Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It's nearly 15 years since the first version of the Linux kernel, and our friends over at TuxRadar have posted the original comp.os.linux.announce announcement. On 14 Mar 1994 at 12:51:16 GMT, Linus Torvalds posted the message to announce Linux 1.0. It was late, though Torvalds shrugged this off. "Almost on time (being just two years late is peanuts in the OS industry), and better than ever."

I used to be one of PCLinuxOS' fans and I especially enjoyed the GNOME flavor so hearing that the team was ready to finally launch a new version sparkled a lot of interest in me. And what better way to express that interest than sharing my first impressions on this popular distribution? Being a GNOME person I went straight to the PCLOS GNOME page and got the 2009.1 ISO from there. 694 MegaBytes later and I was ready to dive into this new experience.

The Jaiku developers have announced that Jaiku is now being served from the Google App Engine, which is the first step at making it "a federated, open source microblogging platform." The customisable platform is a part of Google and is maintained by volunteer Google engineers in their spare time.

The BBC have responded to suggestions that the acquisition and use of a botnet as part of a programme on internet security could have been illegal. The H asked if any costs were involved in acquiring the botnet; a BBC spokesperson replied "We would never discuss costs, but this demonstration was very much in the public interest". As suggested by other sources, the public interest defence is incorporated in the OFCOM regulations on how broadcasters should deal with criminals. Rule 3.3 states

Pop quiz: How many commercial open source business models can you think of? Most people would probably say two or three. How about 10?

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), custodian of the Open Source Definition (OSD), has certified the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) as complying with the OSD. Karel De Vriendt, head of the European Commission's eGovernment programme, says this certification will make it easier to persuade European governments to place their own self-developed open source software under the EUPL.

Sometimes our best intentions give way to our worst, for a wide variety of reasons. This is as true of corporate amalgamations of individuals as it is of those individuals on their own, and it's as true for open-source companies as it is for proprietary companies. Community is the tonic that keeps corporate aspirations in line, just as community helps to keep individuals walking the straight and narrow of societal norms. As The Economist recently highlighted, new research suggests that "having a crowd around often makes things better."

If you have set your Ubuntu machine to auto-login everytime you start your computer, you will find that as soon as you reach your desktop, the keyring manager will automatically pop up and ask you for the password to unlock itself and retrieve the key to connect to the wireless connection. The keyring manager is integrated with Gnome such that when you login from the main screen, it will automatically unlock itself as well. However, if you use the auto-login function, Gnome will skip the keyring manager process and log the user in without unlocking the keyring manger.

Almost two years ago, your editor sat on an Open Source Business Conference panel with Microsoft's Sam Ramji, who made the point that Microsoft had only launched patent infringement lawsuits twice in its existence. Given that, worries about the Microsoft/Novell patent deal were, in his opinion, misplaced. Last week, it was revealed that the count has gone up to three: Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against TomTom, a maker of Linux-based navigation devices. There is much speculation and uncertainty on the net as to just what this action means. Your editor means to add to it by saying that Microsoft's intentions would appear to be relatively clear.

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte has revealed that the project could switch to ARM processors for its next-gen XO laptop. This move is odd in light of the organization's increasingly Microsoft-centric software strategy, but Negroponte says he is hopeful that Microsoft will port Windows XP to ARM.

Go to the Fedora Project Wiki and search for "uninstall Fedora." You won't find anything. Try "remove Fedora." Nothing. Go to Ubuntu's official documentation site and search for "uninstall Ubuntu." You won't find anything in the "official" documentation but in the "community" section you find two entries that state "Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu...." In an installed Ubuntu distribution, clicking on Help and searching for uninstalling or removing Ubuntu finds nothing. A link “repeat the search online at the Ubuntu help pages” brings up a 404 – page not found. If you look hard enough on the real community support pages you'll find a post from July 2007 titled "HowTo: Remove Ubuntu (& Restore Windows)" .

In so many ways, Linux gives us an embarrassment of riches, such as a multitude of desktop environments to suit all tastes and purposes. Bruce Byfield reports that the latest release of Xfce (4.6) delivers a high level of polish and usability, without lard, that makes it a worthy alternative to the popular KDE and Gnome desktops.

Microsoft Corp. is facing increasing pressure to bring its mainstream Windows operating system to the ARM mobile CPU. But analysts say the company should take a different route. Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child Association Inc. (OLPC), said Wednesday that "like many, we are urging" Microsoft to support the ARM processor already used in several billion cell phones and which the OLPC, as well as others, plans to use in the next version of its children's laptop. The week before, Warren East, CEO of ARM Holdings, the designer of the CPU, said that with 10 ARM-based netbooks likely to hit stores by year's end, Microsoft is in danger of missing out.

A report on the Open Source Observatory and Repository Europe (OSOR.EU) web site, says that, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, the French Gendarmerie's gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euros. The Lieutenant-Colonel, says "This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems."

From another conversation I had on an AMIA.org members only list that I wrote: Years from now I hope that people will laugh at these debates [Free/Open Source vs Proprietary EMR software] in the same way that today we think the alchemists where misguided. I hope that laugh will happen in just a few years, and not 20. Do you remember the Steve Martin 'Medieval Barber' skits in which he does blood letting on customers then starts talking into the camera, lays out the discovery of the scientific method then grins into the camera and says 'naaaah!' and continues doing dreadful things? That's what seems to be going on here a kind of 'Medieval Barber' type thing that is occurring with many people in thinking about Health IT. That this proprietary vs. Free/Open Source is even debated just seems so odd to me.

The good news is the deployment of open source is growing. The bad news is that policies managing those projects are an afterthought. Those are the results of an informal survey of developers at the Software Development West Software Development Conference this week.

The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information.

Unreal Tournament 3 was released back on the 17th of November in 2007. Nearly a year and a half later, we still have no UT3 Linux client -- nor do we know the reason(s) behind this massive delay. Ryan Gordon, the widely-known Linux game developer that was contracted by Epic Games to port UT3 over to Linux and Mac OS X, has provided a brief update on the matter.

Kodak has released a free scanner application for Linux called ScanTWAIN that promises "production quality scanning." The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) version 2 and comes with a complete GUI that supports all of the options of its Windows counterpart. Support is included for duplex scanning with automatic feeding of multiple pages through an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

A well-regarded security consultant has shown just how easy it can be to take illicit control of Mac OS X. Security consultant Dino Dai Zovi has given a demonstration to the SOURCE security, business and technology conference in Boston in which he broke into a Mac and took photos with its iSight camera. Dai Zovi explained that Mac OS X's heap memory is poorly protected, and that it is relatively easy to find the location of various libraries.