Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For many, migrating to Linux is a rite of passage that equates to a thing of joy. For others, it’s a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s wonderful when it’s the former; it’s a real show stopper when it’s the latter. But that nightmare doesn’t have to happen, especially when you know, first hand, the most common mistakes new Linux administrators make. This article will help you avoid those mistakes by laying out the most typical Linux missteps.

In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're exploring how to encrypt emails using the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Here you have it. Linux running on the iPhone. Yes, it's only the first port, but it's the iPhone running the Linux OS, controlled with a USB keyboard running off the iPhone multi-purpose port thanks to the reverser engineering of Apple's hardware drivers by iPhone Dev Team member planetbeing. And while it is still limited and doen't have support for many things, this work opens the door to a much more interesting thing than just a character-based terminal: Google's Android running on the iPhone hardware.

Btrfs has received much of the limelight on Linux when talking about file-systems since it promises to compete with Sun's ZFS file-system and introduce several features not found in the commonly-used EXT3 and EXT4 file-systems. However, work on other Linux file-systems hasn't halted. EXT4 should be stable with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel and work on the Tux3 file-system continues.

n a letter written to the SEC obtained by BusinessWeek, lawyers from Facebook counsel Fenwick & West wrote that the company "anticipates that it could in the future have more than 500 holders" of restricted stock. In the 10-page letter, Facebook argued that there's no need to meet the SEC disclosure requirements, since only insiders are getting the equity, and they're not paying for it.

The main factor working against the growth of open source software in Asia has been the ready availability of pirated versions of Microsoft's software. However, open source advocates are gaining traction in places such as Nepal, where Linux is growing in popularity.

As someone who has been following Microsoft for over 25 years, I remain staggered by the completeness of the Vista fiasco. Microsoft's constant backtracking on the phasing out of Windows XP is perhaps the most evident proof of the fact that people do not want to be forced to “upgrade” to something that has been memorably described as DRM masquerading as an operating system.

I started an open source software project a couple of weeks ago, sort of. It's about as minor as something like this gets -- at least for now. But even at that scale, it's become a learning experience. The project is a page template for the Movable Type blogging platform, one which lets you crosspost recent entries to a LiveJournal account as well. I came up with it because the crossposting plugins I'd seen for Movable Type all seemed rather top-heavy, and I wanted to come up with something on my own that would let me learn about how to create such things -- and learn a little about the mechanisms involved. (Figuring out LiveJournal's posting protocol alone cost me more time than putting together the guts of the template itself.)

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative, then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn't. However, the release of the GNewSense distribution a few years ago has complicated the situation, pitting idealists against pragmatists and sending some distributions scrambling for a compromise that is unlikely to satisfy anyone. The GNewSense team was the first to point out that the Linux kernel contained proprietary firmware blobs, and that many kernel drivers depended on external proprietary blobs, and has dedicated itself to producing an operating system with all this material removed.

UNIX is being attacked by Linux from the top and bottom ends of the market. The signs are that it is losing the battle on both fronts. A couple of weeks back I wrote that Linux is becoming increasingly capable of doing the less-demanding tasks that UNIX has historically been asked to do, so there is less and less need for UNIX. That explains its falling share of the server market.

Running an open source company is not like running a proprietary company. But how different should it be? Does the difference include publicly beating your breast about mistakes both real and imagined? Sridhar Vembu is not afraid to find out. The CEO of AdventNet, creators of the Zoho online suite, has quickly become one of the industry’s biggest advocates of total transparency.

I have a confession to make. There's no software on earth I can't make dance and sing... except for photography programs. Whether it's Adobe Photoshop CS4 on a Mac or GIMP 2.6.3 on Linux, I'm a klutz. So, when I need to make my holiday photos look halfway decent, I try my best with easy to use photo programs like Photoshop Elements 7 or Google Picasa. While I'd like to see more Adobe programs, on Linux with Google's new release of Picasa 3 for Linux now here, I'm in no hurry to see Photoshop Elements on Linux.

Linux fans who have been waiting for Linux to come the iPhone and iPod Touch need wait no longer – the breakthrough has finally been made, years after Linux found its way onto earlier iPod models. There’s a way to go before the project is mature, with plenty of things, including touchscreen support, yet to come. Still - Linux on the iPhone is here, at last!

After Wayan previously compiled the extensive G1G1 2008 Buyer's Guide I thought it would make sense to follow up with a list of recommended accessories for your XO, just in time for Black Friday.

Bright and golden California summers have given way to a vivid fall landscape also bright and golden - but with a chance of rain. It's Thanksgiving in the state, and tots are already awaiting the arrival of Saint Nick, who's annual roll-out could mean a shiny iPhone if they've been good, or maybe a Zune duct-taped to a RAZR phone if they've been extremely naughty. With the holiday spirit in mind, we return to the Computer History Museum in Googleton Mountain View for a very special edition of This Old Box.

[I had never seen that one before..how far we have come.. - Scott]

The financial crisis enveloping the world will probably hit sponsorship funds for the forthcoming Australian national Linux conference, but registrations for the event, which begins on January 19, 2009, have been strong, says the man who holds the purse string.

There are fast computers, and then there are Linux fast computers. Every six months, the Top 500 organization announces "its ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications." In other words, supercomputers. And, as has been the case for years now, the fastest of the fast are Linux computers.

LinuxPlanet Classics: originally published, January 10, 2008

It's a common belief that Samba shares cannot be accessed across subnets. But actually Samba can cross subnets. It's easy for Linux hosts, and a bit less easy for Windows clients. But fear not, for we shall guide you through safely past the traps and pitfalls. In this series we'll set up a Samba server that serves two subnets, which is is a common scenario even on home networks: one wired and one wireless. Then we'll hook up a third subnet just to show how it's done. Once you know how to do that you can easily expand to as many subnets as you want. In Part 1, we'll start out with a simple anonymous file and printer server.

Students at the correspondence-based University of South Africa (Unisa) will be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided email address before they are able to receive correspondence from the university. The required email address is part of the first phase to build the MyLife portal to foster a “sense of belonging” among students, the university says. Phase two of the project will see the university encouraging students to use other “Microsoft live services such as social networking facilities … online file storage, and Office Live workspace”.

In 2004 Eric Raymond wrote an open letter to Sun Microsystems' then chief executive officer Scott McNealy demanding Sun open up their core Java intellectual property and allow anyone do whatever they damn well please with it. That other pillar of open source, and creator of the GNU Project Richard Stallman, meanwhile, became one of Java's loudest opponents - sternly advising people not to install the closed-source evil that was Java, and giving Java as a dire example of corporate lock-in. Two years later Sun silenced the the baying crowd with OpenJDK - an open-source project based on Sun's closed-JDK codebase.