Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

An interesting physical security-focused Linux distribution was upgraded a couple of days ago. Tin Hat Linux reportedly takes a Vista-like five minutes to boot, because its whole filesystem is decrypted and loaded from an optical drive onto a RAMdisk (tmpfs). But after that, it's likely Puppy-fast!

Caustic Graphics, a brand-new company to the computer graphics scene that hopes to compete with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA when it comes to ray-tracing power, announced the CausticRT on Monday. The CausticRT is "the world's first massively accelerated ray-tracing system" and can be found in CausticOne, which is their first product and it promises to deliver ray-tracing performance that's reportedly 20 times faster than the modern computer. While 20 times is great, by next year they hope their graphics/ray-tracing accelerator will be 200 times faster. For more on Caustic Graphics and what they hope to achieve when it comes to graphics and ray-tracing, visit Caustic.com.

CrunchBang Linux (#!) is a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the OpenBox window manager and Conky system monitor. The distribution is essentially a minimal Ubuntu install with a custom set of installed packages, and it has been designed to offer a balance between speed and functionality. The light system requirements suggest that CrunchBang Linux is a perfect match for an outdated computer or a netbook. With this in mind, your author tested CrunchBang Linux 8.10.02 on an Acer Aspire One with a 8 GB SSD and 512 MB RAM. Since the RAM is on the low end, this puts to the test how lightweight CrunchBang Linux really is.

Our experience with France's Gendarmerie may be limited to Pepé Le Pew cartoons, but that won't stop us from applauding their efforts at locking up proprietary software. That might just be because the fabled maréchaussée is trimming its IT spending by 70% this year — without losing so much as a byte — thanks to the wonders of Open Source software.

Linux is cram-full of all kinds of remote administration utilities, and even the oldtimers such as gdm and kdm are still good and useful. Juliet Kemp shows us how to use kdm and gmd to enable remote graphical desktops on KDE and GNome.

Two years after its last major release, the interesting PCLinuxOS project has quietly posted a major new release. The "pclinuxos-2009.1" download features a 2.6.28.8.tex3 kernel, KDE 3.5.10, and a host of other updates. It is currently difficult to get, however, possibly due to high demand.

Last year, I blogged about 35 Distros and how they got their names. Some of the distros out there have fascinating stories, while others are just too mundane. However make sure you read that blog, its a very interesting one (trust me). The natural extension of the “Etymology of a Distro” blog would be delving deeper into Open Source project’s etymologies. Indeed many readers already suggested that. Sadly I got sidetracked and put the whole idea on the back burner. Now I have put it off for way too long, here are 20 Open Source applications and the interesting (and not so interesting) stories behind their names:

A survey completed by Talend shows that many companies are using more open source data integration to compliment their proprietary data integration solutions. The open source data integration specialist surveyed about 1,000 users through its website. Over half of the responses were from the US and another 35 per cent were from Europe.

Today, Pat Volkerding published a massive amount of package updates to the slackware-current tree. The entry in the Slackware ChangeLog.txt measures more than 200 lines, and is probably the largest update to the development tree ever.

One of the things that disappoints me is the lack of understanding of what's at stake with open source among some of the other open communities. For example, some in the world of open science seem to think it's OK to work with Microsoft, provided it furthers their own specific agenda.

Lest any think that this article is a endorsement for proprietary EMR software, and that requiring EMR purchases to be Affero general public licensed is far fetched, or wrong-headed, think again. The eClinical Works software is Linux-based. That's right. It is a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). It has a proprietary layer. Its under-pinnings are all Free/Open Source licensed and created by those 'amateur, hippies' (sarcasm).

A bug report posted in the bug tracker for the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4, the future standard file system for Linux, available as an option when installing Ubuntu 9.04. The report describes a crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded, resulting in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files.

Google's Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008. This was despite a general slowdown in growth for the entire smartphone sector over the same period.

Where is a location-based application for the Android platform that gives you information on shopping, travel, gas prices, weather and news, just to name a few. It's a well engineered app that has already existed for other platforms and now has been ported to Android.

Microsoft is trying to prevent people using and distributing software under the GNU General Public License, a free software license, by forcing cross-patent licensing deals, according to Samba project leader Jeremy Allison. Allison told ZDNet UK that through lawsuits such as the one launched against TomTom, Microsoft was attempting to encourage licensing deals which are proscribed under the GPL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first four years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimise the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped. This report is an update to the three-year risk report published in Red Hat Magazine in February 2007.

Both your money and your medical privacy are going to be gone unless a single sentence law is enacted. No less a source than the Congressional Budget Office (page 16 and 17) is saying that the recent Health Information Technology parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will drive the taxpayer into a $17 billion ditch even after 10 years. That's right, the taxpayer will be paying $30 billion to LOSE $17 billion after 10 years with no break-even point even mentioned. Remember that national 'investment' in Health Information Technology is going to catapult us into Health care nirvana in which your data and privacy are secure and the health care system in the United States hums along like a well oiled Internet resulting with all of these great cost reductions and efficiencies? All we really have to do is just spend money on the problem and it will be solved. We need to 'incentivize adoption' of health care technology and all will be well. The law as written will achieve anything but that. A single sentence could change that.

This article describes Puppy Linux, a flexible, fast distribution that's always a favorite among DesktopLinux readers. Author Dave Dibble briefly reviews MiPup2, one of many ready-made Puppy "puplets," and updates us on Puppy's current state and planned new features. As background, "puplets" are custom builds of Puppy that are shared with the Puppy community. Some, like "TeenPup," apparently take hundreds of hours to create. Others, like Muppy, have been years in the making!

One of the intriguing battles I have been watching over the past couple of months is a silent battle between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat. I say silent because it is being played out deep inside the New York Stock Exchange and, unless you're actively watching, you'll have missed the tussle. At the same time it is an fascinating battle that represents many things: the old versus the new, Linux versus Unix and investor sentiment.

The first Nigerian conference on Free and Open Source Software was held this week in Kano, Nigeria. The conference featured local speakers, consultants, network engineers, system administrators and academics, and international guests from KDE for three days at Bayero University of Kano. Over 500 students and professionals attended, filling the hall to capacity.