Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 08-Feb-2009

At the beginning of the week Debian went into a deep freeze until their announced release date for Lenny on Valentine's Day. A group of developers have brought the dark horse of file managers Midnight Commander back from a deep sleep. Jimf exposed me to midnight commander, it was way over my head at the time and in a related article Carla Schroder says you "You Get What You Pay For" that talks about projects having a hard time making ends meet. Both of which I will be talking about again soon..

Walter Leibbrandt and Friedel Wolff of South African localisation specialists Translate.org.za attended this weekend’s Fosdem 2009 conference in Belguim. They sent Tectonic their thoughts on the two-day European FOSS gathering.

The differences between Linux and windows are chalk and cheese in respect to how the two operating systems are put together. While the end result of putting together these operating systems are pretty much the same functionality. It is the way they are put together which ultimately determines the true underlying nature of these layers between man and machine.

I am thinking the unthinkable…..I am considering changing from Ubuntu 8.10 for my desktop to Debian 5. I have been running the Debian 5 Lenny candidate for awhile and have bee very pleased with the stability and features. It actually functions and acts more like the distribution I need and work on than Ubuntu. Not so say that Ubuntu is bad, just that I typically do not need or use the latest applications. I mainly work on my Linux desktop for about 60 hours a week. So I really need something I can count on. Again, not that Ubuntu has let me down, it has never really crashed on me but I do struggle with bugs from time to time. I use my GUI desktop to work from as I manage Linux servers, either Ubuntu or CentOS.

Microsoft's recent survey proclaimed nearly half the population believe it is ok to use pirated software for personal use. This diminishes the argument by Linux advocates that you can use their operating system without any cost. Yet, you can't confuse free as in cost with free as in freedom. Here's what FOSS really means.

Back in May 2000 the first issue of Linux Format magazine hit the news stands. One of its features was a group test of Linux distributions, reflecting the state of play in Linux flavours at the time. If you fancy a trip down memory lane or just a quick look at how beautiful Linux wasn't all those years ago, we've dug out the original article complete with screenshots - read on!

In order to consolidate project planning, bug reporting, team organization and translations as well as the freedom to add other models in addition to openEHR; OSHIP development has been moved to Launchpad.

The team behind the development of the ioquake3 engine, a spin-off of the open-source Quake 3 engine, is preparing for the release of a new update. The second release candidate for ioquake3 1.36 is now available and it features a number of new improvements.

Here's an interesting post from Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's boss, commenting on the EU's decision to investigate Microsoft for its Internet Explorer. It's mostly a useful statement of history and why Firefox on its own shouldn't be regarded as the solution to the problem. But for me the most significant portion is its conclusion..

This paper describes the recent imaging advances by Elphel, supplier of open source (hardware and software) cameras to customers that include Google (for select Street View and book scanning projects). It should interest imaging engineers, fans of open source, and those curious about open source hardware. The paper was written by Dr. Andrey Filippov, the Russian physicist who founded Elphel in 2001. Filippov has contributed many papers to LinuxDevices through the years, as regular readers will be aware.

A survey of the Ubuntu Server communityPDF has been published showing that more organisations are relying on Ubuntu for "mission critical" tasks. The survey, carried out by Canonical, the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu, and RedMonk, an open source oriented market research organisation that makes all of its content freely available, breaks down the 6800 responses, from predominantly Ubuntu users, and analyses it by business size.

BitDefender, a global provider of award-winning antivirus software and data security solutions, has launched a new version of BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices, the on-demand antivirus and antispyware scanner for Linux and FreeBSD, which is free for personal use. The new and improved features of BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices enhance the user experience and increase the level of protection.

gOS and Linux Mint are two of the many Linux distributions based upon Ubuntu, but they provide their own spin of things. gOS, for instance, ships with WINE and Google Gears by default and focuses upon providing an easy and rich experienced catered around Web 2.0 services. Linux Mint ships with its own set of customizations and its focus is on providing an easy-to-use Linux desktop by having a distinct user interface, its own set of system, and shipping with various proprietary drivers, plug-ins, media codecs, and other packages. We had a question though from a reader asking whether the performance of these Ubuntu derivatives is vastly different from Ubuntu itself. With that inquiry, we have run a couple benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 8.10, gOS 3.1, and Linux Mint 6.

Marten Mickos on Friday told fellow employees that he's resigning from Sun Microsystems, just a few days short of his first anniversary as senior VP of database software. The news was greeted with dismay by those who thought he was going to play a key role in guiding Sun through its transition to an open source company. "There's a question whether Sun can make money as an open source company. I would take someone who's been highly successful in an area that Sun has been struggling with and give him free rein," said Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource and head developer on the open source Spring Java framework project, in an interview.

In my last few posts about pyuno (SSConverter, OORunner) we used pyuno to convert spreadsheets to CSV files by running OpenOffice from Python using pyuno as the bridge between the two processes. In this post we're going to get inside OpenOffice and use pyuno as the bridge between OpenOffice and an embedded Python interpreter (embedded inside OpenOffice).

The buzz has been building for Boxee lately. Mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, BusinessWeek and NPR are getting hip to the little open-source media center that could quite possibly change the way you experience TV. I first met Boxee CEO and co-founder Avner Ronen at a NewTeeVee meetup in New York roughly a year ago. At the time, I was contemplating buying an Apple TV. He politely shook his head and said I shouldn’t bother, that his company had something better in the works.

Netbooks are growing in popularity and have emerged as a threat to normal laptops THERE WAS a time when the only way to really be mobile with a computer was with a laptop. Then came what were termed sub-notebooks – smaller laptops which still packed a lot of power. But with the rise of the internet, much of the computing power we need has moved to the web, hence the emergence of the netbooks – a cut-down, small laptop with as simple an operating system as possible.

As described in Plugging into GCC last October, the runtime library code used by the GCC compiler (which implements much of the basic functionality that individual languages need for most programs) has long carried a license exemption allowing it to be combined with proprietary software. In response to the introduction of version 3 of the GPL and the desire to add a plugin infrastructure to GCC, the FSF has now announced that the licensing of the GCC runtime code has changed. The FSF wishes to modernize this bit of licensing code while, simultaneously, using it as a defense against the distribution of proprietary GCC plugins.

"Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts", by Steve Pugh, is a wicked cool book for noob-and-up Ruby users. Ruby is a modern, elegant interpreted programming language. This means you don't need to compile your Ruby programs, but simply write and run them, just like you do with Bash, Python, or Perl scripts.

In 2007 we ran a story on the tiny linux PC The Linutop. Now the diminutive system has hit version 2.4 and with it an official launch in the UK. The pint-sized, open source Linux PC is designed to run silently and is highly energy efficient at just 8 watts.