Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration. "It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said. "Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money."

KBasic is a new programming language similar to Visual Basic. It combines the best features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB and QBasic. It is written with Qt making it entirely cross platform. The Full Version Professional Edition is available to download for KDE now. It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and commercially sold for proprietary software.

Developers might get the picture, but Eclipse reckons it had better ramp up awareness its products among senior management as it moves beyond tools in 2009. Eclipse Foundation marketing director Ian Skerrett has blogged it's important to help senior business and technology executives to understand the Foundation as it moves into runtimes.

The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference in Hobart, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year in that it now includes netbook devices in addition to MIDs and the ARM port.

A new GNUmed live CD is out. With the help of this CD one can test drive GNUmed without altering the currently running environment such as operating system. No installation necessary. Just download the CD image and either burn it to a CD or set up VirtualBox, Vmware/Vmplayer, QEmu or the likes to accept the CD image as a virtual CD drive. Just boot the CD in your physical or virtual PC/Mac and testdrive GNUmed. GNUmed client 0.3.9 is included and configured to connect to either the public GNUmed server via the internet or connect to a GNUmed server included with the CD. No setup needed. Have fun and please let us know how it works for you.

Fred Grott, a programmer who specializes in smartphone applications, has two models for his business: He can write specialized applications in native code that take advantage of all of the features of a specific smartphone, or he can write a Web application that works in the Web browsers of all of the top devices. "Guess which one of those business models [needs] $15K in seed capital and [which] one is in the $250,000 range?" he asks. Given the economics, Grott's choice is simple. Take a standard Web application, add a bit of logic that tests the type of Web browser and then send back slightly customized versions formatted to the screens of smaller handsets.

A quick look at the security vulnerabilities fixed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 including metrics and mitigations. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release and to date, every critical vulnerability has had an update available to address it available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

CherryPal announced an Atom-based "Bing" netbook that runs Linux or Windows XP, and offers a claimed five hours of battery life. The company also announced an upgraded version of its Linux-based nettop, the CherryPal C114, and launched a "Green Maraschino" open-source Linux distribution supporting the Bing.

The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24. The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.

The incoming president of an alliance of open-source companies hopes he can persuade big-name proprietary ISVs to join rivals in his group to further interoperability. Recently named Open Solutions Alliance president Anthony Gold told The Reg that his goal is to take the two-year-old organization to the "next level" by turning it into a destination for practical advice on interoperability between proprietary and closed-source software. To get there, Gold hopes he can persuade Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others to join the group, even though the OSA membership includes JasperSoft, Ingres, and Talend, that challenge Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM in business intelligence, databases, and integration.

Inspired by the wonderful Enigma desktop by Kaelri, featured at Lifehacker, I decided to port at least some of the beautiful design to my Linux desktop.

Linux is a powerhouse audio production platform, and while you have to shop carefully, there is a lot of good-quality audio recording hardware that works well with Linux. The M-Audio MobilePre USB is popular with Linux users; Carla Schroder takes a look to see why.

Red Hat has released version 5.3, the third update of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 operating system first introduced in March 2007. In addition to various bug fixes, RHEL 5.3 also offers a number of new features and improvements. Several improvements affect virtualisation. The x64 version of Xen now supports up to 126 processors and a Terabyte of memory. The paravirtualised network and mass storage drivers for fully virtualised RHEL-5 guest systems have moved into the kernel, and a separate installation is no longer required. Virtio drivers improve the performance of guest systems under the KVM alternative. Features like extended page tables that are included in recent x64 processors are now supported, which is likely to increase the performance of fully virtualised guests.

Linux Format magazine has unveiled its annual Reader Awards (PDF) for 2008 and KDE won a 'landslide' victory in the category of Free Software Project of the year in recognition of the 'incredible' work done with KDE 4. Amarok, Qt, Konqueror and the KDE-based Asus Eee PC were also recognised in the awards. Read on for more details of the KDE related successes.

Sun Microsystems is gunning for the cloud space and eyeing, in particular, the position of being a platform provider. Speaking at a media session Tuesday, Matt Thompson, senior director, developer cloud tools at Sun, said the company intends to be a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, that is, to provide the underlying facilities supporting software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Those up top (the Presidential Inaugural Committee) chose to utilize Microsoft's Silverlight technology to stream the upcoming inaugural events for the new president of the United States. Though Microsoft certainly likes this idea, this leaves out thousands of people in the US and elsewhere who still cannot run Silverlight or an open source alternative on their systems from viewing the streamed video online.

Question: I'm to the point in our organization that load balancing across multiple servers is really becoming necessary. Making the transition from standalone servers to server clusters is a daunting task to say the least. What's the best way to make such a change? Is it possible to start small and increase the "cluster" as we go? What services do well across multiple servers, and which do not?

The patience of today’s computer user is low. Time is, very much, of the essence. And for some reason that adage applies in spades to Linux computer and Linux server boot times. Although less than 1 or 2 minutes doesn’t seem like an eternity, when booting a computer it is. And when getting work done (or getting a server rebooted) as quickly as possible is of the utmost importance, every little second counts. That is where configuring which services start at boot time will help you tremendously. If you’re not running a mail server, why have Sendmail start? If you’re not running a web server, why have Apache start? These and many other linux services can be configured to not start at boot up to save you time.

I confess: leave me alone in your house, and I'll browse through your books. I don't usually have the chutzpah to pry into your desktop and configuration files if you leave your computer unlocked, but the temptation is strong. What seems natural to one user isn't always natural to me, and I've learned a lot when I've been allowed to look around another person's system.

New research indicates that Australian enterprises large and small are becoming increasing adopters of web collaboration technologies to improve productivity and communications. While larger enterprises are already big web collaboration users, a significant proportion of small to medium enterprises are also fast moving towards adoption.