Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mobile communications depends on the availability of service. Not only have carriers been using Linux in their network equipment for years, they also are incorporating open source software into the middleware layer of the stack. It's key to maintain open and reliable standards for the health of the networks.

Citrix’s promised Xen-based desktop virtualization solution will be delivered in the second half of 2009. Earlier this week, the Ft Lauderdale virtualization company announced that it is co-developing the solution, known as “Project Independence,” in collaboration with Intel, one of the original investors in the Xen open source project.

A company specializing in open source authentication and auditing software for mixed networks says it grew by a factor of five in 2008. Likewise Software says its products can be used to securely integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise is based in Bellevue, Wash., where Microsoft also keeps extensive offices. For its part, Microsoft yesterday announced historic layoffs. Likewise boasts of revenue growth of 500 percent, year-over-year, and new customers that include HP, IBM, Oracle, and Sun. It has ongoing relationships with Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, it says.

Unless you're a sysadmin you don't generally have to worry that much about getting email delivered, you just hookup your GUI email client to your external email account and you're done. But what if your system tries to deliver mail, for example from cron? Normally, this just goes to root or perhaps some designated user on your system.

Microsoft today laid off 1,400 workers, with another 3,600 on the block within 18 months. We asked Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin what if any role Linux played in Microsoft's misfortunes, how Microsoft will react, and what it could mean for Linux and the open source community.

The recent news that Identi.ca, called by some an open source twist on Twitter, had received funding got me wondering about how active big names in the open source world are on Twitter itself.

Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to version 5.3 with added support for new Intel Nehalem hardware and including new Java, clustered file system and security tools. Sean Michael Kerner reports on this, and a batch of other new updates.

Logitech's Squeezebox Boom streams music from your PC to anywhere the Boom can find your wireless network, and it also accepts wired Ethernet. Anything you can play on your PC will probably play on the Boom. It even supports Linux. Joseph Moran gives us a tour of this small but feature-packed digital audio player.

This is a great time for the Gates Foundation to embrace Linux, bringing the value of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to people who might otherwise not hear its value. For the past 10 years the Gates Foundation has expanded access to technology by delivering Windows computers to public libraries. Wouldn't it be cool for the next 10 years for the Gates Foundation to deliver new Ubuntu systems for public access use at these same libraries?

The Houston crew (including the editor of this site) are joining together to host an entire conference devoted to FOSS in Healthcare in Houston, TX Summer of 09 (July 31st - Aug 2nd)

The open-source g-Eclipse project has had it's first major release. It started over two years ago with the support of the European Union initiative; with further development now under the umbrella of the Eclipse foundation and other European projects. Version 1.0 of g-Eclipse has been released with support for grid middleware solutions g-Lite, GRIA and Amazon's Cloud storage platforms, EC2 and S3.

Ubuntu has released the second "maintenance update" to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (long-term support). The 8.04.2 LTS release features some 200 software updates, as well as new i386 and amd64 installation CDs aimed at reducing the amount of code that must be downloaded following a fresh install.

Sun Microsystems axed 1,300 employees on Thursday, the first wave in a series of planned redundancies intended to cut head count by almost a fifth. The company said in a statement it had cut workers across all levels, including employees in vice president and director positions. It did not say who'd been cut, but The Reg has learned that the departed include individuals working on and around some of the company's highly touted open-source projects.

The program for the first two days at the Camp KDE meeting in Jamaica provided the attendants with a series of talks. In time, these will be available in video from but for now we have these short summaries of the talks. Read on for details.

In the first article in this series, I was forced to resort to Javascript code to match the central column heights that were too disparate to allow a single minimum height setting to cover all instances. Nonetheless, I used a simplification where on my site I knew the center column would outgrow the side columns. Hence, I could use simpler code. Now the footer columns in the menu template are not quite as well structured, however, the differences in heights are minimal in comparison to the range in the central columns. Therefore, setting the minimum heights in the cascading style sheet was the simplest most effective method to reach the goal for this site.

We've all seen them: on comes a commercial with a young, casually dressed,if somewhat unkempt, young man, and an older, portly man in a very middle-management-esque suit. The younger man announces "I'm a Mac" while the older responds "And I'm a PC," and the two go on to lament some critical design failure facing the PC to which the Mac is impervious. As Linux users, we know the basic premise of the commercial — that "I'm a PC" means "I run Windows" — is a fallacy, and what is really needed is a third cast member declaring "I'm Linux." If such a thought has ever crossed your mind, then fire up your camera, because the time to act is now.

A good offsite backup strategy is not sending boxes of unencrypted tapes home with your party-hearty college intern. Carla Schroder reviews the Spideroak online backup service to see if they offer something better, more secure, and more convenient.

Linus Torvalds is a regular visitor to Australia in January. He comes out for some sunshine and to attend the annual linux.conf.au organised by Linux Australia. He took some time out to speak to Rodney Gedda about a host of topics including point releases, filesystems and what it is like switching to GNOME. He also puts Windows 7 in perspective.

Getting started with Linux can be an intimidating task, particularly for people who have never tried any operating system besides Windows. In truth, however, very little about Linux is actually difficult to use. It's simply a different OS, with its own approach to doing things. Once you learn your way around a Linux desktop, you're likely to find that it's no more challenging to work with than Windows or Mac OS.

According to current plans, version 11 of Fedora, which is expected to arrive in late May, will use Ext4 as its standard file system. That's what the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) recently decided, following a heated discussion in an IRC meeting. If however Ext3's successor encounters big problems with the pre-release versions of Fedora 11, the developers will dump that plan and revert to Ext3.