Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Maps are cool; there's no end of applications which can make good use of mapping data. There is plenty of map data around, but it's almost exclusively proprietary in nature. That makes this data hard to use with free applications; it's also inherently annoying. We, as taxpayers, own those streets; why should we have to pay somebody else to know where the streets are?

Multimedia infotainment devices are a hot seller in today's automotive market and can be the deciding factor in which vehicle a customer ultimately chooses. The automotive infotainment market has successfully navigated the initial wave of consumer devices invading the automobile, offering basic connectivity for consumer electronics in the passenger cabin.

Small laptops are becoming a big problem for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows business. A new breed of lightweight computers called netbooks are beginning to crack the company's dominance of operating systems. Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc., which together account for 90 percent of the netbook market, are using the rival Linux software on about 30 percent of their low-cost notebooks.

The pam_mount project lets you unlock an encrypted filesystem automatically when you log in. The same password used to log in is used as the key to unlock the encrypted filesystem, so you only need to type it once. Using this method, you can easily share a laptop and have only a single user's home directory unlocked and mounted when he logs in. And pam_mount can mount any filesystem, not just encrypted filesystems, so you can use it, for example, with an NFS share that you are interested in but which you might not like to leave mounted when you are not logged in.

Open source multimedia specialist Collabora is hiring developers to work on the nonlinear video editor PiTiVi. The Cambridge, UK-based company contributes heavily to the GStreamer media framework and other GStreamer-dependent projects, so PiTiVi is a natural fit -- and it fills a sorely needed niche on the Linux desktop. PiTiVi is a GTK+ video editor written primarily in Python and available under the LGPL. It uses GStreamer for audio and video processing, and the Gnonlin editing components. PiTiVi maintainer Edward Hervey is a Collabora employee, and the company employs another PiTiVi hacker part-time to focus on user interface improvements.

Sun and IBM launch project and repository of code to make OpenDocument Format application development easier.

Battle of the Browsers postings are nothing new, but usually are based upon the opinion of a single reviewer. However, if there were cash prizes to uncover bugs in Chrome, FireFox 3.1 and IE8 you might get a broader and more interesting view. Welcome to the Browser Bug Battle...

If you're looking to run a serious open source collaboration server, Yahoo's Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) should be on your short list. This Web 2.0 email and groupware server offers AJAX Web-based administrator and user interfaces, a variety of useful groupware features, and email import functionality. ZCS comes in five versions. The Open Source Edition, which is the one I tried, doesn't have all the features of the others, but it's purely open source.

A new release of IBM's Lotus Symphony office suite brings the software to a wider audience with a beta for Mac OS X and a full version for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Can Symphony take a significant share of the office suite market from OpenOffice and Microsoft, or is the company's attempt to compete merely an Irrelevant Business Move?

The openSUSE project has a new board, and the new board has big plans. The distribution's first board was appointed by Novell in November 2007, tasked with the unusual job of "bootstrapping" a community-elected board that could guide the project with a balance of Novell and non-Novell influence. Less than a year later, that community-elected board is now in place, and looking forward to its new role. Pascal Bleser was on the bootstrap board, and took part in laying the groundwork for the new, permanent board election process. "We first initiated the creation of Guiding Principles that were primarily driven by Cornelius Schumacher (who happens to also be on the current KDE e.V. board of directors) but discussed on our opensuse-project mailing list, growing with the input of community members.

Authors need to count the words in articles and manuscripts. But when it's an HTML document all full of tags, you don't want to count the tags. Akkana Peck shows a fast way to count only the words.

Python has a good reputation for tasks like systems programming, network programming, and scripting, but Python for the web is becoming red hot. Part of this has to do with the very popular web framework Django, that was developed at a newspaper to help quickly create Content Management Sites. . Another reason is that Google App Engine–Google’s Cloud Computing offering for developers–only exposes a Python API.

Here are 12 tips, tricks, tweaks and techniques to make you say "I didn't know you could do that in Linux." Sure, not every one may be your cup of tea but here are 12 items to help you have the most positive Linux experience you can and to show why Linux is a superior operating system to other alternatives.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Change", (a.k.a KDE 4.1.3), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. Change is a monthly update to KDE 4.1. It ships with desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, web development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

The presidential election has nothing on the Apple-Psystar copyright imbroglio when it comes to drawn out affairs. The two companies filed paperwork with the California court hearing their dispute in which they ask the court to set a trial date on Nov. 9, 2009. In the joint filing, Apple and Psystar said they expect the trial to last about 10 days. The court has yet to approve the timetable.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM are expected on Wednesday to announce the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF. Sun is contributing an initial set of code for an application programming interface (API) that developers can use to work with ODF files without having to know the ins and outs of the technical specification, the companies said.

The One Laptop Per Child project, launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, was supposed to lead millions of children around the world to information technology and freedom. The plans aimed for low cost, enabling many children to use the machines, and free software, so they would have freedom while using them. I thought it was a good idea; I even planned to use one myself when I found in the OLPC’s promise of free software a way to escape the proprietary startup programs that all commercial laptops used.

If your music library is tied to your CD collection or MP3 player, you can still hit the road without losing access to your tunes. Subsonic is a free, Web-based media streamer that lets you -- and your friends -- access your music collection over the Internet. Subsonic can handle large music collections, running into the thousands of CDs. It also works with video; in fact, it can let you remotely access any format that can be streamed over a standard HTTP connection. If needed, Subsonic will convert your collection to a streaming format on the fly, taking into account the available bandwidth. You can use any browser and media player combination to listen to your music; I went for Firefox and RealPlayer, but other combinations are equally valid.

Simplify. That, at its heart, is the purpose of XBRL -- extensible business reporting language. XBRL employs a common set of tags for financial terms, making reports more searchable and transparent to everyone who uses them. Designed to provide information to investors and anyone else researching financial markets, it is an open standard that is operating system agnostic.

The lightweight Dillo Web browser, in development for eight years, has always been a contender for the fastest browser available on GNU/Linux -- so much so that the Google's Chrome will have to be pretty nimble to outpace it. With last month's release of version 2.0, Dillo is faster than ever. If performance is your main priority, you might find Dillo's minimalistic tools and functional limitations an acceptable tradeoff -- but probably not.