Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One Laptop Per Child confirmed that it will start selling its XO laptop on Amazon.com Inc.'s Web site on Monday. The XO laptop will be sold on Amazon through the same arrangement as the G1G1 program, in which a consumer donates $400 for two laptops, one of which is delivered to a child in a developing nation. Only Linux-based XO laptops will be available through Amazon, said Jim Gettys, vice president of software engineering at OLPC. A Windows version will not be sold.

When Levolor, a maker of window coverings, was looking for a better way to manage floods of data more quickly and efficiently, it ended up swapping its homegrown application for an open source tool. John Shafer, e-business application developer for Levolor, says that his company -- a division of Rubbermaid based in Atlanta -- needed to replace its in-house solution with something that would allow Levolor to better integrate incoming consumer orders with outgoing shipment status reports. It decided to go with a scalable, open source data integration suite from Talend.

Microsoft's CodePlex site could be revised before the year's out to signpost genuinely open-source projects, after the company got itself in hot water. Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, told The Register that Microsoft hoped to wrap up internal discussions over what to do about CodePlex and resolve the issue before the New Year.

Time is up, and we are home again. KDAB has once again proved to be a great host, and so has the city Berlin. We have had a great and productive weekend. Read on to learn more details about the KOffice 2008 meeting in Berlin.

Looking for a big boost out of its current financial doldrums, Sun Microsystems unveiled a line of data storage systems this week that it hopes will establish the Santa Clara, Calif., company as a new force in a growing market. Sun is unveiling three newstorage appliances -- industrial-strength computers designed for corporations and other organizations.

Cynthia Harvey takes us on a tour of fifty popular and powerful FOSS and FOSS-based security utilities: firewall, IDS, anti-malware, encryption, secure delete, forensics, and more. Some cost money, many are free, and all are excellent.

Many academics and students share a dirty secret: They hate the drudgery of assembling bibliographies. The cb2bib utility attempts to remove some of the drudgery, at least so far as online references go. Designed primarily for use with BibTeX, cb2bib can also be used with other formats once you export the results. However, whether the application actually makes bibliographical tasks easier seems questionable.

Small and midsize businesses are among the early adopters of open source enterprise applications in Asia, where the majority of open source vendors are based outside the region, according to an IDC report released Tuesday. Beyond just cost savings, more businesses in the region are turning to open source because they desire to be free of vendor lock-in and want access to source codes, stated the report.

Linux is, among other things, a customizable operating system. Clever developers can craft a Linux whose kernel and packages are configured for a specific purpose, to serve as a sort of vertical-market operating system. The benefit to users is somewhat akin to walking into a hardware store. On the shelves are tools, each suited to a specific task. And it's particularly nice that all the tools are free.

Terra Soft Solutions, the developer of Yellow Dog Linux, has been acquired by the Japanese software firm Fixstars Corporation, a developer of Cell Broadband Engine solutions. The new company, now known asFixstars Solutions, is operating as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fixstars and will maintain its entire product line from a regional office in Loveland, Colo., where Terra Soft is based.

You probably rely on the services on your own private network -- wikis, mail servers, Web sites, and other applications you've installed. What happens when you have to leave the friendly confines of your network? With minimum exposure and few simple tools, you can get all of the comforts of home anywhere you can find an Internet connection.

Microsoft has denied paying a Nigerian contractor US$400,000 in a bid to battle Linux's movement into the government sector. Media reports alleged that Microsoft had proposed paying the sum to a government contractor under a joint marketing agreement last year in order to persuade the contractor to replace Linux OS with Windows OS on thousands of school laptops.

Nagios is a monitoring software designed to let you know about problems on your hosts and networks quickly. You can configure it to be used on any network. Setting up a Nagios server on any Linux distribution is a very quick process however to make it a secure setup it takes some work. This article will not show you how to install Nagios since there are tons of them out there but it will show you in detail ways to improve your Nagios security.

We all know AROS, the Free software re-implentation of the Amiga operating system. While AROS is mostly feature complete, it's not yet ready for prime time, and it of course lacks in applications. The whole vibe around AROS is one of, excuse my wording, flipping the finger to the legal bickering and tangled web of intrigue surrounding Amiga. No schedule and rocking, is AROS' motto. While that might still be the case, a few AROS developers have defected from the motherland, and have started an operating system project of their own, called Anubis.

Japanese embedded Linux house Lineo has announced a quick-start technology that it claims can boot Linux in 2.97 seconds on a low-powered system. The technology appears similar to but much faster than Linux's existing "suspend-to-disk" capability. Warp 2 comprises a bootloader, Linux kernel, and a "hibernation driver," says the company. The driver takes a snapshot of RAM when hibernation is launched, saving the contents into flash memory, optionally compressing the data. On start-up, the contents are quickly returned to RAM, so that the system resumes its previous running state.

The last two articles that I wrote for Linuxjournal.com were about the steps that GCC goes through during the compilation process and were based on a software development class I taught a few years ago. I hadn't intended for this to be a three part series, but it's been pointed out that I didn't cover the make utility and I think it's almost negligent to discuss software development and not discuss make. Since I don't like to think of myself as negligent, I decided to extend the series to one more article.

Longtime LWN readers will be aware of your editor's tendency toward the publishing of wild predictions at the beginning of each year. The 2007 predictions irritated some Debian developers and users by suggesting that, after getting the Etch release out the door, the project would go back to arguing about firmware issues. At the end of the year, it became necessary to acknowledge that this prediction, like so many others, had failed to come to pass. In retrospect, the error in this prediction was obvious: the Debian Project traditionally saves the firmware argument for the end of the release process. After all, they need to find some way to delay a release once it's looking close to ready.

Last week, during Ubuntu's OpenWeek, Mark Shuttleworth joined in for a two hour Q&A session, where he answered a wide range of questions regarding Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical. They ranged from questions regarding Canonical's relationship with Dell, all the way up to Shuttleworth's response to Greg Kroah-Hartman's criticism of Canonical.

I've been nonplussed the last few weeks as ordinarily sane compu-journalists opine that Windows 7 will somehow kill Linux on netbooks. This weekend, I had a chance to actually see XP running on an EEE 900, and I can tell you, Linux has nothing to fear from Redmond.

The European Journal of ePractice has just published a research report showing that the achievement of wide-scale implementation depends not only on the openness of the process, but also on the willingness to negotiate and achieve a compromise.