Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Manufacturers and PC vendors would have you believe that there's only one way to speed up your machine: buy new kit. And then, in 18 months, buy new kit again. However, it's usually our software that's the real bottleneck. If you've been using Linux for a while, you'll already have discovered lighter alternatives to some of the platform's bloatfests – for example, using AbiWord and Gnumeric in the place of OpenOffice.org.

Turning your personal computer into a media server means that you will be able to play video (AVI, MPEG, MPEG-2, DivX, XviD, MKV, WMV, MP4 or even DVD ISOs or VIDEO_TS folders) and audio files (MP3, OGG, FLAC or WMA) or view your favorite photos (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF) stored on your PC's hard drive on a big screen TV set or LCD/Plasma high-definition display, via a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 console. The following tutorial will teach you how to set up such a media server, step-by-step, from configuring your PC and gaming console, to installing and setting up the media server software in your Linux box. We've offered two media server installations, so you can choose whichever fits you best.

Open source has reached the third wave of its evolution and those who have been using the older models which were procurement-driven need to adapt. That's the message which Simon Phipps, the chief open source and standards officer from Sun Microsystems, brought to the Australian national Linux conference this morning.

Linux is quickly gaining popularity, but there are still many users afraid to convert as they are not familiar with the applications. Today our Linux guru Blair Mathis is back to introduce fifty of the most popular applications on this OS

The bonds of the FOSS community go far beyond software. Case in point, Arjen Lentz is stepping outside the bounds of the comfortable realm of software and launching bluehackers.org. The site is an effort to bring developers together to provide support for one another when dealing with depression.

All the Linux bashers use this as an excuse/reason why Linux is not suitable as a desktop operating system. You should never have to use the command line they say. You should have to be able to configure your whole computer just by clicking the mouse. People find the command line confusing blah blah blah.

Mobile communications depends on the availability of service. Not only have carriers been using Linux in their network equipment for years, they also are incorporating open source software into the middleware layer of the stack. It's key to maintain open and reliable standards for the health of the networks.

Citrix’s promised Xen-based desktop virtualization solution will be delivered in the second half of 2009. Earlier this week, the Ft Lauderdale virtualization company announced that it is co-developing the solution, known as “Project Independence,” in collaboration with Intel, one of the original investors in the Xen open source project.

A company specializing in open source authentication and auditing software for mixed networks says it grew by a factor of five in 2008. Likewise Software says its products can be used to securely integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise is based in Bellevue, Wash., where Microsoft also keeps extensive offices. For its part, Microsoft yesterday announced historic layoffs. Likewise boasts of revenue growth of 500 percent, year-over-year, and new customers that include HP, IBM, Oracle, and Sun. It has ongoing relationships with Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, it says.

Unless you're a sysadmin you don't generally have to worry that much about getting email delivered, you just hookup your GUI email client to your external email account and you're done. But what if your system tries to deliver mail, for example from cron? Normally, this just goes to root or perhaps some designated user on your system.

Microsoft today laid off 1,400 workers, with another 3,600 on the block within 18 months. We asked Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin what if any role Linux played in Microsoft's misfortunes, how Microsoft will react, and what it could mean for Linux and the open source community.

The recent news that Identi.ca, called by some an open source twist on Twitter, had received funding got me wondering about how active big names in the open source world are on Twitter itself.

Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to version 5.3 with added support for new Intel Nehalem hardware and including new Java, clustered file system and security tools. Sean Michael Kerner reports on this, and a batch of other new updates.

Logitech's Squeezebox Boom streams music from your PC to anywhere the Boom can find your wireless network, and it also accepts wired Ethernet. Anything you can play on your PC will probably play on the Boom. It even supports Linux. Joseph Moran gives us a tour of this small but feature-packed digital audio player.

This is a great time for the Gates Foundation to embrace Linux, bringing the value of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to people who might otherwise not hear its value. For the past 10 years the Gates Foundation has expanded access to technology by delivering Windows computers to public libraries. Wouldn't it be cool for the next 10 years for the Gates Foundation to deliver new Ubuntu systems for public access use at these same libraries?

The Houston crew (including the editor of this site) are joining together to host an entire conference devoted to FOSS in Healthcare in Houston, TX Summer of 09 (July 31st - Aug 2nd)

The open-source g-Eclipse project has had it's first major release. It started over two years ago with the support of the European Union initiative; with further development now under the umbrella of the Eclipse foundation and other European projects. Version 1.0 of g-Eclipse has been released with support for grid middleware solutions g-Lite, GRIA and Amazon's Cloud storage platforms, EC2 and S3.

Ubuntu has released the second "maintenance update" to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (long-term support). The 8.04.2 LTS release features some 200 software updates, as well as new i386 and amd64 installation CDs aimed at reducing the amount of code that must be downloaded following a fresh install.

Sun Microsystems axed 1,300 employees on Thursday, the first wave in a series of planned redundancies intended to cut head count by almost a fifth. The company said in a statement it had cut workers across all levels, including employees in vice president and director positions. It did not say who'd been cut, but The Reg has learned that the departed include individuals working on and around some of the company's highly touted open-source projects.

The program for the first two days at the Camp KDE meeting in Jamaica provided the attendants with a series of talks. In time, these will be available in video from but for now we have these short summaries of the talks. Read on for details.