Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The week-long Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) meets every six months at changing locations to discuss what will be in the next release of Ubuntu. The mostly unpublicized FOSScamp always meets the weekend before. The FOSScamp un-conference has no program, no invited speakers, and costs nothing. Like some sort of geek Woodstock but smaller, the Ubuntu hip just show up.

If you're using SSH or SFTP and lot, you're probably already thinking that scripting your sessions would save you a lot of time. Jeremy M. Jones shows how you can get up and running with your own custom scripts in no time using Python and the paramiko library, which gives you a nice streamlined interface to build your scripts with.

Pulse is a build server that can monitor your source repository and trigger a build and test cycle every time somebody does a commit. With Pulse you will always know if the most recent sources in your revision control system compile and if they pass your unit and system tests. Better yet, Pulse allows you to build and test your current working copy of checked-out source, during a so-called Personal Build, so you can see if your code breaks things before you commit your changes to the central repository.

Dick Hardt, known for his contentious Windows port of the Perl programming language and current work on online identity management (dubbed "identity 2.0") has revealed he is heading to Redmond.

Today I would like to announce that Sander Marechal has been promoted to 'Senior Technology Editor' from Editor. In his time here Sander has become our resident 'expert' of sorts, his knowledge having been put to the test and proved invaluable in helping and giving technical advice in our forums everyday. Again, please join me in congratulating Sander on his most deserved Promotion.

Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed. The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say. Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.

It's approaching five years since Phoronix was conceived and in that time we have published 1,300 featured articles (many of them can be found here) and thousands of news postings that relate to using computer hardware -- both desktop and server related -- on Linux. A vast majority of these articles have been about computer components like motherboards, graphics cards, and processors, but very few have been about retail PCs that consumers can easily buy in stores or on the Internet...

Adobe Systems is learning the challenges and complexities of taking its software open source. Just a year and a half after Adobe released its Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to encourage developer buy in, it's the company - not the community - that continues to shoulder the burden of building and fixing Flex.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Today we'll learn how to pinpoint connectivity problems and how to map your network and all running services. This is handy not only for keeping tabs on everyday activities, but also to catch users running illicit hosts and services.

If I ask "How much do you know about Google?" You may not take even a second to respond. But if I may ask "How much does Google know about you"? You may instantly reply "Wait... what!? Do they!?" The book "Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You" by Greg Conti (Computer Science Professor at West Point) is the first book to reveal how Google's vast information stockpiles could be used against you or your business - and what you can do to protect yourself.

Properly speaking, Nadav Rotem's Open Text Summarizer (OTS) is not a summarizer at all. True summaries generally involve rewording contents at a higher level of generality while preserving the meaning, not just producing a condensed version of the original the way that OTS does. However, within its limits, OTS is an efficient tool for automatically producing abstracts of non-fiction, that, in the last 15 months, has received favorable mention from at least four academic publications, including one in which it outperformed similar utilities, including commercial ones such as Copernic and Subject Search Summarizer.

Presentation software isn't complicated compared to a word processor or spreadsheet. It doesn't need to be. Maybe that's why OpenOffice.org's Impress offers a variety of views of your work.

Scott Ritchie, an Ubuntu MOTU, has proposed that WINE be moved into Ubuntu's Main repository thereby making it shipping with Ubuntu by default in some form. This proposal is coming after he and several Ubuntu developers had discussed this idea last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. What he is proposing is that by default on new installations of Ubuntu, when clicking on an Windows executable file to come up with some prompt informing them of the possible actions, and then to setup WINE by default.

Based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, Linux 2.6.27, Gnome 2.24 and Xorg 7.4, Linux Mint 6 "Felicia" comes with a brand new "Software Manager", FTP support in mintUpload, proxy support and history of updates in mintUpdate, mint4win (a Linux Mint installer for Microsoft Windows), tabbed browsing in Nautilus and a lot of other improvements.

The release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 delivers a lot of improvements: more user-friendliness, full tables support in Impress, a better cropping tool in Draw, vastly improved Notes in Writer, Calc gets more muscle, and more, as Eric Geier reports.

Although Google's Chrome browser and its Chromium open source twin were launched as open source projects, no one outside Google has had the ability to modify the source code repository, without it going through a Google employee. That changed on Friday when Pawe? Hajdan Jr. joined the committers of Chromium, the first non-Google person to be granted the privilege.

All good things must come to an end. It is with great sadness that the editors and I have decided, at least for the time being, to cease my monthly columns for Linux Magazine, due to my extremely busy schedule and other commitments. I have enjoyed and been enriched by my relationship and friendship with Adam Goodman, who as Publisher gave me a wide berth to write about whatever I wanted and to “Loom Large” at trade shows and intimidate vendors — as long as I handed in my articles on time and didn’t give the editors who had the pleasure of reading through my ramblings too much grief and work at cleaning it up.

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.