Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LinuxPlanet classics: The folks who run NTP servers are generally providing a free service, so it's rather crass to repay their kindness with thoughtlessness when you're setting up your own NTP clients. Carla Schroder shows how you can be smarter than famous big commercial vendors and set up your timeservers the right way.

Dave Whiting, the principal at Red Newt Cellars winery in upstate New York, was tired of chasing vendors to try to get them to support clunky custom content management systems on his site at RedNewt.com. The independent winemaker decided to branch out and teach himself site development skills, with the help of some popular open source applications. The happy result is a full-featured interactive ecommerce site that Whiting says is flexible, scalable, and secure.

When you return from a trip and copy your digital pictures over to your file server, you might like to rename the image files or (losslessly) rotate them to their correct orientation to make finding and viewing them simpler. You might even want to embed comments right into the image files in such a way that all image viewing tools should be able to harvest and share this metadata. In this article we'll take a look at some command-line tools to help you with these tasks.

Outsourcing and open-source development may at first appear to be about as far apart as baseball and football. Both use a ball in a game, but that's about it. Yet a closer look from open-source software developers and industry analysts reveals that enterprises using outsourcing for their programming needs could stand to learn some management and process techniques from the open-source community.

So the election came to an end at last, and the people made their choice. All throughout the blogosphere, fireworks could be heard as Obama supporters reveled in their triumph. Long live the Internet, and the new political landscape it has produced! Things will never be the same again, that's for sure.

Some 20 KOffice developers have gathered at the KDAB offices to discuss and prepare the upcoming release of KOffice 2.0. Read on to learn about what the meeting is for and what is on the agenda to be sorted before the big release.

To say Sabre Holdings is a believer in open source technology is an understatement. Its IT department supports the Travelocity Web site, the Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions, and the company has been using open source tools for some 10 years, according to CTO Robert Wiseman. Cost certainly factors into the reason, but it's Sabre's ability to control its own destiny by making whatever changes it deems necessary that's the real motivation. Along with Kevin Bomar, Sabre's senior principal of middleware services, Wiseman explains how open source software and the community that supports it help Sabre deliver solutions that meet its demanding uptime requirements.

So, you’ve heard about Google’s free software release of its Gadgets server, and the new “Open Social API”. And gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if you could provide this technology to your users with your favorite free software Content Management System (CMS)? Since the documentation that comes bundled with Google’s release will probably give you simultaneous whiplash and vertigo (with a large side of frustration), here’s a breakdown of the problem so you’ll know what you’re up against, how to go about solving the problem, and plenty of free software resources to help you get there.

Currently in late beta, the Sun Presenter Console (SPC) is Sun Microsystems' latest extension for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. Other extensions from Sun in the last year, such as the Sun PDF Import Extension, Sun Presentation Minimizer, and Sun Weblog Publisher, have sometimes been lacking in design and sometimes buggy, but all of them are so invaluable that you might wonder why they are extensions instead of new features. SPC is no exception. It gives slide show presenters a separate view of their presentation and some tools to help them organize and deliver their talks, but includes no indication of how to set it up or use it.

Adobe has issued updates for some of its older software to address critical security vulnerabilities. The updates are aimed at users of older systems that are unable to run the latest versions of Flash and Acrobat.

LXer Feature: 09-Nov-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have Windows 7: Microsoft's Linux killer, the Linux Foundation feels sympathy for Microsoft, Examining alternative Linux distros, How the regular Windows user sees Linux, Why Linux sucks at being user friendly and things you didn't know you could do with Linux.

Businesses must open their doors to iPhones, Facebook, instant messaging and open source software if they want to attract the next generation of workers, a report has found. The next generation of workers--the so-called "Millennials"--demand to be allowed to use consumer tech, social networking and open source software at work, a survey by Accenture has found.

Over at iTWire, we are often in the position where we disagree with a fellow writer and say so. This morning, I found my colleague Davey Winder's piece "Opinion: why Linux sucks at being user friendly" to be a litle too general to pass without comment.

It was the Ubuntu week, with much of the Linux-related coverage on many web sites dominated by the brand new "Intrepid Ibex", the project's latest. A plethora of reviews followed almost instantly, but some subtle hardware issues and lack of real breakthrough features have left some of the users and reviewers unimpressed. In other news, Fedora has unveiled Plymouth, a new flicker-free boot process, Sabayon has hinted at a large number of never-seen-before features for the upcoming 4.0 release, Yellow Dog Linux has launched a beta testing period for its forthcoming version 6.1, and NetBSD is about to branch version 5.0 with some unexpected improvements. Also in this week's issue - Ubuntu has published a draft release schedule for "Jaunty Jackalope" or Ubuntu 9.04. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the October 2008 DistroWatch.com donation is GoblinX, a slick Slackware-based live CD made in Brazil.

The division between proprietary software vendors and open-source providers is not as clear as some industry players perceive it to be. As more enterprises consider adopting open source technologies, even traditional software vendors such as Microsoft have taken steps in responding to such customer needs. "Open source is not a product but an approach to software development," said Matthew Hardman, platform strategy manager at Microsoft Singapore. "Microsoft does not compete with open source, just as Nike does not compete with running." Hardman said the software giant seeks to provide the 'best possible platform' for open source applications to run. "We believe that enterprises and vendors should have a choice of software development methodology, and open source is one such choice."

The most recent official count of Linux distros put the number at 'one hell of a lot'.This is good because it gives us plenty of choice, and choice provides freedom and freedom is good, right? Maybe it can feel as if there's a little too much choice at times, but there's no doubt that the huge variety of distributions makes Linux more interesting. However, trying different distros isn't as easy as experimenting with a new web browser, word processor or even desktop environment.

In this article I’m going to go through some details about what is going on under the hood when you run a Python program, as well how those details have changed over the years in different python’s implementations ranging from original CPython (Python implementation in C) all the way to the newest implementations like PyPy.

Behind Yahoo's push to open up Web search and advertising is software powerful enough to sort through the entire Library of Congress in less than half a minute. The software, calledHadoop, is part of Yahoo's massive computing grid and is transforming the way that Yahoo and corporate giants like IBM extract meaning from enormous streams of data.

Ryan Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) has announced the release of a Crysis Wars (the multi-player version of EA's Crysis Warhead) server for Linux. Crysis Warhead is an expansion to the original Crysis game and was released for Microsoft Windows in September.

It looks like presiding over the death of the Yahoo-Google ad deal will be one of the final acts of Thomas Barnett, the Assistant Attorney General who headed the Justice Department's Antitrust Division since June 2005. Barnett announced his resignation today, effective Nov. 19.