Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

January is here and it's that time of year for penguin-lovers everywhere to make their annual migration south to Australia to flock together. Linux.conf.au is one of the world's most popular technical Linux conferences, and for it's 10th anniversary is being held at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. The conference runs for a week, with two days of mini-confs followed by the main conference programme and culminating in an Open Day on Saturday.

This time last year, the big news from the-company-formerly-known-as-Trolltech — now Qt Software — was a takeover bid from mobile-phone giant Nokia, which closed successfully in June for an estimated €104 million. Once again January brings Trolltech/Qt news from Nokia, this time announcing that beginning with the upcoming 4.5 release, the Qt framework will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Uploading photos from your digital cameras is file management -- and file management in GNU/Linux is always faster from the command line. Bruce Byfield shows us how to use the powerful, fast ghoto2 for maximum flexibility and control of getting your photos out of your digital camera.

Google revealed Wednesday that it will be discontinuing its development of the Jaiku microblogging service and opening the source code. The service will remain in operation on Google App Engine and it will be maintained by a community of volunteer Google developers with the assistance of the broader open source software community. The move is part of a broader set of changes that Google is undertaking to streamline its service offerings and shut down some of its lesser-known web applications.

Possibly Microsoft's most important strategic goal for Windows 7, in addition to redeeming the brand damage done by Windows Vista, is to dominate netbooks, now the fastest selling segment of the PC market. This may not bode well for the Linux operating system. With netbooks, the open-source OS with a highly tech-savvy audience found a market where it could legitimately threaten Windows. But Linux will face an uphill battle in this category now that the sleeping software giant has been awoken to the opportunity that netbooks present, say industry analysts.

If you Google "AJAX Web 2.0" you'll get over eight million hits, but what technologies will you find in that mix that can truly deliver on the promises of Web 2.0 today? While there's no single definition of Web 2.0, at its heart lays the Internet acting as a platform for social networks, where information can be created and shared in a community of interest. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) relate to Web 2.0 concepts only in that they enhance the platform by providing a more effective user interface. AJAX relates to Web 2.0 only in that it provides a lightweight approach for developing RIAs that execute through a single ubiquitous interface, the Web browser.

It used to be that choosing Windows or Linux to host your Web site made a big difference in the kind of functionality or services offered. On Friday, as this informative article on KnockOutHost.com suggests, the choice between Linux and Windows has become somewhat less stark.

Here's an interesting idea: for Russia to fund the creation of a "national operating system" to replace Windows, based on GNU/Linux:..

Your editor's long-suffering spouse will attest that gadgets are never in short supply in the house. Many of them pass below her interest, but a new one has come in which has attracted attention throughout the household: an Android Dev Phone, otherwise known as the fully unlocked version of the G1 phone offered by T-Mobile. This phone is certainly a fun toy, but it has the potential to be a lot more than that.

Newcomers to open source software might be intimidated by the insider nature of the communities, but they shouldn't mistake that for elitism, writes LinuxInsider columnist Jeremiah T. Gray. Stick with it, and the benefits will become clear, he advises.

P2P (peer-to-peer) is the nature of the Net. You can fight that, or you can embrace it. Here in the US, the mainstream entertainment business has mostly been fighting it. Hollywood and its phone and cable company allies have long regarded P2P, and BitTorrent in particular, as a copyright piracy system and a bandwidth hog. In the European Union, however, P2P is more than accepted: it's supported by the Union itself.

Python has a good reputation for tasks like systems programming, network programming, and scripting, but Python for the web is becoming red hot. Part of this has to do with the very popular web framework Django, that was developed at a newspaper to help quickly create Content Management Sites. . Another reason is that Google App Engine–Google’s Cloud Computing offering for developers–only exposes a Python API.

In late 2005 we looked at the ATP ToughDrive 1GB flash drive and in 2006 looked at ATP's ProMax 150x CF card, but since then we haven't heard much from this company. However, they have recently released two new products, which we are looking at today. There is the ATP 8GB EarthDrive, which is advertised as the world's first recyclable USB drive, and secondly there is the ATP 8GB ToughDrive. The EarthDrive is made of a biodegradable material that is derived from corn.

Are rumors of Sun's demise greatly exaggerated? Maybe so, if the company's open-source storage strategy is any indication. Sun has struggled for years to shed its image as an old-school IT dinosaur. Lately, with the economy tanking and Sun's stock price tagging along for the ride, its quest for profitability looks more than ever like an exercise in futility.

Russell Coker is not a man who sleeps with his computers. But he does come pretty close - two servers are positioned in a little cabinet in his bedroom, one being his server and the other his Security Enhanced Linux "play machine." The play machine is open to anyone to log in and try to break the security. The root password is out in public - this is one of the many ways in which he engages with the wider FOSS community and a way by which he tried to improve what has become the project to which he devotes a considerable amount of time.

Last week I had the privilege to chat via IM with Orv Beach, the Publicity Chair for the Southern California Linux Expo, about how SCALE uses FLOSS to productively plan and implement their event. SCALE is currently one of the biggest Linux conferences in the US…but I’ll let Orv fill you in on rest. This year’s Expo will be February 20th - 22nd, 2009. Find out more at the official website.

People often wonder how to get new capabilities—new packages, new features in existing packages, or even bug fixes—included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The process for doing so is straightforward, but may be foreign to those with a background in traditional software products.

Continuing my holiday machine maintenance saga I move on to some notable trials and tribulations with Ubuntu, but not before I report on a little more holiday cheer.

I didn't want to write this column. I live as Windows-free an existence as most people can these days. Of course I have to run Windows as part of my job, in order to make sure that Samba, the software I write, will interoperate correctly with all the multiple Windows versions out there. I also have to install some Windows applications using the Open Source Wine project, which emulates Windows on Linux well enough that some binary Windows applications will install and run straight off the DvD. Like most people, there are some Windows applications I just can't do without, although in this case it's my three year old son who finds an amazing amount of joy in his toddler games, none of which have yet been ported to Linux. Wine works amazingly well these days for this sort of thing, well enough that my wife no longer complains about the computer "being hard to use".

[What part of (W)ine (I)s (N)ot an (E)mulator - WINE, do people not get? Call me a stickler but if its not an emulator, then why do we let people get away with saying it is? - Scott]

Andrew Shebanow didn't imagine that asking for feedback about how Palm's app store should work would open up a flood of input. He also didn't expect the move would change his job description. But now both have happened. On Jan. 8, Shebanow, who is working on a third-party application distribution system for Palm's new operating system, posted an item on his blog looking for input from developers on how that system should work. He threw out a few questions, such as: how should application updating and installation work; should Palm offer payment processing or leave it to third parties; should application trials be available; and how should Palm handle featured applications.