Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

What do you do when you are 20, passionate about open source and want nothing better during the long summer holidays than to be involved in activities surrounding FOSS? Why, you get involved in helping to organise a national Linux conference - which is what Tasmanian web developer Joshua Hesketh has done. He's not sure about it, but he may well be the youngest of the volunteers on the core organising team.

PC/OS aims to be an easy-to-use Linux distribution right out of the box. Being Ubuntu-based, it has a head start on being user-friendly, but PC/OS goes above and beyond Ubuntu's measures to ensure ease of use by having common third-party non-GPL software included in the install. The PC/OS distribution comes in several different flavors: OpenServer, OpenWorkstation, and OpenDesktop, all of which weigh in at around 700MB and fit on one CD. Included with the server edition are Webmin and other GUI utilities to make various server operations easier. The workstation edition includes multimedia production tools, software development tools, and office tools. I tested the desktop edition, which focuses on everyday use..

The military has always had better security than we can get on our computers, and Green Hills Software, a provider of a real-time, secure operating system called Integrity, wants to change that. To that end, the company has spun its Integrity operating system into a wholly owned subsidiary called Integrity Global Security and has set it loose with the job of becoming a kind of security abstraction layer for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guest operating systems on x64 iron.

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Open Source Working Group has released its Free and Open Source White Paper with press release here: "...Even the most skeptical interpretation of the numbers presented on Free and Open Source deployments and patients shows that these systems are being used in sizable numbers,” said Ignacio Valdes, MD, MSc the primary author of the paper and chair of the AMIA Open Source Working Group. He continues, “This paper is for practitioners, CIO's, IT staff, and policymakers making difficult health IT decisions with valid concerns about cost, ethics, interoperability, patient privacy, security and the future of their organizations in the hands of proprietary software. This white paper should be a must-read for every organization that uses or is contemplating the use of Electronic Medical Records.”

If you run Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, or Mandriva, among other distributions, then whenever you run OpenOffice.org you don't run the "official" version, but rather Go-OO, an office suite based on the OpenOffice.org source code. Go-OO includes enhancements and functions that haven't been accepted by Sun, and that may never be, because of licensing, business, or other reasons.

Microsoft is adopting technology from EMC's RSA security division for Windows to police data and prevent loss and theft of information. The companies announced Thursday Microsoft will license RSA's data loss prevention (DLP) engine for future versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and "similar" products. Microsoft would not be drawn on whether the DLP engine will be built into Office or the forthcoming Windows 7. Office would be logical move given it features the Outlook client used by Exchange and is where potentially sensitive documents can be created in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Imagine being able to charge cell phones just by shaking them....Basically, M2E makes use of the Faraday principle which states that a "moving magnet could induce an electrical current in a wire coil," to quote what's written in the M2E web site. The charger has a chamber equipped with a wire coil. Now, when the charger is moved, a magnet moves through the coil creating the energy. M2E, however, tweaked the technology so that even "subtle micro-motions" are translated into energy.

[I found this through Groklaw and after reading it I am left asking the same question PJ did; "Could this work for the OLPC XO, so kids don't have to rely on electricity to recharge batteries?" - Scott]

Developed in co-operation with Microsoft and released as open source, the OpenXML Document Viewer extension for Firefox translates Word 2007 documents saved in the Open XML format into HTML for direct display in the web browser. While fonts, formatting, images, tables, hyperlinks and diagrams can be converted, the original layout does not necessarily get preserved, as some technical elements might not translate into HTML code. The plug-in is still in its early development and currently only works with Firefox 3 for Windows and Linux. A Mac version and a plug-in for Opera are to follow by mid 2009. Surprisingly, there is currently no mention of an add-on for Internet Explorer.

Paul Ferrill takes us on a tour of Novell's Open Enterprise Server, which is built on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). OES has all the bells and whistles that modern network admins require: cross-platform interoperability, domain services, user management, migration assistance, Web-based management, and more.

IBM announced the availability of a "Microsoft alternative" virtual desktop that uses virtualization technology from Virtual Bridges and incorporates Canonical's Ubuntu Linux and IBM's Lotus applications. Based on Virtual Bridges's Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment (VERDE), the desktop environment is far more affordable than running Microsoft desktops, claims IBM.

In a long-term project, the OpenOffice team wants to thoroughly rework the free office software's user interface. This was already widely expected to happen with version 3.0, which no longer looks contemporary in many users' eyes. In addition, the office suite's menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to locate certain functions – a problem Microsoft addressed with the ribbon feature in Office 2007. Ribbons have replaced the classic menus of Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint in the latest Office, and will come to Paint and Wordpad in Windows 7.

There are a host of Linux certifications, such as the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Novell's Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE), and the Linux Professional Institute's entry-level LPIC-1. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols looks for the answer to the question, How much help are they for turning your Linux expertise into a Linux job?

Ruby on Rails is garnering a lot of praise as an easy-to-use, database-driven Web framework for developing Web applications. Most of the documentation for Ruby on Rails centers on Macintosh, with the remainder seemingly only for Windows machines, but RoR is perfectly usable on Linux computers too. This article explains how to install and begin developing with RoR in Linux.

Bashing Microsoft for being closed and proprietary has been a popular pastime in the media and the IT industry for many years, and there is no doubt that much of this has been well deserved. After having its wings clipped on several occasions by regulators, however, the Microsoft of today, while not totally reformed, is a lot more open and well behaved than it was, say, 10 years ago.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced several incremental enhancements to the compatibility of its Office Open XML document format. The enhancements came out of the Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), a working group set up in March between Microsoft and companies such as Novell, QuickOffice and Dataviz. The object of the DII was to boost the interoperability between Office Open XML (OOXML) and rival XML-based document formats such as the open-source OpenDocument Format (ODF), which was already a ratified ISO standard.

Opera released an alpha version of Opera 10 today, a first step toward the next major release of the popular cross-platform web browser. First and foremost, Opera 10 is looking to offer stiff competition with the blazing rendering engines in the upcoming Firefox release (Tracemonkey) and Google Chrome (V8) with an update to its rendering engine, Presto—which Opera claims offers a 30% speed boost over the previous version of the engine. But that's not all.

Virtual Bridges and Canonical today announced general availability of a Linux-desktop solution designed to drive significant savings compared with Microsoft-desktop software by amplifying Lotus collaboration software and Ubuntu to a larger user base through virtualization.

With the EXT4 file-system being marked as stable in the forthcoming Linux 2.6.28 kernel, and some Linux distributions potentially switching to it as an interim step until the btrfs file-system is ready, we decided it was time to benchmark this journaled file-system for ourselves. We ran a number of disk-centric Linux benchmarks along with several of our real-world tests from the Phoronix Test Suite to gauge how well the EXT4 file-system performance will be noticed by desktop users and computer gamers. We have compared these EXT4 results to the EXT3, XFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

Within the next 12 years, 40 percent of IT jobs will be related to open source, and open source-based cloud computing will be solving many problems in the real world, open source advocates have predicted.

Luc Verhaegen has announced today that the X.Org Foundation will once again have a development room at next year's FOSDEM. The Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting is taking place on the 7th and 8th of February in Brussels, Belgium.