Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

God bless local news. Annie Schubert was expecting a "bread and butter" Dell running Windows for school. But when she fired up her accidental Ubuntu machine, confusion was only the beginning of her problems. You see, Annie was ready to enroll in online classes at Madison Area Technical College (emphasis mine), so she bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu pre-loaded. MATC lists as its requirements Microsoft Word and internet access, so when her Verizon DSL install CD wouldn't work and the word "Microsoft" was nowhere to be found, she called Dell. There, a gracious callcenter support drone told her that Ubuntu was just fine for everything she needed to do (true, I would say) and that it's just perfect for college students. Annie agreed.

It’s no secret that I’m a Linux fan. I love it. I use it. I tell of its goodness far and wide. It’s also true, however, that I administer and use a variety of operating systems throughout any given day. I like to think that makes me more objective than some, and I like to think more people will pay attention to me if I don’t bash every other operating system out there.

It has been gratifying to see the number of businesses and personal computers moving to Open Source software and the Linux Operating System. In our organization alone, the numbers, while small on a grand scale, are quite significant from where we stand. We've installed hundreds of Linux systems in the past two years and the retention rate of those systems are what we get excited about. However...

As a new parent, one of my concerns is the possible exposure of my daughter to adult oriented materials when she reaches internet surfing age. I’ve still got some years to go before I really need to come to the task of protecting my child from the cr@p that is pervasive throughout the internet, but as an IT professional, this is the biggest gripe I hear from parents all over. How can you protect your children while allowing them the freedom to use the internet responsibly and productively in order to become successful students and therefore successful adults?

Windows-only shops looking to do a little virtualization on the cheap need look no further than Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s Hyper-V and the freebie Hyper-V Server 2008 standalone host. However, our tests showed that customers with even mildly complex virtualization requirements should run Hyper-V on top of Enterprise or Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2008 and manage guest virtual machines by adding System Center Virtual Machine Manager--which brings on licensing costs. As for non-Windows environments, Microsoft's claim that Hyper-V is capable of mixed operating system virtualization is technically accurate, but the latest version of Novell's SUSE Enterprise is the only flavor of Linux supported across the Hyper-V range.

Most software developers, whether open source or proprietary, would agree that the success or failure of any endeavour depends on building a community. This may be a community of fellow developers, advocates or just users, but unless a significant number of people take a project to their hearts, it's unlikely to make an impact. If you're an elite coder who dreams in C++, making your mark on a free software project could be relatively easy; you take the code – magically available under the GPL – and work out how to do something new or more efficient with it and then bash out your edits on a keyboard. You release your patch and the community sings your praises while you begin the process over again with the same or another project.

We recently held a olpc / LTSP presentation in Vienna, which gave us the opportunity to be experimental and check the wonderful world of using Sugar on various platforms via LTSP. We hooked up 2 Acer Aspire One netbooks, a Thin Client (Artec), a laptop acting as LTSP and ejabberd server, along with 2 traditional XOs. Before going into the details of the experiment some explanation is due. LTSP stands for Linux Terminal Server Project, and refers to the use of a mainframe like infrastructure, where minimal systems without hardrives and little CPU and RAM can be used as diskless terminals.

The 451 Group, a market intelligence consultancy that proudly distinguishes itself from its "pay-for-play-propaganda" competitors, predicts that 2009 will be a big year for open-source software merger and acquisition activity.

[So even though a bad economy hurts companies selling both Proprietary and Open Source solutions, merging them will help? - Scott]

January is here and it's that time of year for penguin-lovers everywhere to make their annual migration south to Australia to flock together. Linux.conf.au is one of the world's most popular technical Linux conferences, and for it's 10th anniversary is being held at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. The conference runs for a week, with two days of mini-confs followed by the main conference programme and culminating in an Open Day on Saturday.

This time last year, the big news from the-company-formerly-known-as-Trolltech — now Qt Software — was a takeover bid from mobile-phone giant Nokia, which closed successfully in June for an estimated €104 million. Once again January brings Trolltech/Qt news from Nokia, this time announcing that beginning with the upcoming 4.5 release, the Qt framework will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Uploading photos from your digital cameras is file management -- and file management in GNU/Linux is always faster from the command line. Bruce Byfield shows us how to use the powerful, fast ghoto2 for maximum flexibility and control of getting your photos out of your digital camera.

Google revealed Wednesday that it will be discontinuing its development of the Jaiku microblogging service and opening the source code. The service will remain in operation on Google App Engine and it will be maintained by a community of volunteer Google developers with the assistance of the broader open source software community. The move is part of a broader set of changes that Google is undertaking to streamline its service offerings and shut down some of its lesser-known web applications.

Possibly Microsoft's most important strategic goal for Windows 7, in addition to redeeming the brand damage done by Windows Vista, is to dominate netbooks, now the fastest selling segment of the PC market. This may not bode well for the Linux operating system. With netbooks, the open-source OS with a highly tech-savvy audience found a market where it could legitimately threaten Windows. But Linux will face an uphill battle in this category now that the sleeping software giant has been awoken to the opportunity that netbooks present, say industry analysts.

If you Google "AJAX Web 2.0" you'll get over eight million hits, but what technologies will you find in that mix that can truly deliver on the promises of Web 2.0 today? While there's no single definition of Web 2.0, at its heart lays the Internet acting as a platform for social networks, where information can be created and shared in a community of interest. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) relate to Web 2.0 concepts only in that they enhance the platform by providing a more effective user interface. AJAX relates to Web 2.0 only in that it provides a lightweight approach for developing RIAs that execute through a single ubiquitous interface, the Web browser.

It used to be that choosing Windows or Linux to host your Web site made a big difference in the kind of functionality or services offered. On Friday, as this informative article on KnockOutHost.com suggests, the choice between Linux and Windows has become somewhat less stark.

Here's an interesting idea: for Russia to fund the creation of a "national operating system" to replace Windows, based on GNU/Linux:..

Your editor's long-suffering spouse will attest that gadgets are never in short supply in the house. Many of them pass below her interest, but a new one has come in which has attracted attention throughout the household: an Android Dev Phone, otherwise known as the fully unlocked version of the G1 phone offered by T-Mobile. This phone is certainly a fun toy, but it has the potential to be a lot more than that.

Newcomers to open source software might be intimidated by the insider nature of the communities, but they shouldn't mistake that for elitism, writes LinuxInsider columnist Jeremiah T. Gray. Stick with it, and the benefits will become clear, he advises.

P2P (peer-to-peer) is the nature of the Net. You can fight that, or you can embrace it. Here in the US, the mainstream entertainment business has mostly been fighting it. Hollywood and its phone and cable company allies have long regarded P2P, and BitTorrent in particular, as a copyright piracy system and a bandwidth hog. In the European Union, however, P2P is more than accepted: it's supported by the Union itself.

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.