Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Cynthia, the daughter of my friend Sue, has cerebral palsy and uses a small touchscreen with picture icons to speak. Sue explained that this is a costly piece of equipment at $6,000, with a $400 fee when it needs service - expenses that many middle-class families with special needs children in even the developed world cannot afford. I had just received my OLPC through the Give One Get One program and had a sense of curious excitement about this new platform, and little idea of the possibilities. "Hi Matt, what's that thing?" asked Sue. The green laptop had caught her eye. After I explained, she immediately thought, “Could this help my daughter?”

Over the past month, two things struck me as indicative of our current time in space, and both are related to the availability of technology. I live and work in Washington, DC, where we have had issues with the homeless in the past. This has lead to a number of laws and a certain cynicism about their presence. But lately I have noticed fewer of them. At first I simply thought it was the natural cycle. We got cold quickly this year and that tends to drive them indoors. Then I thought it might have something to do with the inauguration and a cleaning up of the city so that it will look good for the camera. But I was accosted the other day, and I began to think that it might be in reaction to technology.

Perhaps you're tired of getting beat up by malware, high prices, lack of interoperability, and poor performance. Maybe you're intrigued by the idea of software that is open, friendly, and that doesn't treat customers like criminals. Maybe you're just curious. Whatever your reasons for wanting to give Ubuntu Linux a try, Eric Geier shows you several easy ways to give this polished, powerful system a test drive. You don't even have to install it to your hard drive.

Once upon a time, there was a little company named SCO that lived in the town of Unix. Now, one day SCO went into the woods. And, horrors, it ran back into town shouting that that the big, bad wolves--IBM, Red Hat, and Novell--had attacked it with their big nasty Linux penguin buddy, Tux the Destroyer! And-oh no!--they had stolen SCO's picnic basket of Unix intellectual property goodies.

Once again, a federal judge has ruled that SCO owes Novell over $2.5m, insisting that the Utah shell-of-a-software-company was unjustly enriched by a 2003 licensing agreement with Sun Microsystems. On Thursday, as reported by Groklaw, judge Dale Kimball issued his final judgment (PDF warning) in the seemingly-endless legal face-off between SCO and Novell. The judgment kills SCO's attempt to waive certain claims and then resurrect them on appeal, and it reiterates a July ruling that SCO must pay Novell $2,547,817 (plus interest) for unilaterally agreeing to amend Sun's license for the Unix SVRX copyrights. Interest exceeds $900,000.

When Maine State Employees Association SEIU Local 1989 needed software to safeguard confidential information and ward off online threats, it found an open source solution. The labor union, which represents more than 15,000 public and private sector workers throughout the State of Maine, chose Untangle's open source Gateway platform, a solution that not only helps keep confidential data away from prying eyes, but also protects against spam, spyware, phishing, and viruses.

Migrating from high-end Unix-based systems to commodity x86/Linux platforms has been a popular idea for the last few years, at least in theory. But it turns out that not everyone thinks going full-on with Linux is the best solution -- at least not yet. Dan Blanchard, vice president of enterprise operations at Marriott International Inc., is serious about Linux. He says his company's transition from HP-UX and IBM AIX is ongoing -- and inevitable. "We're migrating and we have a strategy to continue deployment of Linux," he says. "A 100% transition will take place over several years and will be completed as technology is refreshed and as other opportunities arise."

Corporate America is increasingly leaving computing to the experts. Why go to the trouble and expense of building and managing complex systems to handle your spiraling data-crunching needs when another company can do it for you? And who better, faster, or cheaper than Google? That's just the kind of conventional wisdom Debra Chrapaty wants to change. As Microsoft's vice-president for Global Foundation Services, Chrapaty wants to prove that her company is no less capable of running the sprawling data centers to offer software doled out via the Internet. The company is especially keen to handle the ubiquitous Microsoft software that consumers and corporations have been running for themselves for the past few decades. "Google has done a great job of hyping" its prowess, Chrapaty says. "But we're neck and neck with them."

As so many wise persons say, migrating from Windows on your computer desktop to Linux is all about having the right applications. Eric Geier introduces KompoZer as a good option for users wanting to find a Microsoft FrontPage replacement.

An online web directory that tracks pages about installing Linux on specific laptops and notebooks says the Internet now has over 8,000 such pages. And, according to Werner Heuser's TuxMobil.org site, the number of online Linux guides has been "rapidly increasing" during the current year.

