Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The final version of OpenOffice.org 3, the open source competitor to Microsoft Office, came out two weeks ago and looks better than ever. I've been using its predecessors for years and, broadly speaking, OO3 is the most useful, widely compatible software ever. You can run it on anything: Macs, PCs, Linux, Unix workstations.

In January, Hewlett-Packard will introduce a glossy black mini-laptop at retail for a mere $379. When it does, it will become the first major computer maker this decade (besides Apple, of course) to push a non-Windows PC in stores. This Linux-based version of the HP Mini 1000 will not slay Microsoft (MSFT) Windows. But it will add to a growing sense that the iconic operating system’s best days are behind it.

Struggling wireless phone maker Motorola will cut more jobs and focus on designing handheld devices that run Google's new open source Android operating system. The company will pare down the number of operating systems for which it currently creates mobile phones to just three: Android, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Motorola's proprietary P2K platform.

In today's installment of the classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting guides us through the vital innards of OSPF, the Open Shortest Path First routing protocol: LSAs (Link-State Advertisements), packet types, and area types. Knowing these things ensures you will always understand your routing infrastructure, and never make daft mistakes.

Yesterday we took a look at BashDiff, a patch for the bash shell that adds new capabilities. We've already looked at some of the additions that BashDiff makes to bash's commands and string parsing abilities. Today we'll look at modifying positional parameters, parsing XML, talking to ISAM and relational databases, creating GTK+2 GUIs, and a few other tricks and issues.

Five of the top 10 most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch use the Debian package system. It has developed a rich infrastructure of utilities -- not just the core commands apt-get and dpkg, but also such less well-known commands as apt-cache, apt-spy, and apt-listbugs. In addition, an array of other scripts, some mashups of existing utilities, and some original, are regularly available on sites like openDesktop.org. Such scripts help to streamline the process of keeping a Debian-based package system in working order, and provide information to help you make better decisions about software installation.

In today's installment of the classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting guides us through the vital innards of OSPF, the Open Shortest Path First routing protocol: LSAs (Link-State Advertisements), packet types, and area types. Knowing these things ensures you will always understand your routing infrastructure, and never make daft mistakes.

Windows Vista gets a bad rap for its hefty hardware requirements, but it's not alone. Apple's MacOS X platform has left a lot of Macs with PowerPC G3, G4 and G5 chips out in the cold. However, Linux isn't just for the Intel set; here’s how Ubuntu to can bring new life to your old Mac too.

Sun's recently released VirtualBox 2 is one of the best virtualization applications for desktop users. It's available in two wallet-friendly flavors, with a few extra features in the closed-source variant. The software sports a nice graphical user interface, but few users realize that it can also be completely controlled via a powerful command-line interface.

When you think about portable gaming gadgets, it's hard to rattle off a hefty list of possibilities. They mostly follow a path of heavy marketing -- the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable are heavily advertised, and their sales are strong. But some hardcore gamers have become attracted to devices exclusively designed and marketed for homebrew or do-it-yourself applications.

Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) in cooperation with Nepal's national Department of Education, launched a pilot-program to integrate OLPC XO laptops in regular school classes at two rural sites in April 2008. OLE Nepal is one of the first organisations to do this kind of laptop deployment, and so it comes across a lot of problems for which there's just no guiding light that you can just follow. How do you make suitable educational software? How does the hardware hold out under these conditions? How do you prepare teachers that themselves often don't have any experience with computers?

Just a few more days. Yes, the U.S. presidential election is a mere week away, but there's another countdown going on. Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition, the Intrepid Ibex release, is set to go live on Thursday. The beta has excited both users and potential users of the popular distro because of its rich mobility functionality, including 3G support.

They're back! John Van Ostrand and his gang of idealists put on another great money-losing all-volunteer effort to get Linux users and developers to connect in Toronto last weekend. An estimated 250 people attended the one-day Ontario Linux Fest at the Days Hotel near Toronto's major airport. Among the 27 sessions were keynotes from Jeremy Allison of Samba fame and numerous interesting sessions on everything from Nintendo Wiimote integration in X to an introduction to a group called Geekcorps that seeks to bring usable computers and the Internet to rural West Africa.

The Yahoo-owned open source messaging software firm Zimbra announced Tuesday that it's taking its act into the cloud. Universities and other educational institutions can now access the Zimbra Collaboration Suite via Yahoo's worldwide infrastructure. Formerly, Zimbra was managed by users on-premise; however, now they can choose a delivery method.

New Linux users may be content with automatic updates and the package information shown by desktop tools, but more experienced users are generally more cautious and demanding. Experienced users, for instance, may want to assess the risk of an upgrade by studying its dependencies before they begin, or to overcome a package conflict by using versions from an older repository. Because of Debian's long history of providing for advanced users, this sort of information is available from several different sources -- from the apt-cache command, from distribution Web sites, and, in Ubuntu, with the new Ubuntu Simple Package Crawler. Unfortunately, no single source has all the features you are likely to want.

Open standards are critical in ensuring that the South African government both avoids vendor lock-in and promotes democracy. This is according to South Africa’s minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. In a prepared speech for the opening of the recent Second International ODF conference in Pretoria, Mapisa-Nqakula said that the department of home affairs was “forging ahead to make open standards a priority” to ensure future ability to process and share documents “using formats which have significant impact on the efficiency, interoperability and accessibility of public services”.

This is a series about the Linux OS on netbooks, but we need to remind ourselves that these devices aren't personal computers. The personal computer is a machine you work on. Netbooks are essentially machines you work through, out into the Cloud. It shouldn't matter what the operating system is. Or the hardware. Ideally, all your apps and your data are 'out there' in the Cloud, independent of any hardware or software you might use to access them. But design goals seldom accurately second guess the actual use to which things like these are put. We are treating these netbooks as low-cost PC - we are messing with the operating system and expecting to tailor them to our individual requirements.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and a group of human rights and public interest organizations plan to introduce Wednesday a global code of conduct that they say will better protect online free speech and privacy against government intrusion.

In the past five years, the mettle of mobile Linux has been tested -- and it has deservedly earned a shining new reputation as a real technology of choice -- an embedded operating system and a flexible platform for truly open innovation. Linux has even gained the status of the de facto operating system for the growing Mobile Internet Device market.

Burning discs reliably ceased to be an area of concern for Linux a long time ago, thanks to tools such as K3b and GnomeBaker. Another tool, AcetoneISO2, aims to be the Swiss army knife at managing disc images. This utility can convert many different image formats, such as .nrg, .bin, and .img, to ISO, and can generate, compress, encrypt, extract, and mount ISO images. It can also mount Mac OS *.dmg files as images, rip DVDs to Xvid AVI files, split and merge images, and more.