Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Wildcards in bash are referred to as pathname expansion. Pathname expansion is also sometimes referred to as globbing. Pathname expansion "expands" the "*", "?", and "[...]" syntaxes when you type them as part of a command, for example..

The Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard, the ODF Alliance reported this week. "Sweden now joins Brazil, Croatia, Italy, South Korea, and South Africa as countries whose national Swedish Flagstandards bodies have formal approved this standard", the ODF advocacy organisation writes in this week's newsletter. SIS press officer Erika Messing called the approval "routine". SIS was one of the national standardisation organisations that took part in the procedure at ISO to approve ODF, she said. "ISO approved it in 2006 and now SIS has made it a national standard."

Few free and open source software projects have attracted such a range of reactions as Mono. On one hand, as an implementation of Microsoft's .Net that's sponsored by Novell, it has been vilified both for the company it keeps and as a possible source of patent claims, should Microsoft choose to get nasty. On the other hand, Mono has been the platform of choice for such major projects as Second Life, which uses it to increase the efficiency of its servers. This week, as the Mono project reached version 2.0, Miguel de Icaza, the project's founder and maintainer, talked with Linux.com about the history of the project, its application and the criticism leveled at it, and where the project goes from here.

Yahoo has unveiled a new dynamic calendar service powered by open source developer Zimbra. Yahoo Calendar offers standard Web 2.0 information-sharing options along with an updated drag-and-drop interface and a handful of unique options. The program is available in beta to Yahoo users as of Wednesday.

Open source software is thought to be one of the driving forces in overcoming the fragmentation in the health IT market. However, barriers like lack of long-term professional support [editor's note: this may be universal for all health IT] or uncertainty of cost saving capability hinders open source software to gain a reasonable market share. The workshop "Open Source in European Health Care" is conceptualized as a forum where existing open source projects or initiatives are invited to present their work or their experiences in the field of open source in health care. Submissions from all over the world including position papers are highly welcome.

As I walked through the war zone that is Wall Street yesterday on my way to a Red Hat meeting, I assumed the worst. I scanned the rooftops for Paul Cormier, Red Hat's EVP of Products and Technologies, ready to catch him if leaped. I scanned the cardboard boxes along the pavement, expecting to see Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens claiming a cozy spot on the curb. Finally, I dug through dumpsters in search of Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO and no stranger to market meltdowns as the former COO of Delta Air Lines.

If I had had SpeedCrunch or Qalculate! during high school, finishing homework really would've been child's play. From breaking down complex algebraic equations, to solving your calculus problems, to performing geometric computations and providing statistical answers, SpeedCrunch and Qalculate! are tools that offer quick solutions to difficult questions. SpeedCrunch is the lesser of the two beasts. It runs not only on Linux but also on Windows and Mac OS X, and offers over 50 mathematical functions, unlimited variable storage, automatic completion, expression history, and more. It's available in the software repositories for most distributions, or you can grab the tarball from the project's Download page.

As we continue the classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting gives us a clear, understandable introduction to routing, which is quite possibly the most important part of computer networking.

A reliable network monitoring and management solution must accurately detect network devices such as routers, servers, and client workstations. It must be able to display a map of the whole network, monitor the health and performance of each device, and have a way to notify someone of a problem by email, text message, or other form of communication. It should be able to fix a problem by restarting services or running specific programs. It should generate detailed reports that you can analyze easily to help prevent future incidents. Finally, a decent monitoring system must be easy to use, deploy, and customize according to your monitoring needs. Let's use these standards to see if GroundWork Monitor Community Edition is up to the task.

AppDeploy, an online community for both systems management professionals and application and computer administrators has released a free software tool called"AppDeploy Repackager." The tool is the industry's first free application dedicated to the complex task of Windows Installer repackaging, according to the company.

Sidux, a relatively new desktop Linux distribution, is based on Sid, the unstable developmental branch of Debian. The developers strive for an easy-to-install and easy-to-use modern Debian derivative, and pride themselves on remaining true to the principles and values of the Debian project. Despite a few inconveniences, I like Sidux a bit more each time I use it. Sidux comes as a live CD in a few different configurations. I chose the 2GB DVD with a full KDE desktop for both i686 or AMD64 architectures, but you can also choose from a KDE-Lite or XFCE desktop version for either architecture; each uses less than 500MB.

One of the most annoying experiences for any desktop Linux user is installing a Linux on a laptop, switching it on, and... discovering that the Wi-Fi chipset doesn't support Linux. That used to be a commonplace experience, but over the years it's gotten much better. Unless, of course, you were using a laptop with a Broadcom chipset; then, chances were, you were in for some trouble. -

In the old childhood folktales, trolls are big, mean, ugly creatures that live under bridges and exact payments in exchange for allowing travelers to pass. That, according to Jeff Matsuura, is very similar to how patent trolls operate. Matsuura is an intellectual property attorney with the Alliance Law Group, based in Falls Church, Va.

Sun Microsystems has lost a key individual responsible for getting its aspiring open-source software included in leading Linux distributions. Barton George has quit Sun after 13 years, hard on the heels of having helped secure the inclusion of an open-source friendly version of Sun's Java Development Kit (JDK) - OpenJDK - with major GNU/Linux distros.

"The Green Penguin" is a new blog devoted to ‘green’ IT related to Linux (though at times loosely). This week´s topic is about Google and General Electric´s recently announced plan to promote a ‘smart’ electric power grid and thus encourage greater use of renewable energy.

Some are apparently up in arms that Google is refusing to allow Chrome developers to use its trademarks and the comic book it released to help explain Chrome. To these and others that equate open source with"up for grabs," please pay attention..

The international standards body ISO has offered to help maintain the ODF document standard alongside its work on the rival Microsoft-originated OOXML specification, saying its creator Oasis is not dealing with defect reports quickly enough. At a meeting in Korea last week, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee for document standards, SC 34, issued a liaison statement to Oasis, the body that created ODF. It requested an "alignment" of maintenance of ODF between the work done at Oasis and that within ISO.

Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox browser, has released technology that helps websites detect the physical location of computers. The system will allow users, for instance, to find local restaurants when they travel to a new town. The Geode project is an experimental add-on ahead of a full blown launch of geolocation technology in version 3.1 of Firefox.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat hosted its annual analyst day in New York today, and as Wall Street continues to hemorrhage, the company couldn't have picked a gloomier time for the occasion. But harsh economic conditions tend to accelerate technology shifts, so the top brass at Red Hat were a pretty chipper bunch as they explained to Wall Street how they intend to make money in the coming years. Those in attendance were probably just grateful to have something else to listen to and talk about, and more than a few were probably reminiscing about the killing they made when Red Hat went public so gloriously little more than nine years ago.

Many audio, video, and graphics professionals would like to make the switch to Linux, but don't want to deal with the hassle of figuring out multimedia on Linux or are scared off by the purported lack of such tools. I created Vector Linux Multimedia Bonus Disc (MMBD) to address this problem and perception. It's a complete multimedia creation and production system that contains hundreds of the best multimedia applications available on Linux. The MMBD is an add-on for Vector Linux that installs directly into a preinstalled copy of the distribution. Vector is a Slackware-based distribution that is built for speed and flexibility. Although Slackware is sometimes viewed as an archaic, crude operating system, it is famous for its stability and clean, reliable core.