Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Like Firefox, the open source media player Songbird is a pretty neat alternative to a big-name competitor on its own, but the ability to extend it through add-ons is what really makes it boss. We considered the release candidate of the potential "iTunes killer"—Songbird a sloppy mess, then backed up a bit when it's 1.0 release was official. Now we're geeked to show you a few add-ons that make Songbird a great place to organize your MP3s, iTunes purchases, iPods, and whatever else you listen to.

Those with doctorates in artificial intelligence are never the best stewards of houseplants. Programmer Bryan Horling says he's killed whole swaths of greenery inside and outside his rural western Massachusetts home. But at least one plant will survive, thanks to a computer-controlled plant watering system -- a simple network of plastic tubing and an aquarium pump to keep the Wandering Jew plant in his living room alive.

Users of all current versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer browser might be vulnerable to having their computers hijacked because of a serious security hole in the software that had yet to be fixed Monday. The flaw lets criminals commandeer victims' machines merely by tricking them into visiting Web sites tainted with malicious programming code. As many as 10,000 sites have been compromised since last week to exploit the browser flaw, according to antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc.

openSUSE 11.1, the next major version of the company's community-driven Linux distribution, is scheduled for release on December 18. The new version will include updated software and some important new features that enhance the quality of the distribution. OpenSUSE 11.1 installation media is available in several different formats. There are installable Live CD images for both GNOME and KDE. Each one provides a complete stack with the major components of its respective desktop environment. There is also a conventional DVD installer image that includes packages for both desktop environments and a significant number of other popular programs.

Jeremy Allison's contributions to the free software world are legion, and yet the project he's best known for continues to be Samba, the open implementation of some of Microsoft's most important networking protocols. Linux Format magazine asked him about KDE, NAS, LSB, DCs and other acronyms, and now his answers are here for your TLA titillation…

Originally begun to investigate the possibility of extending the useful life of legacy IT equipment, the Linux Terminal Server Project is now a comprehensive collection of tools for running driveless thin clients with a Linux server. Certainly in its current version 5, if not before, it has blossomed into an useful – and free – terminal/server solution.

Red Hat on Monday is giving away 5,000 JBoss Developer Studio subscriptions to Java developers in six territories in the Asia-Pacific region. The program will run in China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Hong Kong, targeted at independent Java developers and those from small and midsize businesses (SMBs), said the open source vendor, in an e-mailed response to ZDNet Asia.

HP said last week that it will offer Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop to business and education customers. Suse's desktop software will be carried on the HP Compaq dc5850. The desktop will be available in the United States from 15 December, for US$519. A spokeperson for HP said that the OS is only being pre-loaded in the US and "there are no current plans to introduce this in the Unite Kingdom".

All WordPress site owners have their own list of "must have" plugins. Is one or more of these administration and security add-ons among yours? Each adds valuable functions to WordPress, and is simple to configure and use.

In this interview we talk with Warren. In specific, we talk about: The origins of SimplyMEPIS, Ubuntu’s role in the larger community, differences among distros from a developer perspective, corporate use of free versus for-fee Linux, the Linux desktop and the future of client-side Linux and future directions of note: IPv6 and DNSSEC

LXer Feature: 14-Dec-2008

Hello everyone, It seems that in the search to bring the infections under control, the USB drive ban I told you about last week has been expanded to the entire military now. AbiWord 2.6.5 just hit the streets and it boasts better compatibility with Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer and Amarok 2.0 with a host of cool new stuff was released earlier in the week as well.

On the kernel page a few weeks ago, we took a look at KSM, a technique to reduce memory usage by sharing identical pages. Currently proposed for inclusion in the mainline kernel, KSM implements a potentially useful—but not particularly new—mechanism. Unfortunately, before it can be examined on its technical merits, it may run afoul of what is essentially a political problem: software patents. The basic idea behind KSM is to find memory pages that have the same contents, then arrange for one copy to be shared amongst the various users. The kernel does some of this already for things like shared libraries, but there are numerous ways for identical pages to get created that the kernel does not know about directly, thus cannot coalesce. Examples include initialized memory (at startup or in caches) from multiple copies of the same program and virtualized guests that are running the same operating system and application programs.

You want a phone that can do it all? Internet, music, photos, films, documents, texting, instant messaging, diary, contacts and ... err ... phone calls? Then a smartphone is right for you. But as the market for high-end mobiles gets ever more crowded, which should you pick? The global market leader, Symbian, makes the software that runs most of Nokia's smart phones (and a few others).

There seemed to have been little buzz generated by this announcement when it first came about, but Tungsten Graphics has been acquired by VMware. They were acquired in late November for undisclosed terms and their only news mention of this acquisition is below (from their website).

MystOnline, also known as UruLive, a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, is to be released as open source by Cyan Worlds. MystOnline has had a difficult time, originally launched and then shut down by Ubisoft before leaving three years of beta, then being purchased by GameTap, released in fourteen countries and, after a year, again shut down. This led Cyan Worlds to come to an agreement to reclaim their intellectual property and to announce a plan to relaunch the game.

For a brief moment in time, between October 2007 and April 2008, thanks to the Asus Eee PC it really did seem as if desktop Linux was finally going to have its moment in the sun. Unfortunately for the Linux crowd, however, Asus, Acer and other hardware makers realised they could sell many more netbooks if they did deals with those nasty folks in Redmond.

Viet Nam has officially become a member of Asianux, an organisation dedicated to the development of free software, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Quoc Thang has announced. He was speaking at a recent symposium on open source software (OSS) in Ha Noi, organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other agencies related to the IT sector.

Steve Jobs says Apple does not know how to make a $500 computer “that’s not a piece of junk”. Yet this article was written on a small computer that costs less than that—and barely a quarter of the price of the Apple iMac that sits on the desk beside it. Small, cheap mini-notebooks like this, or “netbooks” as they have come to be called, are not as fast or as capable as a big computer like an iMac, and in performance terms they trail behind most laptops. But they are certainly not junk, and for some people they may be the best computers money can buy.

Collaboration and interoperability are shaking up enterprise content management from the outside, but forces are also emerging from within that have the potential to reshape the market. Two companies in particular, Alfresco and SpringCM, challenge the dominant deployment model of proprietary, premises-based software. Alfresco and SpringCM attack the two major weaknesses of ECM vendors: cost and time. It's not unusual for a company to drop $1 million on ECM software and services, and Gartner says it can take six to 18 months to deploy.

Many sceptics were convinced that as free software spread out beyond hackers into the general computing sector the rigorous GNU GPL licence would gradually be replaced by more accommodating – meaning weaker – forms, since it was “obvious” that its unbending rules were too strict for widespread use. In fact, the GPL has grown in importance, until today it is probably fair to say that it underpins most of the free software world, including enterprise applications. This makes any violation of its terms particularly worrying, because if left unchallenged, it threatens to undermine the entire ecosystem.