Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Life just got easier for users of the downloadable or boxed retail versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 operating system who want easy and cheap ways of adding DVD playback and improved audio capabilities to their machines. Inexpensive add-on applications that will provide audio codecs and a DVD player to expand the multimedia capabilities of the four-year-old Linux operating system are now available for purchase in the Ubuntu online store.

Mark Shuttleworth is tap-dancing to work these days, he writes on his blog. Why? His Ubuntu Linux project has hired a team of "designers, user experience champions, and interaction design visionaries" tasked with the heady chore of making Linux the world's most usable operating system. After acknowledging the significance of the challenge, Shuttleworth admitted that he does not yet have all the answers. But, he said Ubuntu's new "upstream" team -- which will work separately from its "platform" team, to avoid conflicts of interest -- would focus initially on participation in the X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, GNOME, and KDE projects.

Unified Threat Management (UTM) devices unify all network security elements into a single device. They often include a combination of routing, firewall, intrusion detection, content filtering, URL filtering, spam filtering, VPN, and antivirus functionalities. These devices usually cost thousands of dollars and require subscriptions. However, you can secure your network and save money at the same time with Endian Firewall Community, a free, open source alternative to costly UTM devices. Endian Firewall Community is a Red Hat-based OS running on kernel 2.6.9-55. Endian designed this UTM with usability, flexibility, and ease of deployment in mind. It includes a stateful packet inspection firewall, an application-level proxy with antivirus support, content Web filtering, spam filtering, and VPN support that uses Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or OpenVPN. The latest version is v2.2 RC2, but it's still in the development stage. The current stable version, which I used, is 2.1.2.

Phoronix.com is the definitive Linux hardware review site, featuring articles on motherboards, processors, memory, power supplies, cases, and other components. While other sites throw a hardware review into the mix occasionally, hardware reviews are the primary focus of Phoronix.com. Phoronix founder and executive editor Michael Larabel has it down to a science -- so much so that he was able to package and released his primary tools as an open source hardware testing suite. Now it is easy for anyone to obtain reliable and repeatable benchmarks for the components in their personal computer.

Eric Geier is back with more tips and tricks on transitioning to OpenOffice.org (OOo). This tutorial continues by highlighting OOo Options you may want to change, discusses the PDF exporting feature, and shows how to overcome two vexing issues you may encounter when working with images.

One brake on the GIMP's popularity is that, while it boasts dozens of filters, a rival like Photoshop boasts thousands. You may only occasionally need a special effect that imitates a pencil sketch or a famous style of painting such as Impressionism or Cubism, but, when you do, having a filter to create the effect instantly saves serious amount of time. To help bridge this divide, the GIMP is reviving the User Filter from its 1.x releases. This filter is a kind of meta-plugin that allows users to import and manage Photoship filters or, if they have the knowledge, to write their own. The GIMP User Filter is available from the project's SourceForge.net site as source code or as a Debian package that may or may not work on Ubuntu, to judge from mailing list chatter. Once you install it, you will find it under Filter - > Generic -> User Filter.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.

Designing and building Web sites can be a maze of tasks these days. One tool that can simplify the task is the well-known Firebug extension, which lets you edit and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within Firefox. As useful as Firebug is on its own, it can actually be extended past its initial setup with additional extensions that can make your work as a developer or designer even easier.

Faithful readers of this column may remember news we reported back in early April that the next Ubuntu release had been cunningly named"Jabbering Jackass." The news came from a memo that got leaked to the Linux Loop, the story went, and it was, of course, an April Fools' Day joke -- which we knew all along.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not met requirements to provide "open source" intelligence--that is, publicly available information--for state and local law enforcement, a new report shows. The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report Friday criticizing the department after interviewing more than 350 state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials about the DHS's open source intelligence efforts.

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2008

This week's LXer Roundup is full of all kinds of good stuff, but not if your Microsoft. HP is attempting to work around the Vista GUI, an ad campaign that doesn't seem to be about anything and to top it off The London Stock Exchange went down because of a .NET crash. Also, Mark Shuttleworth says that the Linux Desktop needs a facelift, a very funny article on why you should switch from Linux to Vista. Did you know that the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built, called the "Large Hadron Collider", which when powered up could theoretically create a black hole and suck the entire Earth into it? It runs Linux.

Firefox, what's not to love about this open-source web browser? Well, a number of users following the development work on Ubuntu 8.10 (the Intrepid Ibex) are feeling rather outraged over Mozilla Firefox 3.0.2 and later. In the latest Ubuntu packages, Firefox requires an EULA (End-User License Agreement) be accepted the first time you launch the browser. The EULA mostly deals with agreeing to Mozilla's trademark policies for Firefox.

Distinct personalities in real and imagined worlds collided recently at the fourth annual Second Life convention in Tampa, Fla. That was only the beginning of the confusion for those outside Second Life, the virtual online community that is anything but confusing to those immersed in the virtual world.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure project has long been working toward improved 3D graphics support in free operating systems. It is a crucial part of the desktop Linux experience, but, thus far, DRI development has been done in a relatively isolated manner. Development process changes which have the potential to make life better for Linux users are in the works, but, sometimes, that's not the only thing that matters. The DRI project makes its home at freedesktop.org. Among other things, the project maintains a set of git repositories representing various views of the current state of DRI development (and the direct rendering manager (DRM) work in particular). This much is not unusual; most Linux kernel subsystems have their own repository at this point. The DRM repository is different, though, in that it is not based on any Linux kernel tree; it is, instead, an entirely separate line of development.

This is the ninth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part IX, we are going to talk about the menu.

I have been talking about Ubuntu for a number of articles now and how easy it is to use. In this article I will look at the next two upcoming versions and investigate what they have to offer. Ubuntu, unlike other Operating Systems which could be mentioned, strive for a predictable release schedule. They have only missed it once in eight releases and then only by two months. A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months in April and October. The naming convention is associated with the year and the month that it is released. 8.04 was released in 2008 in the 4th month, April. The previous release was 7.10 in October 2007.

With KVM Virtualisation now under their banner, Red Hat is ready to take on the other company that owns virtualisation as well as operating system technology, Microsoft. Last week, for US$107 million, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, owners of the KVM Virtualisation product. The coupling of the Linux producer with virtualisation software positions Red Hat to move into the lead as a supplier of an enterprise level virtualisation solution.

I got an e-mail this morning, tickling me to look into the idea that VMWare is violating the GPL. This idea has been around for some time and Big Money Matt has covered it beautifully. (Matt Asay’s writing is first-rate and his sources top-notch. If he ever decided to become a full-time reporter I’d hire him in a New York minute.)

Sometimes a consortium can play a smaller supportive role that is really powerful. Helping people and organizations to pull together in the same direction can accomplish amazing things. It’s very gratifying. The Linux Foundation, in concert with several well-known industry names (hint: they start with letters like I and G), has hired a key contributor to the Linux kernel development community, the system administrator for kernel.org. It’s an important position. kernel.org is crucial to the Linux kernel’s collaborative development environment. It is the actual physical space — in cyberspace — where kernel developers get their work done. Without it, nothing happens.

Pardus has been around for quite a while, but never got much attention, perhaps because its developers focus on giving people from Turkey a distribution in their native language. But Pardus is a multi-language distribution, so it can be used by many people without a Turkish background. You can install Pardus in Catalan, German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portugese and of course Turkish.