Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Custom Linux provider Xandros will release a free Linux OS called"Freespire 5" during the fourth quarter of 2008. This next version of Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/Linux"Lenny" release rather than the Ubuntu Linux platform Freespire 4 uses. The move spearheads a new Xandros consolidated desktop strategy following its acquisition in July of Linspire, the developer of the CNR software distribution platform.

The usual practice of configuring your email client to retrieve email from your ISP's servers works well, but not for all situations. Suppose you add a laptop as a compliment to your desktop machine, or you'd occasionally like to use your spouse's computer to read your email -- you can run into problems trying to keep all of your email clients in sync. You can use IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) instead of POP3 (Post Office Protocol), but then you need to store all of your email on your ISP's servers indefinitely, which has its own drawbacks. Here's a way you can set up a single machine on your own network to fetch and store your email and serve it to any number of email clients.

Ubuntu founder and Canonical chief, Mark Shuttleworth, yesterday announced his ambitions for Ubuntu 9.04, now called “Jaunty Jackalope”. In an email to developers last night, Shuttleworth said: “As we approach the launch of Ubuntu 8.10, it’s time to create space for future plans, and so I’m writing to introduce you to The Jaunty Jackalope.”

The folks at One Laptop Per Child got back to me with a statement following my recent blog post on its plans to sell through online commerce giant, Amazon. It was tough to get many details on this story because the only information came from a news items briefly quoting an OLPC team member who blabbed prematurely about the Amazon deal. An OLPC spokesperson told me the group didn’t issue a press release because Amazon doesn’t announce things until they’re available at their online storefront.

A posting to the Google Groups Chrome support forum has announced the availability of an update to the Chrome browser. According to the poster, the Chrome 0.2.149.27 update fixes 'confirmed security vulnerabilities' although despite requests from users in the forum declined to expand upon what these might be. However, a little digging revealed that it is likely to be the buffer overflow problem that was identified by a Vietnamese security researcher on September 5th.

On August 22, the Fedora Project released an "infrastructure report" confirming what most observers had, by then, suspected: the project had suffered a major security breach. The attacker got as far as a system used to sign packages distributed by Fedora. That, of course, is something close to a worst-case scenario: if an intruder has control over such a system, it's a relatively small step to capture the package signing key and the passphrase used to employ that key. And those, in turn, could be used to create hostile packages which would be accepted as genuine by Fedora installations worldwide.

In many cases, adding a graphical interface to Python scripts means getting your hands dirty with TKinter or other GUI programming kits. This exercise is usually reserved for users who have already acquired decent Python programming skills, as it requires some serious code wizardry. Thankfully, the EasyGui module allows you to add some GUI goodness to your Python scripts without going through coding rigmarole. Using EasyGui, you can add visual elements with just a few lines of code.

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has upgraded its India-focused GNU Linux distribution. Version 3.0 of Bharat Operating Systems Solutions (BOSS) Linux adds GNOME and KDE desktop environments, Bluetooth support, and support for 18 Indian languages, says C-DAC.

Microsoft's new Windows ad, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, is outdated and not very funny -- but it's highly revealing of all that's wrong out there in Redmond. The background: Windows is losing market share to Apple's Mac OS and even Linux. And Vista, the latest version, has been a big fat dud. Businesses have shunned it outright, and many consumers find it unintuitive and difficult to use. So, Microsoft hired "award winning" agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky -- at a reported cost of $300 million -- to give Vista, and the Windows franchise in general, an image makeover. The Seinfeld ad debuted Thursday and it's the first piece of an integrated marketing campaign covering TV, the Web, and point-of-sale outlets.

With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. You can, of course, just acquiesce and accept that as soon as you click to the first slide, most of your audience will sigh deeply and sit back low in their chairs. But, if you really want to make slide shows work for you, you'll think before opening up the Impress wizard.

I recently sat down with my 12-year-old son Ian, who agreed to sit still long enough to try a few typing teacher applications on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Ian has a lot of experience on the computer but, until now, he has subscribed to the hunt and peck typing philosophy. Fortunately, we found a number of open source typing tutorial programs to download and test. Ian and I looked at three GPL-licensed apps: Klavaro, TuxTyping, and KTouch.

Red Hat, which bills itself as the world’s leading open-source solutions provider, has managed to make free software pay by gathering, extending and packaging Linux and complementary open-source components into certified and supported products that are ready for enterprise consumption. As the focus of IT attention shifts to new platforms, including virtualized environments, Red Hat has turned to an IT industry newcomer, former Delta Airlines Chief Operating Officer Jim Whitehurst, to guide the open-source leader.

A local AM Radio show that I have been a guest on several times interviewed Richard Stallman on their most recent show. Over 40 minutes of Mike Cady and the guys talking to Richard, good stuff. - Scott

Wireless management on Linux is a bit of a hodge-podge, especially for roaming users. NetworkManager, KWifiManager, and various other utilities that have come and gone all attempt to make managing different network connections easy. wicd (pronounced "wicked"), the wireless interface connection daemon, tries to do the job better, so we're going to give it a test drive.

The new generation of inexpensive netbooks may be wonderful, but for my main desktop I want a real machine -- something I can open up, clean, and add to. So I was extremely tickled recently to trade for a new LinPC, an economical personal computer that features PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 preinstalled and ready to go. The LinPC's motherboard is an MSI K9N6SGM-V V2 in a Micro-ATX form factor. An AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor powers the system, aided by a gigabyte of RAM. It has a 1GHz front side bus and supports up to 2GB of DDR2 533/667/800 RAM. Included is a Realtek RTL8201CL Ethernet chip and Realtek ALC888 7.1 High Definition Audio. It has the standard ports, including four USB ports and six-port audio. The Nvidia MCP61P GPU is equivalent to an Nvidia 6100. Expansion slots are one PCI Express x16, one PCI Express x1, and two PCI (all open upon delivery). There are two memory slots, with one open.

Wireless management on Linux is a bit of a hodge-podge, especially for roaming users. NetworkManager, KWifiManager, and various other utilities that have come and gone all attempt to make managing different network connections easy. wicd (pronounced "wicked"), the wireless interface connection daemon, tries to do the job better, so we're going to give it a test drive.

Chinese PC manufacturing giant Lenovo, which years ago purchased IBM's personal computer business, appears to have quietly stopped offering Linux as a pre-installation option. None of the company's 49 ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebook models -- nor its many ThinkCenter and IdeaCenter desktops -- can currently be ordered with Linux.

News Items that were on the OpenSourceToday site were mostly rewrites of official company [1.] press releases. These Items were by their nature were highly volatile (read as rapidly prone to rot), hence, were inappropriate for longer term retention. Moreover, whatever marginal gain they offered meant prompt display was a necessity. Therefore, rapid, dynamic updating of the News page was an inherently sensible. I describe here one way to meet those needs.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States. Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

I've wanted to write this article for quite a while. Over the years I've noted thatJava-based music and sound applications have increased in number and quality, yet no comprehensive list or summaries have covered these advances. And so at long last I present this survey of music and sound applications that require Java. The presentation follows no particular order, but in this first part I'll begin by questioning the use of Java in sound and music applications development, followed by a brief look at Java's internal audio and MIDI capabilities.