Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After introducing the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop to the teachers and then the third and fourth grade students involved in our OLPC pilot project in Ouéléssébougou, Mali, we finally got to see how exactly the kids use the XO laptops. We found out in the fifth and sixth weeks of the program lots of good news: the kids love the XO, especially since they have now started taking the small green laptops home at night. In addition they have really taken to navigating the Sugar OS and have become speedy typers. Even better is the collaboration that takes place in the classroom to teach each other how to use certain applications.

Virtualization software can help you run programs that your native Linux distro wouldn't. While Linux users have many virtualization options, none comes close to the all-encompassing VMware Workstation 6.5. Introduced last month, VMware Workstation 6.5 continues the tradition of outshining and outpacing the competition with a host of useful new features, and boldly goes where no virtualization software has gone before -- into the realm of virtual machines with accelerated 3-D graphics. Despite the advances, some of the new features are still in beta, so Workstation 6.5 might not be the best virtualization option for everyone.

Yesterday, I looked at the major applications in the first beta for KOffice 2.0. Now it's the turn of the rest of the beta: The KPlato project manager, KChart, the vector graphics editor Karbon, and the raster graphics editor Krita. These four graphical and charting programs have always been among the best-regarded of the KOffice programs. All of them have matured much faster than the traditional office applications KWord, KSpread, and KPresenter. In the case of KPlato and KChart, they have done so because they were limited applications with relatively few features. By contrast, the graphics editors Karbon and Krita have done so by attracting users who were not interested in office applications so much as design.

Flash memory drives the size of your thumb are dirt cheap and offer gigabytes of storage. It's tempting to fill one of them with important computer files, clip it to a key chain and hit the road. However, what if you lose it while fumbling for change at Starbucks and the hacker in the corner finds it? This is not a good thing. That's where a new breed of flash drives comes in.

With the ip command you can assign multiple network addresses to a network interface, without creating aliases like ifconfig requires. Carla Schroder shows you how.

Charlie Schluting's video tutorial shows you how to set up a Samba server on Ubuntu, and test it from a Windows PC, all in just a few minutes.

Founded in 1998, EZ Prints is an Atlanta-based provider of digital image fulfillment technology for retailers, portals, ISPs, digital content owners and professional photo services. About 500 online and offline retailers in the U.S. and Europe, including six of the top 10 online photo sites, use EZ Prints' technology platform to offer services that allow consumers and businesses to personalize digital content.

French software firm Mandriva has released its Mandriva 2009 Linux distro, moving to KDE 4 as the default desktop. Other new features include a revamped installer and "Control Center," netbook compatibility, and a variety of updated applications. Although KDE 4, or more specifically 4.1.2, is now the Mandriva default, the GNOME desktop has also been bundled and upgraded to version 2.24. Other updated applications include OpenOffice 3.0, and Mozilla Firefox 3. It now includes version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel.

Whether you believe that punctuality is "the politeness of kings" or "the art of guessing how late the other fellow is going to be," you can count on your Linux box for information about local times across the globe, so that you can plan a punctual VoIP call, stock transaction, or meeting. Here are some world clocks that work well on the desktop. World time is a topic fraught with complexities and exceptions: Daylight Savings Time, fractional hour discrepancies, exceptional time zones, today, tomorrow, or yesterday. Some tools handle these difficulties well, and others not so well. On a practical level, however, what you need to know comes down to two basic questions: What time is it right now in Rubovia? And is it a good time to call Mary?

"Sidux" is a fairly new Linux distribution based on Debian's "unstable" branch, which is perpetually code-named "Sid." An early review suggests Sidux might have the ingredients to make the very newest versions of open source software available for wider testing and use. I have long suspected that a majority of Debian users actually use Sid. Despite its name, the "unstable" tree works fine on the desktop.

Foresight Linux is best known by many as the distribution that features the Conary package management system. Perhaps soon it may become known as your child's favorite distro. The recent release of Foresight Kid's Edition 1.0 introduces a new generation to the benefits of Linux and open source software. Not that kids care about that -- they'll just appreciate the unlimited hours of fun at their fingertips.

A surge in demand for netbooks is helping drive business for Linux, as the devices are designed to be low cost with smaller storage, according to Novell Inc.'s chief technology and strategy officer for Linux. "People typically don't care what operating system is on the netbooks, because they don't buy them to run a suite of applications like Microsoft Office but to be on the Web using a Web browser," Novell's Nat Friedman said in an interview. Novell's SUSE Linux is already being preloaded with laptops from vendors including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The company is now in negotiations with Lenovo and HP to start offering its Linux distribution on their netbooks as well, he added.

KOffice has been trailing the office application leaders for a long time. Despite years of development, it has yet to match OpenOffice.org feature for feature, although its features are complete enough that they have attracted a loyal community. Judging from the first beta, KOffice 2.0 will still not rival OpenOffice.org or other free software rivals, but it should be a major step in that direction.

Akkana Peck shows how you can speed up your Web searches with custom bookmarklets-- you don't need to be an ace coder to create your own; it's easy, fast, and powerful.

Since the free, online Wikipedia user-created encyclopedia began in 2001, the Linux-based IT infrastructure behind it has been expanded and lassoed together to keep up with the demands of the popular Web site. That meant that often it was haphazardly expanded by tossing in a new server with a different operating system each time. Over five years, the servers were running a variety of versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Fedora, making it more complicated to install applications and maintain the servers. Soon, that problem will be gone.

The year of the GNU/Linux desktop has been always right around the corner for many years now. Many have been looking for the 'killer application' that can only be had on GNU/Linux and that will spur widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop. While fast-booting Splashtop desktops look promising, one killer application boldly going where Windows cannot go is languishing. That killer application is...

"Claiming itself to be a next-generation publisher, WEbook has successfully roped in venture capitalists to invest in their business," Deepak Thakur, senior research analyst in ICT Practice at Frost& Sullivan told the E-Commerce Times. If the dot-com burst and the more recent Wall Street fiasco have taught us anything, it is that investor confidence is not necessarily a harbinger of success.

As important as security is, remaining current with every development is hard, and evaluating possible vulnerabilities across a network can be quite a chore. You need a way to both automate tests and make sure you're running the most appropriate and up-to-date tests. Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is a network security scanner that includes a central server and a graphical front end. The server allows you to run several different network vulnerability tests (NVT) written in Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL), which OpenVAS updates frequently.

Kicking off what promises to be a month packed full of good Linux releases, Mandriva Linux will today release Mandriva 2009, the latest incarnation of its popular Linux desktop. This is what you can expect.

Regardless of all its hype, security in cloud computing is not a revolution; rather it's an evolution of the age-old business model of outsourcing. The concept of cloud computing has evolved from the concepts of grid, utility, and SaaS, and these models evolved from the application service provider in the mid-early '90s.