Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

eBay subsidiary Skype is beta-testing a "Moblin" version of its proprietary VoIP softphone. Skype 1.0 Beta for Intel-based MIDs (mobile Internet devices) is claimed to offer excellent, free video calling, thanks to the high-performance processors and high-bandwidth 3G/4G/WiMAX wireless networking capabilities MIDs are expected to have.

Pop the hood on our new Web site and you’ll find one very powerful engine. It’s called Drupal, a free, open-source platform that powers all of our content entry. As many healthcare IT workers know, the value of open-source solutions isn't just the (lack of) price tag: it's the fact that the products are user-developed, community-tested and constantly improved. After an exhaustive evaluation process, the open-source model was the only solution that met our needs for a fast-paced, ever-adapting content management system (CMS).

LXer Feature: 09-Jan-2009

A review of my time walking around the largest technology exposition on the planet and how I barely avoided an epic fail at finding something FOSS related to write about.

Cisco is holding a contest for Linux developers as a way to familiarize them with its Network as a Platform concept. The goal is to generate applications to run on Cisco's Application Extension Platform and to create a Linux developer network.

The December holidays always hold some interesting surprises for me, and this year's season was no exception. However, in this context "interesting" can mean either "utterly engaging fascination" or "coma-inducing exasperation". This holiday season I got plenty of both.

Matt Hartley offers up some helpful tips, tools, and strategy to aid in migrating from Windows to Linux without making a big mess. Security, basic system management, and thinking like a Linux user instead of a Windows user are foundational steps to get started.

[Lookout people, its a Matt Hartley story.. - Scott]

Here is LWN's eleventh annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. As always, 2008 proved to be an interesting year, with great progress in useful software that made our systems better. Of course, there were some of the usual conflicts—patent woes, project politics, and arguments over freedom—but overall, the pace of free software progress stayed on its upwardly increasing trend. 2008 was a year that saw the end of SCO—or not—the rise of Linux-based "netbooks", multiple excellent distribution releases, more phones and embedded devices based on Linux, as well as major releases of software we will be using for years (X.org, Python, KDE, ...). We look forward to seeing what 2009—and beyond!—will bring.

The Climate Savers Computing Initiative is on the front lines of the battle against global climate change. Their mission? To convince you that saving power is good for both Mother Earth and the bottom line. The Green Penguin chats with Pat Tiernan, Climate Savers' new executive director, to see what the future holds for this green-IT organization.

SSH, the "secure shell", is the workhorse of secure remote system administration. SSH is a very strong protocol, and you can make it even stronger by using encryption keys in instead of passwords. Jeremy M. Jones shows us how.

From the 'it's not there yet' files: In my opinion, one of the greatest innovations of the Firefox 2 release was the inclusion of Tab Overflow. For the first time I could actually handle as many open browser tabs as I wanted. While Mozilla introduced Tab overflow in 2006, here we are in 2009 and Google Chrome doesn't have that feature. For someone like me that often keeps 10+ tabs open at any one time this is a (minor) problem.

Using the OORunner class that we developed last week we'll now create a Python class for converting spreadsheets into CSV files. The converter supports any type of input spreadsheet that is supported by OpenOffice.

The friendly British Bobby has just been given the right to remotely hack into the computers of UK citizens without notifying the owners, or bothering with a search warrant, or even passing an act of parliament for that matter. A few months back the Brit police proved themselves not to be too worried about the small matter of search warrants when it comes to computers, data and privacy when City of London detectives closed the investigation into BT and Phorm.

PC BIOS giant Phoenix Technologies today launched a fast-booting Linux add-on for Windows PCs. This hands-on review finds "HyperSpace" works to redress slow boot times, WiFi connection hassles, and short battery lives typical of Windows PCs, but sacrifices a lot of flexibility in order to achieve these goals.

The newly-released book "How to be a Geek Goddess" is supposed to be a helpful, not-condescending computing howto for women. Tina Gasperson, who blatantly admits to being of the female persuasion herself, isn't sure it meets these goals, and suffers from severely mixed feelings. Read Tina's review to find out if this is a must-read or a must-fling-against-the-wall.

Bloggers took a moment to contemplate the upcoming year and what it means for open source software and Linux in particular. There were some New Year's resolutions and a few holiday gifts still floating around in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Freescale's new i.MX515 processor is built for netbooks -- low-cost Linux netbooks, specifically. Working with organizations like Pegatron, Freescale has drawn up a reference design for OEMs that ties in its processor, Ubuntu Linux and Adobe Flash Lite to create a netbook that could retail for as low as $200.

The U.S. economy is bleeding jobs, but -- at least, so far -- the high-tech industry is something of a safe haven. That's not to say there haven't been tech losses or that it's easy to find an IT job. However, people with the right skill sets and the savvy to sniff out the particular areas of demand are much better positioned than professionals in some of the more-beleaguered industries.

LXer Feature: 04-Jan-2009

Welcome to the first LXer Roundup of 2009, I hope your new year was a good one. ChannelWeb has a list of what they think are the 10 Coolest Open Source products of 2008 and Phoronix has their take on the great Linux innovations of 2008. Bruce Byfield gives us his list of the seven most influential Linux distributions. I like the list overall but I think it should include Damn Small Linux.

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 7-8 February 2008. This is earlier in the month than usual. We are looking for people to give talks in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom. FOSDEM is the European meeting of free software developers, with over 4000 visitors, 200 lectures and lots of stalls to visit over a 2 day period. You can come and listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software, and meet the people behind the nicknames.

GRUB 2, the next-generation Linux boot loader, has received a new font engine. Version 2 of the GRand Unified Bootloader introduces this new font engine that's written in C and with a font tool in Java. This engine will allow for better internationalization support including non-ASCII character codes and support for multiple fonts.