Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity. When ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski declared that “Microsoft’s sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft “gets it” regarding the ASF” I had a fit of the giggles—and then, like many others, I started to ponder on the reasons why and what it actually meant.

Many college graduates are finding it difficult to enter the information technology world with little or no work experience. There is no such thing as an entry-level position anymore, and more and more graduates are finding themselves in a catch-22 situation because of this. Searching the numerous jobseeker Web sites, such as dice.com, will return thousands of positions available in the IT field. But when you look closely, most positions, such as an entry-level software engineer, have a minimum requirement of at least one year's work experience in a related field. The search field criterion doesn't even offer a selection for graduates with less than one year's experience.

A startup called Unison Technologies has released a commercial "unified communications" groupware suite based on Ubuntu Server, and announced a beta release of a Ubuntu desktop client. The Unison suite combines e-mail, instant messaging, a PBX, contacts, and calendaring, says the company.

Google on Tuesday said its Android mobile operating system is not planning to join a growing consortium of mobile Linux companies even though the two sides have similar foundations and goals of besting Apple's iPhone. Eric Chu, a group marketing manager with Google's Android group, downplayed any talk that his company would be lending its name to the Linux Mobile Foundation -- or LiMo -- in an attempt to standardize mobile middleware. LiMo said on Monday that it has signed 11 new member companies in recent weeks and said that the number of mobile devices running the LiMo OS now totals 21.

Shakiness of macroeconomy plus general problems with travel arrangements caused many usual attendees to sit out this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. More than 7,500 people signed up, but about half that actually showed up, some estimates said. But there was no lack of enthusiasm for new product releases — especially in the data center, mobile and cloud computing sectors. Those who stayed home missed a lot of good new products and plenty of good networking opportunities.

[This article has much nicer pictures than what I took, which I will try to rectify next year. :-) - Scott]

This year's Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas is pretty much like all the ones in the past. It's a world-class conference with speakers that either bore you or blow you away. Black Hat is known for releasing a few Zero-day exploits and exploring nearly every other covered topic far better than any other computer security conference. Unfortunately, about half the presentations are wastes of time, with the speakers seemingly spending more time trying to make weak jokes than to present cutting-edge facts.

Imagine being able to open any Web page on your server in OpenOffice.org, edit it, and save the changes back to the server by pressing the Save button. It may sound too good to be true, but that's exactly what the ODF@WWW project is set to achieve. Started as a relatively simple hack, ODF@WWW has become a nifty solution that allows end users to create and edit Web pages in OpenOffice.org. ODF@WWW is based on three components: a few custom configuration options in the Apache server, the JODConverter utility, and a couple of bash scripts.

In my last article I talked about connecting Ubuntu Linux to Windows shares . In this article I will talk about the way that I connected to my networked printer. When I first connected an HP Inkjet 3550 printer to my laptop, it was easier to get it working than in Windows! The driver for the printer was already available in Linux, so all I had to do was select it and the printer worked.

Linspire, the distribution originally launched as Lindows, is no more, says Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos. Xandros purchased Linspire, the company, earlier this summer. This week, the company announced that it was going to revamp community distribution Freespire, basing its next version on Debian instead of Ubuntu, and using it as a precursor for Xandros Desktop Professional, in much the same way Red Hat uses Fedora and SUSE uses openSUSE. But the company didn't need multiple for-pay desktop distributions, so Linspire is getting the boot.

When Jeffrey Spencer prepared for his college exams, he would tape his notes to the handlebars of his bike and ride to school, studying all the while. To him, it made perfect sense."I am a kinetic learner, which means I learn and mentally perform best when I am moving," he says.

The Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy (SCP) make remotely performing system administration and copying files across secure links a painless operation. SSH and SCP use the same SSH protocol to protect network communications, but they rely on users knowing if they want a shell or to copy a file beforehand. You cannot easily use an existing SSH shell connection to a remote machine and just grab one or two files; if you want the files, you'll have to make another SSH connection for the file copy using SCP -- unless you have ssh-xfer.

Enterprising engineers will soon get the chance to find out how Openmoko's Linux-powered phones work and to modify them. Barely a month after shipping the Neo FreeRunner, Openmoko has said it plans to make the schematics for this - and the Neo 1973 - publicly available under a Creative Commons (CC) license.

Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea. The Linux Foundation has just released a beta of a new program, Linux Application Checker (AppChecker), that's going to make ISVs and other programmers start to love developing for Linux.

Michelle Murrain is a great example of what the FOSS community is all about. She's complicated: she calls herself a "scientist turned technologist turned theologian turned writer," all blended into one person. She's also an active supporter of and contributor to open source software projects. She's not a developer, however, and Murrain would really like to see more space for people like her, with different gifts to share, in the open source community.

Xandros, the Linux desktop company that supplies Asus with its UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) Linux,, announced that the next generation of Xandros community-driven Linux Freespire 5 will be based on the Debian Linux 5"Lenny" release. Lenny is due to arrive in September. Freespire will follow sometime in the fourth quarter of 2008. After the release of Freespire 5, Xandros will release its commercial Linux distribution, Xandros Desktop Professional 5. This will be built on the Freespire 5 code base with additional commercial software. These commercial programs will be be primarily for enterprise customers.

A little more than three months after he became leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project, Steve McIntyre is beginning to realise that it can be a little scary at times. Though he's been with the Debian project a long time and met many of his fellow 1000+ developers, either face-to-face or through online communication, McIntyre still knows that he cannot go out ahead of his troops.

Paul Ferrill agilely leaps over several hurdles in order to install and review Ubuntu Mobile Edition on a Samsung Q1 ultra-mobile PC, tests it for hardware compatibility and usability, and takes a look at Canonical's developer resources for UME.

Motorola has started a public preview of development tools for unreleased Linux mobile phones. The free Eclipse-based tools will help Linux developers create, test and certify native applications for the newest Motorola handsets. Motorola has released a "public preview" of the first-ever native development tools for unreleased models of its Linux-based mobile phones.

It would seem, that unless you are not actively involved in the current world (perhaps you are busy studying the galaxy or wondering whether that really is water on Mars), you might have heard something about going green.

Mozilla has launched a prototype messaging Firefox extension that it says could eventually enable users to keep track of all of their electronic communications, including e-mail, RSS, social networks and Web discussions.