Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you accidentally mangle your boot record and render your system unbootable, don't reinstall your operating system. Paul Ferrill shows how to rescue a non-booting computer with the Super Grub Disk, a sophisticated yet easy-to-use Free software application.

OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new group to help implementors create applications that conform to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard. ODF defines a genuinely open XML file format for office productivity applications, including text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases. The new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) Committee will work to ensure that the growing number of ODF-compliant applications are able to interoperate and conform to the standard.

Members of the Debian community are up in arms following a surprise announcement over the way project participants are vetted and organized. The announcement, posted by Debian developer and administrator Joerg Jaspert, proposed - among other things - that a new class of non-technical Debian contributor be introduced. This person would have a lower status than full Debian developers and have limited access to project resources.

Each new Ubuntu release has raised the standard by which other Linux distros are judged. With the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, the focus is on mobility and 3G network support. I found Intrepid to be a fast and stable release, yet I experienced some minor issues that keep it from absolute perfection. I installed the 64-bit version of Intrepid on both my desktop computer and my laptop, which is a Gateway M-7315u with a 2GHz Pentium Dual Core T3200 Processor and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. When it comes to installing Ubuntu, you have the same options this time around as you did before, with one extra. The live CD installer is apparently unchanged. If you prefer a simpler text-mode installer, an alternate CD is available too.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) yesterday announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL). The latest release of the licence now allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 licence.

System administrators need to keep an eye on their servers to make sure things are running smoothly. If they find a problem, they need to see when it started, so investigations can focus on what happened at that time. That means logging information at regular intervals and having a quick way to analyse this data. Here's a look at several tools that let you monitor one or more servers from a Web interface.

A mainframe version of the OpenSolaris operating system is now available for download, IBM and Sun announced Monday. Both Solaris and the System z mainframe have a huge footprint in the financial services sector, and many customers will be interested in consolidating Solaris-based applications onto mainframe servers, says Forrester Research analyst Brad Day.

Many computer users know that if you want to save money, go open source. Open source software is programming that is freely available on the Internet and whose programming language -- literally the software's DNA -- is available to all users. There are open source software equivalents of nearly every professional software product on the market, most sporting the same features as their for-profit counterparts.

Once upon a time, one computer was all you needed. All of your documents lived on that computer, or a stack of floppies or CD-Roms nearby, and nowhere else. Those days are gone, much like the one-car, one-TV, and one-iPod days. Today I have my home computer and my wife has hers. There's also my laptop, my daughter's laptop, my work computer, and my file server. At any time I could find myself sitting in front of any of these and wherever I happen to be sitting there is bound to be a file that is sitting on one of the others that I would prefer to be readily available. These files are mostly along the lines of current projects I'm working on. If inspiration strikes I want to be able to open up the appropriate file or create a new one and start writing without worry. I worry because keeping these files synchronized across all my logins on the various computers I might sit in front of in a single day is a big issue.

There's no doubt about, when it comes to selling small laptops (or what's now often called a netbook) Asus is king of the hill. Just like most people think of Apple's iPod when it comes to MP3 players Asus' eee PC brand has become synonymous with small inexpensive laptops. I honestly can't remember the last university lecture where I didn't see at least one student with an eee PC and on a short 2h train-ride on the weekend I spotted 3 people using eee PCs.

The Data Warehousing Institute World Conference, New Orleans, LA – Nov. 3, 2008 – Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), will join other business intelligence industry leaders to discuss the latest industry innovations that allow BI to reach more users. Lance Walter, vice president of marketing for Pentaho, will represent open source business intelligence during the TDWI session entitled, “Cool BI: The Latest Innovations,” led by Cindi Howson, founder of BIScorecard, at this year’s TDWI World Conference in New Orleans on Nov. 4 from 2:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

A. Lizard's in-depth howto on setting up secure remote graphical desktops continues with configuring secure Internet access: managing dynamic IP addresses, creating and managing SSH keys, configuring routers, and using Wake-on-LAN for added convenience.

Last month, when the National Center for Open Source and Education announced this year's FOSS and K-12 Education Awards, three of the five awards were given for software designed for the Linux Terminal Service Project (LTSP). Two were given to Eric Harrison and Paul Nelson, the founders of the K12LTSP distribution (now called K-12 Linux). The third was given to Robert Arkiletian, the developer of an administration application called Fl_TeacherTool that is designed specifically for K12LTSP. The award was only the latest acclaim for Fl_TeacherTool, which has a small but dedicated group of users in the classroom. Ironically, though, the award comes at a time when the tiny project faces significant challenges if it is to survive.

Canonical, the developers behind Ubuntu Linux have release Intrepid Ibex, the successor to last spring's Hardy Heron release. Ibex isn't a long-term support release - which might put off some large organizations - but for Ubuntu desktop fans, version 8.10 makes a worthwhile upgrade. If you made the leap to Ubuntu 8.10 when it was released last week you may be scratching your head wondering what the fuss is about. The answer is that it might be a few days before you appreciate the small tweaks and overall streamlining in this release. Naturally, there are a slew of new and updated packages - GNOME 2.24, GIMP 2.6, and more - but much of what we love about 8.10 is more subtle.

Backing up data can be difficult, especially when you only want to copy files that changed since the last backup. It can be even more troublesome when you have to remember to start the process manually,or you have to delete old backups to make room for new ones. Because of these difficulties, some people decide not to back up data at all, and feel the pain when they accidentally delete the wrong file or their system crashes. TimeVault is a backup utility for Ubuntu that addresses these problems.

Unveiled earlier this month at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference by Chief Whiteboard Operator Ray Ozzie, the Azure Services Platform confused damn near everyone. But after days of collaboration with the top minds in both industry and academia, El Reg is proud to announce that we have finally figured out what Microsoft Azure is.

This has been a big year for patent law in the technology industry. A few weeks ago I wrote about the Supreme Court's Quanta v. LG decision. Now the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, has handed down a landmark ruling in the case of In Re Bilski. The case dealt with the validity of patents on business methods, and a number of public interest organizations had filed amicus briefs. I offer my take on the decision in a story for Ars Technica. In a nutshell, the Federal Circuit rejected the patent application at issue in the case and signaled a newfound skepticism of "business method" patents.

Have you tried the major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RHEL, and OpenSUSE/SLED? Were they not quite right for your needs? The major distros are not the only game in town. Find out the good, the bad, and the ugly about three of the best-known alternatives to the "big" user distros.

Halloween came and went last week, and we have yet to hear from anyone who wore a Tux costume. Sigh -- looks like we'll have to wait another year. Generating much more excitement than the spooky Linuxy possibilities, it seems, was the grand landing of Intrepid Ibex, which caused a veritable flurry of reviews, comparisons and general Ubuntu-related discussion.

Ubuntu fans rejoice, the latest release is upon us in the form of version 8.10, Intrepid Ibex. But can't you just run a software update in Hardy Heron? I'll tell you what's different down to the package level between an upgraded Hardy installation and a fresh Intrepid installation so you can evaluate for yourself.