Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Encryption is standard in a lot of applications these days, such as email, Web sites, VPNs, and wireless networking. There is a lot of snake oil and ineffective technology that lies in wait for the unwary; Paul Rubens gives a clear and understandable explanation of the power and benefits of Public Key Encryption (PKE), and why it revolutionized securing communications over untrusted networks.

Archmbox lets you list, move, and copy messages from one mbox mail file to another, primarily for archiving messages. This tool lets you easily move all messages that are older than a given date into another (possibly compressed) mbox file, and you can also grab or delete messages by matching regular expressions against message headers.

Tom Berquist, former managing director of financial powerhouses Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and now CFO of open source database firm Ingres, made the prediction last week. Ingres, the second largest open source company, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers. Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web, application and database servers to support their software as a service (SaaS) operation.

Suppose you need to chart some demographical or geographical data. Using OpenOffice.org's chart module you can present the data as a bar, pie, or even exploded donut chart. What you can't do, though, is to create a map chart that shows data distribution by continent, country, or region. To do this, you need the EuroOffice Map Chart Professional (EOMCP) extension. Unlike many other OpenOffice.org extensions, EOMCP is not free, but the price is right (it costs 9.90 EUR or about 12 USD), and there is a free trial version available.

LXer Feature: 07-Dec-2008

Ok so first some numbers, Tech Republic has a nice list of 10 mistakes new Linux administrators should look out for. Steve Emms gives a review of 6 Lean Linux Desktop Environments of which I had only heard of two before. I also came across Cynthia Harvey's big list of 40 Open Source Tools to help you protect your privacy online that has working links to each of their SourceForge webpages, very cool.

Back in October Ryan Gordon surprised the Linux community by releasing a Linux game demo of Prey two-years after the game began shipping on Windows. He was contracted to port the Prey server to Linux but this was the first time we were seeing any client. A month later an updated Prey demo for Linux was released. This afternoon Ryan has now released the binaries that allow the retail game to be used on Linux.

Thanks to a Ubuntu Developer named "Teapot", the newest version of Ubuntu (8.10) is now optimized for the XO laptop. Teapot designed this release to be reliable and consistent with many modifications.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just click your way to a custom distro? After all, most of the packages you will need are sitting on a well-connected web server somewhere, so it makes sense to build ISO images and repositories directly on that server. And since that server has a HTTP interface, why not make the distro building software into a web application? This is the principle behind http://www.instalinux.com, created by Chris Slater. It's based on the SystemDesigner CGI scripts from the Linux Common Operating Environment project, originally developed as a tool for internal use at HP, and now released under the GNU GPL.

Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client is very popular among Linux users, but it has poor visual integration with the Linux platform. Fortunately, Thunderbird is finally getting some Tango love and its own Linux theme. Mozilla user experience designer Bryan Clark published a blog entry this week that provides an early preview of some recent theming work that will significantly improve the look and feel of Thunderbird on Linux. Magnus Melin has started working on a Thunderbird gnomestripe theme which uses icons from the user's default theme in the menus. Michael Monreal also came up with a cool userChrome.css hack that applies Tango icons to the main user interface.

An image viewer (also known as image browser) is a desktop application that can quickly display or handle stored graphical images in different graphics file formats. It can render images according to properties of the display such as display resolution, color depth, and color profile. Other image viewers have advanced features like editing and web publishing. Some Linux users may not care much on whatever image viewer they are using. But to those who are rather picky, they can always get and install other image viewers with different features to suit their needs.

I recently promised you a strategy for a long-term exploration and transition to Linux and Open Source. This plan is for home use; organizational Linux is another issue. You also can follow this strategy to get some idea of how well a netbook will work before shelling out big bucks. You can decide whether Open Source applications work for you without installing Linux. Why? Most come in Mac and PC-compatible versions as well. Start by downloading and trying out the big ticket items, Open Office, Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail client, on your PC, replacements for your must-use for-fee applications. Wikipedia.org has a good list of addition software.

If one was to believe IBM, the days of the Microsoft desktop are numbered, soon to be cut short by a combination of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, IBM's Lotus range of office applications and a virtual desktop from Virtual Bridges. The trouble is IBM's solution is nothing new and addresses none of the issues associated with moving away from Microsoft.

Keith Curtis spent years as a Microsoft programmer. Then he quit and became deeply enthusiastic about source development. This is his story..."A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky's patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux."

After trying Ubuntu 8.10 for two days on my Macbook, which proved to be a success, I now take Fedora 10 for a spin. Read on to see how my two days experience was with this Linux distro.

I read a longish post from Linux Canuck, “How Windows Users are Changing Linux and What We Should Do About It,” which attempts to sum up a lot of the issues that have been discussed at length here. The gist of the post is that, as former Windows users wander over to explore Linux, they bring their own Windows prejudices and expectations with them, and that the accommodating Linux community tries to make them feel “at home.” Canuck wonders — is the Linux community in danger of being too accommodating — to the point that it attempts to be more Windows-like and loses its own identity?

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom “languages” and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. In Sydney for the annual Open Source Developers Conference, Wall delivered a keynore on “The once and future of Perl” and gave a few rare insights to what the future of Perl programming might look like.

The Symbian Foundation will make Symbian as an open-source operating system in 2010 and will put out its first distribution of software for developers in the first half of next year. The foundation is the successor to the Symbian consortium that has administered the OS since 1998. It is being formed after Nokia agreed to buy the remaining part of Symbian, a deal that closed on Tuesday.

The recession is taking its toll at Google, forcing the company to cut back on its famous "20 percent" projects, which allow employees to work part of the time on non-core interests. Is it a sign of the high-flying company coming down to Earth?

First the Linux Hater’s blog ended, and now there’s a claim that the Linux Hater’s Redux has gone to the great kernel panic in the sky. Now a mysteriously named person called “Oiaohm” is trying to re-incarnate some of the hate in a new “battle ground” but his sights aren’t set on Linux alone.

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn't. But it's not as black-and-white as it seems, since closed binary-only blobs have been allowed in the kernel for years now in violation of the GPL. Bruce Byfield examines the complexities of this issue.