Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The economy is falling as fast as temperatures in November. Recession seems certain, if it's not already here. The stock market's performance resembles Disney World's Space Mountain roller coaster. And every open source vendor, every Linux project, will be touched in one way or another. Matt Asay of Alfresco, which makes a Linux-based open source content management system, sees different effects on the open source software (OSS) community in the short and long term. "Short term -- the next few weeks -- everyone, whether commercial or proprietary, is going to find life unpleasant," Asay says, adding that the last several months have been the "most unpleasant quarter I've ever been through."

Virtual memory in Linux goes well beyond simply having a swap file or partition; it touches everything from file caching to some network functions. Charlie Schluting is our guide on this excellent tour of Linux virtual memory management.

Novell Inc.'s latest pitch to lure Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers to migrate to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise appears to be a tough sell. Last week, in a deal similar to bank enticements that target new checking account customers, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell offered existing Red Hat customers two years of Red Hat support and updates with every three-year premium SUSE Linux Enterprise subscription, at no extra charge. The total cost is $3,748 per server, compared with $3,507 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and $6,747 for RHEL's Advanced Platform including clusters and virtualization.

MySQL GUI Tools is a suite of graphical desktop applications for working with and administering MySQL servers. The suite consists of three tools: MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Migration Assistant (available only on Windows). We'll look at the first two to see how well they let us manage MySQL without using the command line. You can install MySQL GUI Tools via the package management systems on Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora Linux. On Ubuntu and Debian the package name is mysql-admin; on Fedora, it's mysql-gui-tools. Pre-built binaries and the source code are all available on the project's site.

Local geek gets confirmed as Ubuntu contributing developer. Tectonic asks him where it all started.

I like Linux netbooks. I like them a lot. They're lightweight, they're solid performers, they're cheap, and it looks like they're soon going to be cheaper than ever. According to Mike Elgan, starting on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, you'll see new, solid brand-name netbooks going for as little as $199. We're already seeing Best Buy offering the Asus Eee PC 900a for $299. Will we see the Asus Eee PC 1000, which I like, for $399? We just might.

I've been using a T-Mobile G1 for about a month now, and while it's the best phone I've ever owned (yes, I bought it), I haven't yet found myself sayingI love this phone. I like it plenty, don't get me wrong, but like any device, it's got things about it that are frustrating and other things that are pretty cool.

LinuxPlanet Classics: The popularity of Ubuntu Linux has attracted millions of new Linux users. Helping inexperienced computer users, whether as part of your job or just on a friendly basis, can be demanding and frustrating. But it is an essential part of building community, and just being a decent person. Michael Hall has some helpful pointers for keeping perspective, keeping your temper, and keeping your sanity.

Firefox is cram-full of hidden treasures, as we have learned in this series. Today Akkana Peck exposes Firefox's expertise at handling those ridiculously long URLs that plague the Web-- email clients mangle them, copy and paste is a nightmare-- but Firefox has some special tricks that make them easy.

Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only. PC Magazine’s circulation was 1.2 million in the late 1990s. It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises. “The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

[Moving to a online only publication? It seems the trickle is becoming a flood. - Scott]

Fedora 10 isn't even being released until next week, but five features have already been approved for Fedora 11 and a release schedule has been put in motion. FESCo, or the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, convened yesterday and approved the Fedora 11 release schedule (though it's likely to change as with all past releases) and approved five of the proposed Fedora features. The five features that are marked to be introduced in Fedora 11 include DeviceKit integration, improved volume controls, Windows cross-compiler support, Presto plug-in integration, and simple support for setting up a multi-seat system.

System monitoring tool Nagios offers a powerful mechanism for receiving events and commands from external applications. External commands are usually sent from event handlers or from the Nagios Web interface. You will find external commands most useful when writing event handlers for your system, or when writing an external application that interacts with Nagios.

Mozilla has advised Firefox customers not to try add-ons classed asexperimental, such as the recently released China Channel, because they could cause computer problems. Firefox add-ons allow users to personalize their browsing and add additional features, and because Firefox is open source, many of these add-ons are thought up by third-party developers.

The free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org might be a killer app for many, but its inability to properly display documents created in the proprietary Microsoft Office formats hinders its widespread acceptance in multi-OS business environments with many legacy .doc and .xls files. If changing over to an open document format is not an option, try SoftMaker Office. It's no OpenOffice.org-killer, but it's a full featured office suite that has great compatibility with Microsoft Office. Sure, it costs $80, but you can increase your karma by running it on Linux.

The KDE project has announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Beta 3, the third beta version of the future version 2.0 release. In a statement announcing the new beta, the KDE team said the “intention was to increase integration between the components of KOffice, decreasing duplication of functionality and easing maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities.

Everything's going open source nowadays. Why not government? That's precisely the question that some analysts and consultants are asking, along with citizens themselves. President-Elect Barack Obama has begun to implement a bit of open source thinking with his Presidential Transition Project Web site.

It's just 71 years ago this month that a seminal paper from Alan Turing was published, which helped pave the way to today's multi-billion dollar IT industry and confer on Turing the title of father of modern computer science. As is often the case in scientific endeavour, Turing was actually working on an entirely different task when he stumbled on a way to create a general-purpose computer.

[Not directly FOSS related but I couldn't pass up on posting this. - Scott]

Marking the two-year anniversary of their partnership, Microsoft and Novell said Wednesday they were releasing tools to help users manage and support SUSE Linux. The news, which comes a week and a half after the official Nov. 2 anniversary date, was preceded by a new Microsoft investment in the partnership that took affect Nov. 1 and calls for the vendor to purchase up to $100 million in additional Novell SUSE Linux support coupons to distribute to users.

LinuxPlanet Classics: With a few simple regular expressions you can quickly search your logfiles for problems, nasties, and even good news. These regexps are also useful for all kinds of text searches; Carla Schroder shows you how.

A full-featured distribution, ClarkConnect includes most features that would be needed to facilitate access from a remote site. Provisioning a highly functional yet inexpensive remote network solution for remote sites is a continually evolving challenge. I have started an endeavor that will be considering the ClarkConnect Internet gateway distribution of Linux. The ClarkConnect gateway is based on Red Hat Linux and the 2.6 kernel.