Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If all goes according to plan, the first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be released tomorrow. It's not even been one month since the release of Ubuntu 8.10, but this first alpha release will show early signs of what we can expect to see in this next Canonical-sponsored release -- albeit many of the features are still in planning. In this article we will provide a glimpse at what Ubuntu 9.04 should hold in store to captivate Linux desktop users.

StarOffice 9 reminds me of the classic Monty Python skit in which Graham Chapman wrestles himself. Although StarOffice is being aggressively presented as an alternative to Microsoft Office, it seems to be equally marketed and bundled to compete against OpenOffice.org, the free software project that is sponsored by Sun and that shares a common code base with StarOffice. The trouble is, the differences between the two have diminished with each release, until, with StarOffice 9, you have to wonder who the potential customers might be.

Last week in our classic Networking 101 series we learned about Border Gateway Protocol, the networking protocol that powers the Internet. This week Charlie Schluting leads the dive into iBGP-- Internal Border Gateway Protocol-- to learn how to connect all those BGP routers together, and how to route between thousands of computers without going nuts.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2. The November 2006 agreement has had Microsoft offering Suse Linux support certificates from Novell. The companies have also agreed not to sue each other's customers over intellectual property issues. Some have protested that the agreement legitimized Microsoft's claims that Linux violates its patents.

The 32nd edition of the Top 500 supercomputers lists was released late last week and Linux-based systems occupy 439 of the 500 positions. Other Unix variants, including BSD-based systems occupy another 24 positions.

The Linux desktop comes with a variety of multimedia players, such as Xine, MPlayer, and Amarok. Yet all digital media players are only as good as the files they have to work with, and preparing those files requires the best tag editor you can find. I checked out half a dozen of the more popular and stable graphical ID3 tag editors available for Linux. I found that going from no tags to great tags requires keeping more than one of these editors on hand.

A patent represents a grant from the United States government to an individual for the exclusive right to make, use, import, sell, and offer to sell an invention. In order to obtain a patent, an inventor must prove that the invention is new, useful, and not merely an obvious improvement over what was already known.

With diff-ext, GNOME users can compare and merge files from within Nautilus. If, instead, you use KDE 3, try out kdiff-ext from the same site, which works with Konqueror. Each utility handles paths to files and directories and invokes an external diff tool to perform the grunt work. With diff-ext you can easily compare two files with different names, from different directories, or whole directory trees.

Chip maker ARM is to get Ubuntu Linux up and running on its ARMv7 processor architcture, part of its plan to get its chips into netbooks and handheld internet devices. It's all about taking the fight to Intel's Atom, of course. The chip giant's processor has become the de facto standard for small, cheap computers. But the handheld tablet side of the story - the MID - has yet to take off, providing ARM with an opportunity to tout its platform's superior power efficiency.

To great fanfare, Microsoft has announced that it is deploying XO laptops in Quetame and Chia, Colombia, with the Windows XP operations system, what I like to call "Windows XO", thereby claiming that Colombia signs up for OLPC laptops with Windows. This bragging certainly has pissed off Greg Dek, a Red Hat Community Architect working on OLPC. Greg declares that Microsoft bought 10,000 XO laptops in May and can do with them whatever they want, including trumpeted up pilots of Windows XO, and that OLPC builds with Linux and Sugar, and always will.

All the time you hear the constant nagging "Backups! Backups! Always have good current backups!" But this is often easier said than done, especially in the world of expensive, restrictive, overly-complex proprietary backup applications. But, as usual, Free software takes a sensible, user-friendly approach to backups and recovery. Deann Corum shows us how to get started with Bacula, the powerful backup and recovery application that supports both tape and disk storage.

Wikipedia is one of the preeminent examples of what can be done in an open setting; it has, over the years, accumulated millions of articles - many of them excellent - in a large number of languages. Wikipedia also has a bit of a licensing problem, but it would appear that recent events, including the release of a new license by the Free Software Foundation, offers a way out.

Two years ago this month, Microsoft Corp. forged its controversial partnership with Novell Inc. that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect SUSE Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft. Just how well has that deal worked out? That depends on who you talk to. Microsoft and Novell paint nothing but a rosy picture of the arrangement. Customers "like the idea that Microsoft and Novell are in the same room," says Susan Hauser, Microsoft's general manager for strategic partnerships.

From its name, you'd never know that sK1 is a good vector graphics drawing program, in the same category as better-known names like Inkscape, Dia, and OpenOffice.org Draw. Moreover, sK1 includes a feature that other Linux applications lack: it can read CorelDraw's CDR files and convert them to Linux-friendly formats. sK1 derives its name from Sketch, a free vector graphics editor that appeared about 10 years ago. Sketch eventually became Skencil, but development seemingly got stuck (and eventually stopped) after version 0.6.17 in June 2005, when work was started on a port to GTK+. A group of Ukrainian programmers began working with the Skencil source code around 2003 and produced a fork that became sK1. The focus was to provide full support of professional printer requirements, such as the CMYK color model and PostScript and PDF formats.

It's a small wonder that the Linux operating system remains vibrant in multiple industries and is poised to make a dash for more consumers' desktops, considering how often misunderstandings get in the way of its advancement. For instance, Linux was not immediately recognized as a real OS in the way that consumers and business owners viewed the Apple computer or IBM PC in the early days of computing.

Gone are the heady days of early Ubuntu releases when everything seemed new and fresh. Now you have to look a little deeper than the desktop wallpaper to see the changes Ubuntu is making.

I admit it, before hearing his name in connection with OLPC's G1G1 campaign and looking it up on Wikipedia I had no idea who that Tom Brady fellow was. But I now understand he's some kind of soccer American football player or something. ;-)

One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on. Sadly, that narrative has been rather undermined by the independent Top500 supercomputing sites ranking. Five years ago, the GNU/Linux family ran 36.80% of the top 500 supercomputers; worse, Windows ran on precisely one supercomputer.

What gives you a firewall, load-balancing, QoS, 3G support, RADIUS, wireless access point, HTTP proxy, VPN, VLAN, PPPoE, captive portal, and a host of other useful security, authentication, and network applications, all in a hundred megabytes? Zeroshell, the built-from-scratch Linux network appliance.

C Cod is a front end to your C, C++, or Objective-C compiler that lets you treat C more like a scripting language. C Cod comes with C Server Pages, which provides support for CGI so you can write Web applications in C or C++ and have them automatically compiled on demand.