the computer sure beats getting dry-erase marker all over yourself or sneezing because of chalk dust.

With the release of Ubuntu 9.10, which is due out this October, Canonical and the Ubuntu developers hope to fix at least 100 "paper cuts" on the Ubuntu Linux desktop. Paper cuts are rather trivial usability bugs that are small, but in one way or another could impair the Linux desktop or increase the burden placed on a new Linux user ever so slightly.