Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I was going ask you for your take on what will be this year’s marketing trend to boost sales. We have seen things like green computing and virtualization and the ever popular security (pick your favorite subtopic – USB data slurping, laptop encryption, firewalls etc), or whether Linux is for smart people but I was talking with a couple of friends, both technical and end user and ended up shaking my head.

Linux has a multitude of handy specialized commands and fast ways to do things. Juliet Kemp shows us how to read compressed files without unpacking them first.

Akkana Peck spent an eventful week trying to see and absorb all of LinuxConf 2009. Executive summary: you want to see real innovation and a desire to get more people involved, as opposed to finding more innovative ways to exploit them, check out Linux.

The purchase of StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, a German office "productivity suite", by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The subsequent release to the free software community of the StarOffice code, in the shape of OpenOffice, came as a surprise to many. Sun was a hardware company. Its primary business was back room servers, and Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystem's CEO, was not a fan of office productivity suites. Quite the opposite. Back in October 1996, McNealy had announced to the National Press Club of Australia: "When the anthropologists look back on the 1980s and 1990s and do the archaeological digs, and get their calipers and brooms and microscopes out, they will blame the massive reduction in productivity during the 1980s and 1990s entirely on Microsoft Office."

The Montegancedo Astronomical Observatory, based at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing and part of the Madrid Region’s ASTROCAM network, was officially opened on 23 January 2009, coinciding with the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Nokia has released details of the 11 finalists in its "Calling All Innovators" competition, picked from almost 1000 entrants and apparently focusing on applications that improve the quality of life on earth. There are those who believe the best way to improve quality of life would be to switch off the mobile, but unsurprisingly that's not how Nokia sees things. The finalists are split between the ecologically sound, the improving-the-third-world and the cool-technology, with an interesting application or two in every section.

Proposing to change the implementation language for a large project is hardly uncontroversial, but when that proposal calls for moving from C++ to Python, one might expect an enormous flame fest. Surprisingly, a proposal to do just that with the code for the "Battle for Wesnoth" strategy game has resulted in a fairly flame-free discussion. Whether or not the project actually makes the switch—it looks unlikely that any wholesale switch is imminent—there is a great deal of value in the discussion, particularly in its tone.

Ever feel like you're Rodney Dangerfield? You live someplace and Linux shows you no respect, time-zone-wise that is. What I mean is that you live somewhere that's not one of the time-zones that comes predefined with Linux. If that sounds like you, then read on and get Linux to show you a little respect.

There is now talk on the Mesa 3D development list about the possibility of having a Mesa driver for the Nintendo Wii. Those working on developing custom games for this console platform have already experienced some success in bringing OpenGL to the Wii through the use of Mesa. Nintendo has its own graphics API (GX) for the Wii, which is resemblant of OpenGL but still different enough that some work is required to get OpenGL running...

A lot of notebooks and even netbooks these days run Windows, but also offer a minimalist Linux environment that boots in seconds. Now, with the Intel-sponsored Moblin project's alpha release of Moblin 2 Monday, it looks like insanely fast boots will become a standard feature of full-featured Linux desktops, too.

Linus Torvalds makes a minor, off-hand comment that is buried deep in a lengthy interview. The tech press and Linux community act like it's nude celebrity pics and go gaga. Bruce Byfield peels away the nonsense and finds a tiny nugget of actual news. Sorry, no nude pics.

Ordinarily, I don't spend much discretionary income on computers. I get enough of 'em at work. But the other day, I actually considered buying a netbook. In the process of doing some shopping, I learned why Windows is outselling Linux.

Uncertainty over hardware support is a perennial Linux bugaboo--even when vendors claim to love the penguin, it isn't always true. Rob Reilly risks his own money and peace of mind testing various external storage devices on his Asus Kubuntu laptop, including an antique Zip drive, and reports his findings.

The Conservative Party has published a new report on government open-source IT procurement, claiming that the recommendations would save tax payers' money. The report is the result of studies by Dr Mark Thompson, of Cambridge University's Judge Business School, who was asked to pursue the topic by shadow chancellor George Osborne in a speech last year.

The Jetty project has now formally proposed to join the Eclipse project. Greg Wilkins has previously discussed the potential move to place the open source Java HTTP server and servlet container under the umbrella of the Eclipse project, and now the formal proposal has been made. The proposal notes that the Eclipse IDE already uses Jetty to serve help pages and that Jetty is a mature project and technology.

It’s been a while in the coming but KDE 4.2 is here. The latest release of the popular desktop environment packs a truck-full of improvements over earlier releases and developers are saying that KDE 4.2 is the best choice for all users, not just KDE enthusiasts. Previous releases of KDE 4x have sparked controversy in the open source community over its suitability as a general purpose desktop.

The uptake of cloud computing was rendering many traditional systems-administrator functions obsolete, tech author and Google sysadmin Tom Limoncelli told attendees at Linux.conf.au (LCA) in Hobart this week.

The NVIDIA 180.22 Linux driver was released less than three weeks ago, but today NVIDIA has released a new 180.xx display driver update. In addition, NVIDIA has updated all three of their legacy display drivers.

Once you finish adding content to your presentation in Impress, your efforts aren't over yet. You still need to prepare how you will deliver it. These preparations are partly a matter of choosing various options for slide transitions and delivering the show, but they also include some practical choices and -- worst of all -- the practical considerations such as making sure that you have all the graphics, fonts, and audio files you need, and are ready to work with dual monitors in a world in which GNU/Linux is still a rarity.

Hello everyone! I would like to welcome you to the new and improved KDE Dot News. As I am sure many of you know, although the old KDE Dot News has served the KDE community very well, it was beginning to show its age. Because of that a number of people including myself took it upon ourselves to modernise the Dot.