Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google has released a new Linux version of the popular beginner-level photography program, Picasa. Picasa 3.0 for Linux (beta) adds an improved collage tool, red-eye-out, watermark support, a retouch tool, and enhanced integration with Picasa Web Albums, says the company.

The wave of cheap netbooks, mini laptops, or ultra-mobile PCs has crested with the cheapest yet, the NPX-9000 from Carapelli. Though it was announced in July with great fanfare at a price of £65 (or $110), it has yet to appear on the vendor's Web site. But we got our hands on one of the first units to escape from the factory and put it through its paces. We found that you get what you pay for -- if that. The low price for the NPX-9000 is a bit of a tease. That's actually the price for each of 100 units delivered to a plane or ship in China. If you buy it from an importer you'll see the added effect of shipping costs, import duties, and, in the EU, value-added tax (VAT), so the retail price might be almost double what was announced last summer.

It didn't take long for NetSuite to cozy up to Google. Shortly after the Web conglomerate rolled out its open source browser Chrome last month, the SaaS suite provider announced its support. Support for Chrome may prove especially intriguing for its customer base -- primarily because it is so Ajax-friendly.

FreeBSD is a Unix-like open source operating system that can trace its ancestry back to the original Unix. It's well known and well respected in the server marketplace, but until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu. I came away a little disappointed. PC-BSD offers the stability and security of FreeBSD but pitches itself as "a complete desktop operating system, which has been designed with the 'casual' computer user in mind," so from the start my expectations were high. I downloaded the CD ISOs (three in total; a single DVD version is also available) and booted a test machine. The installation is straightforward and the PC-BSD guide gives detailed installation instructions if you get stuck anywhere.

Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve? Thanks to the efforts of its supporters worldwide, ODF has become the format of the future, a truly open standard that has achieved growing popularity and support in a variety of software products, bringing to an end the era of closed formats that have kept users tied to a single vendor’s products.

The Mono Project, which develops an open source implementation of the .Net Framework, released the long-awaited 2.0 version on Monday. Mono 2.0 offers complete API compatibility with ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications, and is compatible with desktop and server components of Microsoft’s 2.0 version of its .Net Framework. Mono 2.0 lets users develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux and other operating systems. It also features the Mono Migration Analyzer, which helps determine changes applications need for .NET-to-Linux migrations, if any.

Over the past couple of days the online media has been full of stories of dissatisfied Linux netbook users returning their computers. Bloggers and journalists quickly picked up on the fact that return rates for Linux-based netbooks were apparently much higher than for Windows-based machines. It seems the origin of the story is an interview with Laptop magazine in which MSI’s Andy Tung said that the “return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks that Windows XP netbooks”. MSI is the maker of the Wind netbook.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code. It was a fun class to teach, so I'm hoping that the subject translates into interesting reading.

I respect Richard Stallman for the same reason I respect gravity. The man is a force of nature. He is like the iron core of the Earth: fixed, central, essential. So, when I read a story like "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", which ran in the Guardian last week, I take notice. And I'm not alone. A search on Google for stallman "cloud computing" brings up 142,000 results.

I have read a number of heated complaints about Ubuntu's default implementation of sudo privileges in preference to simple root access. While I have issues with some of Ubuntu's implementations and features, this is not one of my complaints. Indeed, I prefer it. I have an administrative account that has sudo rights that I do not normally use. My activities are primarily restricted to another user's account that lacks any machine administrative rights [1.]. However, I use a single command to gain full root access rights when I desire it. Perhaps those driven away from Ubuntu due to this one issue might reconsider.

Microsoft lobby platform"Voices for Innovation", which is managed by APCO (a well-known lobby firm in Brussels of which Microsoft is a client), has sent an alert to their corporate members asking them to lobby against a parliamentary resolution led by Rocard-Cotigny-Geremek-Geremek, which is asking to migrate the European Parliament systems to FLOSS, and to give some funds for R&D of FLOSS in Europe.

IBM has joined the companies jostling for position in the cloud computing space. The company has announced a variety of offerings that it claimed would allow users to better manager data and make collaboration easier. The company has opened up the beta for Bluehouse, the company's so-called Facebook for the enterprise. The software has been available in closed beta for the past nine months but is now being made available to anyone. The company said that Bluehouse would combine social networking and online collaboration tools to help organizations to share documents, contacts, engage in joint project activities, host online meetings, and build social networking communities through a Web browser.

There's never a dull moment for those of us lucky enough to be part of the technology industry, and we here at LinuxInsider are just as prone as the next tech enthusiasts to get caught up in the excitement of new innovations and ideas. Take cloud computing. It's a concept that has been grabbing an increasing portion of the digital ink on our pages and elsewhere.

CEO Rusty Harris revealed MontaVista's role developing the quick-booting, ARM-based processor subsystem expected to ship this year in select Dell laptop models. The "Latitude ON" feature aims to give enterprise laptop users instant boot-up and access to select applications, with multi-day battery lifetimes.

If there's one thing that's never affected by economic downturn, it's the mobile handset market. This phenomenon is most evident at the underground parties and dive bars in San Francisco, where it is a well known yet unspoken tradition that in any given group of hipsters, the one with the cheapest phone must always buy the first pitcher of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Everyone needs to back up their computers, but when you have machines running on different platforms and different operating systems, it can be annoying to have to learn several interfaces. Areca and plan/b are two Java-based backup solutions that can run on any platform, including Linux, Windows, and Unix. Although maintenance has been discontinued for plan/b, both apps are worth a look.

Like DD-WRT and OpenWRT, Tomato is an excellent Linux-based replacement for your stock WRT54G wireless router family firmware. Unlike DD-WRT and OpenWRT, it presents a well-organized interface that appeals to both novices and advanced users.

At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

Maintaining filesystems can be a real administration burden. Over time you might start getting multiple copies of the same file, soft links that point to files that no longer exist, temporary files that have been hanging around longer than they should, and binaries that have been installed and not had their debugging information stripped out. fslint can help you find these troublesome files so you can clean up your filesystem. Packages for fslint are available in Ubuntu Hardy universe and in the Fedora 9 repositories. There are currently no packages for openSUSE. I built it from source using version 2.28 of fslint on a 32-bit Fedora 9 machine. fslint is written in Python and uses GTK+2 and libglade2, so you'll need these and the Python bindings for them installed first.

Red Hat on Thursday introduced what it called the first fully integrated, Linux-based, high-performance-computing platform, claiming to undercut a similar Windows-based system recently introduced by Microsoft. The Red Hat HPC Solution is an update of a product of the same name that was introduced in November 2007. That product had more limited options for hardware and support, and was not available outside the United States. The new version is the first to be available directly through the Red Hat Network and to be backed by Red Hat's own international customer-support services.