Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Imagine a world without Linux. There'd be no cute Tux penguin or any notion of software freedom day. Netbooks would not have come about. But more strikingly, there wouldn't be the modern powerful tools that Windows systems administrators have come to love. That's right; Linux is keeping Microsoft honest and I'm going to expose the new Windows Small Business Server for what it is, along with those who resell it.

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) support, integrated with Pentaho’s Data Integration and Data Mining modules. PMML support from Pentaho can provide interoperability or migration alternatives for end user organizations that have traditionally been subject to the extremely high acquisition and maintenance costs of traditional, proprietary analytical and data mining platforms from companies like SAS Institute, SPSS, and Microstrategy. Now those organizations can take advantage of the cost benefits of commercial open source BI from Pentaho, while reusing their existing investments and providing continuity in their deployments.

In part two of this series, Akkana Peck takes us on a solar system tour via XEphem. We'll visit the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and learn how to get detailed information on thousands of far-away objects, and travel in time, both past and future.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn't like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature.

Red Flag is China's biggest Linux supplier. The Red Flag Linux distribution is based on Red Hat Linux. Red Flag recently announced the release of a beta edition of Red Flag Linux 7, called "Olympic Edition." While it contains the expected bugs of a beta system, it also gives us an opportunity to preview the next release of Red Flag. What I saw didn't blow me away.

Loosely speaking, in software terms, a wrapper is something that provides an alternate interface to another object. SMPlayer is an advanced multimedia player wrapped around MPlayer that provides a friendlier and more powerful front end to the underlying application. SMPlayer can play practically anything -- you can watch DVDs and VCDs, stream videos from a URL, or play audio CDs or MP3s. SMPlayer version 0.6.2 was released last month, and is licensed under the GPLv2. It is written using the Qt libraries (as most of KDE is; this practically ensures good integration with the KDE desktop) and thus can be used not only under Linux, but with Windows too.

Don't forget to pre-register for the coolest Linux event in the MidWest!

Virtual worlds come in all shapes and sizes, says Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming for Dallas-based research firm Parks Associates. Virtual worlds can be categorized by graphics type (2D, 2.5D, 3D), applications (enterprise worlds, social worlds, entertainment worlds, gaming worlds), and by demographics (adult worlds, teen worlds).

If you've ever looked in your /etc/fstab file, you have may have seen an entry that looks like UUID=62fa5eac-3df4-448d-a576-916dd5b432f2 instead of a more familiar disk drive designation, such as /dev/hda1. Such entries are called universally unique identifiers (UUID). You can use these 128-bit numbers to make hard disk management easier.

The SCHED_FIFO scheduling class is a longstanding, POSIX-specified realtime feature. Processes in this class are given the CPU for as long as they want it, subject only to the needs of higher-priority realtime processes. If there are two SCHED_FIFO processes with the same priority contending for the CPU, the process which is currently running will continue to do so until it decides to give the processor up. SCHED_FIFO is thus useful for realtime applications where one wants to know, with great assurance, that the highest-priority process on the system will have full access to the processor for as long as it needs it.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has failed spell out to the markets the precise cause of Monday’s catastrophic seven hour trading outage. The exchange carried out a series of upgrades and tests last weekend, but all LSE representatives are saying is that “there was a combination of software activities that coincided”, and these had caused the problem. The stock exchange has reiterated that the fault was not due to an upgrade on its high-speed trading platform TradElect.

Back in May when OLPC announced the XO-2 the organization also indicated that an XO-1.5 would be released in spring 2009. To date the only official information regarding the XO 1.5 is that it's supposed to have fewer physical parts and cost less than the XO-1.

GNOME enthusiasts have a couple of good options when it comes to searching, launching, and otherwise manipulating and accessing files, applications, and information right from the desktop: GNOME-Do, and the GNOME Deskbar applet. GNOME-Do is a desktop search and application-launching applet similar to the now-defunct GNOME Launchbox. It's inspired by Quicksilver, an applet for Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Do was built for the GNOME desktop but also runs on KDE. Developers call Do an "intelligent launcher tool" because it uses predictive technology to guess what you want to do when you start typing the first few letters of the name of an application, file, or contact.

In recent years, Linux distributions have successfully made the transition from being the exclusive domain of technical users to being suitable for even brand new computer users. However, unlike with proprietary software and operating systems, GNU/Linux is built mainly on the efforts of users who volunteer their time and expertise to write programs. The result is that the success of free and open source software (FOSS) depends on feedback and contributions from its users. New users, or users without programming skills, may not understand how to contribute, or even see the need for contributions. But non-programmers can contribute a great deal to FOSS projects, benefiting not only other users but also themselves in the process. Even you can help.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to release the code for its open-source server virtualization software Wednesday, and will make a commercial version of the xVM Server available next month. XVM Server can virtualize Windows, Linux and Sun's own Solaris operating system on x86 hardware from such vendors as Sun, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM and Dell Inc., said Steve Wilson, Sun's xVM vice president. Previously, Sun's server virtualization strategy focused on its own operating system and the Sparc chip set, he said.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Black Duck Software has joined as a Foundation member. Black Duck provides solutions for software development teams and legal counsel to manage the hybrid software development process, which involves the assembly of internal software, open source software and other third-party code.

Linden Lab, creator of the online virtual space Second Life, recognized the accomplishments of outstanding individuals in its open source community this week at its Linden Lab Innovation Awards. Seven winners were announced at a "mixed reality" ceremony held both at a convention center in Florida and simultaneously within the Second Life system. Linden's head of open source development Rob Lanphier emceed the awards ceremony at the Second Life Community Convention (SLCC). It was the second such annual event, initiated last year at the 2007 SLCC following the release of Second Life code as open source. A panel of six judges selected winners in five categories, with each winner receiving a "Hippo Award" prize package.

Citadel provides plenty of groupware functionality in a scalable, easy-to-deploy package. This week, learn how to manage users, set up an e-mail server and provide RSS feeds.

As the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics become more important, not only to the economy, but to our understanding of the natural world and ourselves, Linux is becoming a better platform on which to build and deploy the software scientists will rely on. A few groups have even gone so far as to create entire distributions geared for computational biology, such as BioBrew and Debian-Med. One of the more prominent comes from Oxford's National Environmental Research Council's (NERC) Environmental Bioinformatics Centre (NEBC). Bio-Linux does not sell itself as your average distribution, but it does not measure up to an average distribution either.

It has been a couple of weeks since Akademy 2008 finished. KDE's contributors are now back home, more enthusiastic than ever about our future. If you missed the talks videos are now online. This article covers what happened during the week and outlines some of the results.