Standards-based technologies are rapidly being adopted by the telecommunications industry, and for good reason. Using standards-based solutions allows telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software systems across multiple network elements - speeding time-to-market, saving money, and freeing up key resources to focus on competitive differentiation. Equally important, the adoption of standards-based elements enables new and emerging hardware to plug into an existing network infrastructure without extensive retooling and associated costs. It also encourages use of best-of-breed technologies without imposing vendor lock-in.

The Bash Debugger Project (bashdb) lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, perform a backtrace, and step through a bash script line by line. In other words, it provides the features you expect in a C/C++ debugger to anyone programming a bash script. To see if your standard bash executable has bashdb support, execute the command shown below; if you are not taken to a bashdb prompt then you'll have to install bashdb yourself.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. believes that its new partnership with Japanese computer manufacturer Fujitsu Ld. could accelerate migration from Unix to Linux for mission-critical applications in Japan and ultimately in the U.S. But industry analysts said this is nothing new for the industry and expressed doubt that the move will have a global impact. Red Hat and Fujitsu have extended Long Term Support from seven to 10 years and committed to faster support response times. Under this program, the two vendors will extend the bug fix support periods for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and offer emergency assistance within 24 hours, Tier 1 aid within a half-hour and Tier 4 help for less severe problems within four hours. The program specifically applies to environments running RHEL on Fujitsu Primequest and Primergy servers.

In the real estate world, the mantra is location, location, location. In the network and server administration world, the mantra is visibility, visibility, visibility. If you don't know what your network and servers are doing at every second of the day, you're flying blind. Sooner or later, you're going to meet with disaster. Fortunately, there are a plethora of good tools, both commercial and open source, that can shine much-needed light into your environment. Because good and free always beats good and costly, I've compiled a list of my favorite open source tools that prove their worth day in and day out in networks of any size. From network and server monitoring to trending, graphing, and even switch and router configuration backups, these utilities will see you through.

The practice of law is a knowledge, information, and document-intensive profession. In many respects, lawyers ply their trade in the same way independent programmers do: we sell our expertise, experience and technical skill in using what is, essentially, the aboriginal “open” source code — the code of laws and courtroom procedure. In 2004, after practicing law for 23 years in a mid-sized downtown Seattle law firm, I opened my own boutique law practice and I decided to make GNU/Linux the centerpiece of a completely free/open software law firm environment.

The biggest news of the week was the final decision in the case of SCO vs. Novell in a Utah court. LXer.com summed it up this way: "Novell Wins, SCO Loses." In other news, big box retailers across the United States stocked their shelves with netbooks preloaded with Linux in time for Black Friday, the day after the American Thanksgiving holiday and traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Target and Best Buy stores displayed the ASUS Eee PC 900a for US$299 this week. Other netbooks with prices as low as US$199 are expected on shelves by Friday. In the news section, Paul Frields challenges the often-made claims that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution; openSUSE announces Zypper 1.0 and plans for Zypper 2, Gentoo Linux summarises the Gentoo Council functions and activities, sidux celebrates its second birthday, and Shift Linux announces a major shift in the direction of its Ubuntu-based distribution. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the new editor of DistroWatch Weekly is Chris Smart of the Kororaa and MakeTheMove.net fame.

I recognized I was mistaken when I thought my multiple, parallel div columns matched heights. I knew too well it was the background color of my base div hid the failure as the columns changed heights. However, it was more than simple inertia delayed efforts my correcting this too visible flaw in the menu pages. A myriad of other perplexing issues monopolized my attention. Moreover, I thought I had simple solutions stored on my system utilizing seemingly very straight forward javascript code. Furthermore, the problem of matching column heights seemed to be a well understood problem with its solution documented. Or so I thought, until my browser crashed losing all the code samples, irretrievably. I soon learned the solution was not so simple. I ended up developing my own code. Oh yes, welcome to the strange world of Javascript.

Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they're more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding spreadsheet data easier.

Businesses everywhere are looking to cut costs in the grip of reduced consumer spending, decreased advertising and a general slowdown of trade. Linux can aid you in cutting your infrastructure costs - no matter your platform of choice.

What's involved in a switch from Windows to Linux? An editor and a couple of readers posed that question after last week's column. Given the proliferation of cheap Linux-based "netbooks" it is worth a systematic look. For newbies, the more stand-alone, Internet-oriented your computing, the more likely you are to find Linux a good substitute for other operating systems. That's because your interaction with the Net is mediated by a browser and e-mail program, making the operating system less relevant. Conversely, if you're in an institutional Windows-based environment, you may find it difficult to make the transition.