Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In a recent independent test, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Advanced Platform trumped all other operating systems that process more than 1 million transactions per minute -- and at 22% lower cost than its next closest competitor. The San Francisco-based Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), which performs benchmark tests of database transactions, validated Red Hat's processing of 1.2 million transactions per minute on an IBM System x 3950M2 with the new Intel X7460 Xeon processor.

The tech sector is experiencing a crash -- not of stock prices, which rebounded somewhat on Wall Street on Tuesday -- but in its ability to take new companies public. So far this year, there have been just six venture-backed initial public offerings; last year, there were 86, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The recent collapse of investment banks Lehman Brothers Holdings and Bear Stearns Cos. is exacerbating the problem.

Online office suites are attractive for organizations with modest document processing needs, especially due to their low cost (read: free). But if you don't like the idea of storing your documents outside your network, try OpenGoo. It's an online office suite that installs on your local network and allows users to collaborate with others both inside and outside the network. The open source software, still under active development, is an easy to install and use, and if it's not quite ready for real-world large-scale deployment, it's getting there fast.

ICANN, IANA, IETF, ISOC, IAB, IRTF, SRS, NSI, RIR, NSO-- who or what are these, and what do they have to with what you can do with the Internet? Charlie Schluting explains the roles of the many organizations and governing bodies that operate behind the scenes.

The Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) is a new tool from Ubuntu whose goal is to make configuration of the built-in Linux packet filter less complicated and more secure for novice users. You must run UFW commands as root, so in Ubuntu, you must preface them with the sudo command. With UFW, enabling and disabling packet filtering is a simple matter of issuing the sudo ufw enable and sudo ufw disable commands. You set the default policy for filtering packets by running the sudo ufw default command and passing the allow or deny argument, depending on what you want to achieve. If you issue the sudo ufw default allow command, all incoming packets will be allowed by default, creating a very unsecure packet filter but giving you the broadest range of allowed services. The command sudo ufw default deny will block all incoming packets, requiring that you allow specific services to pass the packet filter.

The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was held September 15 and 16 in Portland, Oregon, immediately prior to the Linux Plumbers Conference. At this invitation-only meeting, some 80 developers discussed a number of issues relevant to the kernel and its future development. The following reports were written by Jonathan Corbet, who attended the event and was a member of its program committee.

It is coming out a bit late, but the beta release for the upcoming Fedora 10 release (codenamed Cambridge) is now available. It has been almost two months since the last test release and a lot of work has been accomplished when it comes to the new and exciting innovations found within this Red Hat distribution.

Both One Laptop Per Child and Intel are now moving into million-unit sales numbers for their respective 4P Computers, the XO laptop and the Classmate PC. Last week, the Economic Times reported that OLPC is looking to sell 1 million XO laptops in India for $300 each. But this would not be to the Indian government, which alternates between calling the XO "pedagogically suspect" and attempting its own "$10 laptop". OLPC is looking to India's wealthily elite to fund educational empowerment through an Indian Give Many + Give One Get One:

As I listen to all this talk of lack of trust in the banking system, of inflated values ungrounded in any reality, of “opacity”, and of “contaminated” financial instruments, I realise I have heard all this before. In the world of software, as in the world of finance, there is contamination by overvalued, ungrounded offerings that have led to systemic mistrust, sapped the ability of the computer industry to create real value, and led it to squander vast amounts of time and money on the pursuit of the illusory, insubstantial wealth that is known as “intellectual property”.

Bluefish is a GUI-based text and code editor that runs on "most (maybe all?) POSIX compatible operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, Ma cOS X, OpenBSD, and Solaris." It has an impressive feature list, and is both lightweight and speedy. It is not currently under heavy development primarily because it is a mature program that already does exactly what it is supposed to do with no fuss or complaint.

Open Source is emerging for the first time as a central theme at the CeBIT 2009 conference. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizers and the Linux Foundation, is now encouraging Open Source projects to bid for free booths at the conference. CeBIT 2009, the largest global IT trade show opens March 3-8 in Hannover, Germany. For the first time Open Source becomes a central theme. Without these projects free software would be unthinkable, therefore not only will industries take part, but free projects will have the opportunity to share their work with the larger public. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizer Deutsche Messe AG, is therefore seeking out projects that wish to present their work publicly at CeBIT Open Source.

"Where does all my money go?" If you want to know the exact answer to that question, you need HomeBank, a personal finance manager that can help you keep track of your income and expenses with consummate ease. HomeBank started its life in 1995 on the Amiga platform, so it has had plenty of time to mature and become a first-rate application. Today, you can find HomeBank in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. While HomeBank may be less well-known than alternatives such as GnuCash, KMyMoney, or Grisbi, it is the preferred personal finance manager of several lightweight distros such as Puppy Linux and SliTaz due to its small size and simplicity.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, says technologies such as Linux and open-source software can help enterprises cut costs during tough economic times. Zemlin says users should look to open source and Linux, systems management tools, and virtualization technology to keep budgets in line. In lean times, look for technologies such as Linux and open source to do well. The current financial crisis may just be one of those times.

Unless you have fully embraced the virtualization movement, you probably have more than one machine in your home or office, particularly if you run more than one operating system, and you probably have more than one keyboard and mouse on you desk. If you would like to regain some desk space without having to purchase a KVM switch, x2x may be the solution. Simply put, x2x takes advantage of the X Window System's ability to run a display over a TCP/IP network. In this case, you are not running a display as much as you are taking charge of another display's mouse and keyboard.

Open source adoption is growing rapidly, but adopters in U.S. are lagging behind European enthusiasm, according to software provider OpenLogic. OpenLogic announced Tuesday it has discovered more than 300,000 open source package and project installations in use around the world through its Open Source Census. OpenLogic initiated the global survey last December.

In this ENP classic, learn how to colorize and test your Bash prompt, run your own local timeserver, deliver customized MOTDs that change, and create elegant ASCII art. Carla Schroder shows you how to do all these things the easy way.

After holding an invitation-only conference for key open-source developers and community members in each of the past two years, the Linux Foundation is expanding its events schedule to add a conference focused on a broader attendee base. In an announcement today, the San Francisco-based consortium, which sets Linux standards and works to promote the use of the open-source operating system, said it will hold an event called LinuxCon next September that will be open to anyone who wants to attend.

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.

The Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora Games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram, had announced the release of Omega 10 Beta this past weekend. Omega is a desktop/mobile Linux distribution that is based upon Fedora but includes packages from the Livna RPM repository. The Omega 10 Beta release is roughly equivalent to the Fedora 10 Beta to be released tomorrow, but integrates multimedia support not found in Fedora along with delivering other added functionality.

With this installment I complete my survey of Java-based sound and music applications that run under Linux. Again I've focused mainly on production software.