Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

NFS-GANESHA is an NFS version 2-4 server that runs in the user address space instead of as part of the operating system kernel. Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) lets you run a filesystem in the user address space instead of as part of the Linux kernel, but the FUSE support in the Linux kernel from many Linux distributions does not allow you to export FUSE through NFS. NFS-GANESHA lets you expose FUSE through NFS without patching your kernel.

On successive days, Harald Welte and David Woodhouse gave different views of the relationship between embedded companies and the free software communities whose code the companies are increasingly using. Their outlooks were not contradictory, but instead complementary; each came at the topic from a different direction. Welte looked mostly at what companies, particularly chip vendors could do better, while Woodhouse looked at what things the community could do to improve.

Apple's attempt to quash an effort to help the latest iPods and iPhones work with non-Apple software such as the Linux operating system is out of line, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday. Earlier this month, a lawyer from Apple's legal counsel, O'Melveny & Myers, managed to get an open-source project called the iPodhash pulled from Bluwiki, a free Web site used to create Wiki pages, saying the project is illegal under the terms of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Adobe's long-awaited release of a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux won the company praise and even a little advocacy in the Linux blogosphere last week. Writers touted the speed and robustness of the new Flash and told people to stop pirating Photoshop -- and use GIMP instead.

Glancing at the features list for Fedora 10, at first you might be unimpressed. Many of the features are basically infrastructure improvements, fixing known problems and enhancing performance while laying the groundwork for future developments. However, infrastructure affects almost everything you do with your computer, and the more you use Fedora 10, the more you are likely to conclude that -- one or two minor problems aside -- this may be the strongest Fedora release yet, as well as the first glimpse of its future. Fedora 10 comes in three formats: A single DVD, or a complete set of six CDs with the GNOME desktop, or a single live CD featuring either GNOME or KDE. You can download all these formats using BitTorrent, Jigdo, or a direct download. For efficiency, I used the live GNOME CD, reasoning that I would immediately want to upgrade online anyway.

Zurich, Switzerland-based Neuronics has released an open-source embedded Linux version of its "Katana" robot." The Katana Robotic Arm runs Linux with Xenomai hard real time extensions on a Freescale MPC5200-based control board, and is aimed at industry, production, and research applications, says the company.

Google's Android platform appears to be a much hotter seller than first anticipated by HTC, maker of the T-Mobile G1 phone. The Taiwanese handset manufacturer is almost doubling its G1 shipment expectations for the year. HTC believes it can ship about one million G1 phones by the end of 2008, upped from figures of around 600,000 units made earlier this year. The upped figure comes from HTC's CEO Peter Chou in a report by Digitimes.

The Australian subsidiary of the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation today said it would commence a local "Give 1, Get 1" program on November 30 that would deliver the machines to both geeks and disadvantaged children. The initiative will provide a XO laptop to a child in remote Australia or the Pacific Islands for each laptop purchased. The cost of a laptop is US$399 (plus shipping and GST). The devices can be ordered online.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Caterpillar", (a.k.a KDE 4.2 Beta 1), the first testing release of the new KDE 4.2 desktop. Caterpillar is aimed at testers and reviewers. It should provide a solid ground to report bugs that need to be tackled before KDE 4.2.0 is released. Reviewers can use this beta to get a first glance at the upcoming KDE 4.2 desktop which provides significant improvements all over the desktop and applications. With 885 bugs closed in the past week, the KDE community is now in bugfixing mode in order to provide a smooth KDE 4.2.0 to end users in January.

The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April. The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements.

The other day, a client called upon me to perform a hardware and software inventory on all of the computers on his network. There weren't that many machines to inventory, but we needed to gather quite a bit of information about each one. The client was a Microsoft shop and so I had to deal with about an even mix of Windows XP and Vista with a few Windows 95, 98, and ME machines thrown in for good measure. So off I went, with an Excel spreadsheet in hand. I visited each machine in person. For each machine, I wanted the network configuration, the workgroup configuration, and the hardware configuration.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Your CUPS-based Linux printer server can easily serve multiple subnets with some simple tweaks. Carla Schroder shows you how.

The Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project on Tuesday released Fedora 10, the latest version of the free Linux-based operating system, with a wide range of improvements in areas such as virtualization management, networking, boot time and security. The release also bundles in OpenOffice 3.0, the most recent edition of the open-source productivity suite. The new virtualization features include the ability to manage virtual hosts and storage remotely, which should appeal to network administrators with fragmented teams. "These features combine to make administration of remote hosts much easier, even in cases where direct physical access is limited or non-existent," the Fedora Team said in a recent blog post on Red Hat's Web site.

Netbooks are a new category of laptop computer, defined mostly by their small size and cheap price. The category started only a year ago and has evolved drastically since. I tried the first netbook, an Asus Eee PC with a 7-inch screen and didn't like it; the keyboard and screen were much too small. But many disagreed with me, and the popularity of that first Eee PC led to dozens and dozens of imitators.

All sorts of misconceptions, misunderstandings, propaganda, and FUD swirl around Free and Open Source Software like autumn leaves. Bruce Byfield addresses and debunks the twelve most prevalent FOSS myths.

Making labels for DVDs and their cases is an often overlooked task. Many discs are lucky to have some terse information quickly scrawled on them after burning. But there are some fine open source applications available for creating labels for CD-ROM and DVD disks and printing jewel case inserts, including gLabels, kover, and cdlabelgen. Fedora 9, Ubuntu Intrepid, and openSUSE 11 all provide packages for gLabels 2.2.3 and kover 3, but cdlabelgen 4.1.0 is left out in the cold by all three distributions. I used the packages for the first two projects and built cdlabelgen from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

I would love to go through 2009 and never have to use the tag “legal” on an open source blog post. Wishes do come true. SCO has lost, to the tune of $2.54 million, plus interest. The era of obvious business method patenting may also be over, along with Microsoft’s patent threats, thanks to the decision In Re Bilski.

I'm wondering how many nails have to be pounded into SCO's coffin before people finally just take a stake and pound one through its heart. But one of the last nails has been driven in and sealed over: SCO's lost toNovell in a way that may be, gratefully, irreversible.

SUSE Linux Enterprise now has more than 2,500 software certified applications and is recommended as a preferred platform for leading ISVs including Microsoft and SAP Novell today announced more than 2,500 software applications are now certified on the latest versions of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise, with an average of 140 new applications being added each month. Based on publicly available information, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10 have the most certified software applications when compared to the latest releases of all other commercial Linux* distributions.

TiddlyWiki excels at managing notes and text snippets, but can you tweak it for other uses? If you take a look at some applications based on TiddlyWiki, the answer appears to be a resounding yes. With TiddlyWiki derivatives, you can manage tasks, track projects, keep tabs on contacts, and organize book collections. Like the original TiddlyWiki, each derivative consists of a single HTML file which you have to download to your local hard disk. Open the downloaded file in a browser, and the TiddlyWiki-based tool is ready to go.