Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Larry Cafiero is sitting in his cluttered office in the Santa Cruz Mountains looking nothing like a revolutionary. Friendly bearded face. Casual blue jeans. Comfy work shirt with the little penguin logo. Yeah, penguin logo. See, Cafiero is a Linux guy. Maybe you know one -- or a Linux woman.

This week the BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme is in Brazil. Here the show investigates how the country's enthusiasm for technology is now reaching schoolchildren from all backgrounds. There are an estimated 45m PCs in Brazil, making it the world's fifth biggest market for computers. The more striking number, however, is the fraction of the population that does not have access to technology.

Last week we had looked at the Corsair DHX 4GB DDR2-800MHz memory, which performed and overclocked very well and featured Corsair's exclusive Dual-Path Heat Xchange cooling technology. Today though we are looking at the more mainstream A-DATA Gaming DDR2-800 4GB Kit. This memory is less expensive than Corsair's DHX memory, but has higher latencies and simple heatspreaders. As you will find from reading this article, the overclocking potential is quite limited.

Microsoft is posting code to its much-trumpeted CodePlex open-source projects site using licenses and conditions that go against the principles of open source. The company has been posting projects under Microsoft licenses that stop you from running CodePlex projects on non-Windows platforms or restrict access to code.

Audio is a fitting topic for the first day of the Linux Plumbers Conference. Users want sound to Just Work, and there's lots of working code in individual projects. But so far, it seems like nobody has everything quite plumbed together in an annoyance-free way. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio and Red Hat employee, moderated the miniconference and started with a summary of the state of Linux audio: "it's a mess." The audio miniconference came up with two steps toward cleaning up the mess, though. First, come up with a coherent story for application developers on what sound API to use, and how. Second, clean up the often-confusing array of user-visible audio level controls.

When a network is small and most of its users interact chiefly with services on the Internet at large, it's easy to get by simply by assigning numeric Internet Protocol addresses to your nodes rather than names. As the network grows, however, and as internal services (wikis, mail servers, media servers, and more) come online, recalling numeric addresses becomes unwieldy. One solution is to implement Domain Name Server (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) with dnsmasq, and thereby cache external DNS addresses for performance reasons, dynamically assign IP addresses to all of the members of your network, and manage everything from one location. This article shows you how.

With Xapian and Omega you can quickly build a powerful search interface for your Web site. You'll be able to index your HTML, PDF, and PHP content and search for it by metadata or words contained in the documents. The shared library that implements the actual index is called Xapian. Omega is a set of tools built by the Xapian team to let you use the library for index and search if you are not a software developer. Since Omega uses Xapian, if your distribution's package repository includes Omega, then when you install it you'll install Xapian as a dependency.

A group called Nathive has officially launched its Alpha-stage, open-source image editor for GNU/Linux. The Nathive editor runs on a GNOME desktop, is open to developer modification, and aims to be "simple, lightweight, and easy to install and use," says lead developer "Markos."

Apple releases iPhone developers from nondisclosure agreement ... copyright board keeps music royalties the same ... Visa tries Android as a payment platform ... Motorola looks to Android as its potential savior, and more.

A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of computer scientists) for a thorough examination. At that time she also ordered that we could publish our report 30 days after delivering it to the Court--which should have been today. Three weeks after we delivered the report, on September 24th Judge Feinberg ordered us not to release it. This is part of a lawsuit filed by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, seeking to decommission of all of New Jersey's voting computers.

Microsoft plans to continue charging licensing fees from handset makers for using its mobile operating system and not follow the free offerings of Google and Nokia, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday. The pressure on Microsoft's high licensing fees has increased over 2008.

There are several definitions of "open access." One is making open source code available to a community of smart cookies who can debug and modify it using open source mechanisms. Another is offering up low-cost or free software development kits (SDK) to encourage creative applications for a given platform. Another is offering middleware that allows an application developed once to run on multiple platforms. And, finally, in mobile networks, open can mean using a phone and its applications on any carrier's compatible network.

Cisco has been talking about the "network as a platform" for a long time, but what does that actually mean, and what does the AXP network module have to do with it? The Cisco Application eXtension Platform (AXP) is made up of a hardware card (three different models), modified Linux software that runs on the card, and a program for software developers. You could also say that the AXP represents "network virtualization".

At a very early stage in the installation of the Ubuntu8.04 desktop I encountered some perplexing failures in the mount command and in my attempted alteration of the fstab file. Commands that had worked in Ubuntu's earlier LTS desktop failed both on the command line and when the file itself was executed. Moreover, with respect to the latter the results were similarly perplexing whether the file was executed during bootup or on the command line with the "a" option. Succinctly the problem is, I have not been successful mounting the external directories [1.] of the 6.06 desktop while on 8.04. Nonetheless, use of essentially the same commands work where I can see all the directories of 8.04 while running the 6.06 desktop. Moreover, with root level privileges on 6.06, I can copy, remove or alter files and sync in either direction. Those options are unavailable to me on 8.04.

Red Hat Thursday released a Linux software stack for compute-intensive IT environments that it said costs less than Microsoft's price for its comparable Windows offering. Red Hat charges a subscription of US$249 per node, or server, per year for Red Hat HPC Solution, a new offering that combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Platform Open Cluster Stack 5, clustering software it has licensed from Platform Computing. Red Hat HPC Solution also includes device drivers, a cluster installer, cluster-management tools, a resource and application monitor, interconnect support and a job scheduler.

After marking the GNU Project's 25th anniversary with an endorsement by Stephen Fry and the relicensing of OpenGL, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is concluding the month-long celebration by relaunching its high priority list, which enumerates as-yet unwritten or incomplete software needed to run a completely free computer system. Instead of being simply a page on the FSF's Web site, the list will become a campaign, and be actively promoted and discussed, and given a new emphasis in the Foundation's activities.

The dd command is one of those ancient UNIX tools that is extremely powerful, yet at the same time, the syntax can make it feel slightly archaic. A lot of seasoned sysadmins and developers still remember the first time they saw the dd command used by a bearded wizard. He might have used it to test the disk I/O, capture a disk image, or restore it. In some ways, dd can seem like Old Spice–only the guys over 60 use it. But the younger generation should know that dd still has some tricks up its sleeve. In this article, we’re going to put a new twist on this old favorite and show how grandpappy really does know best sometimes.

As South Africa prepares to host the second annual ODF conference next week, momentum behind the Open Document Format appears to be growing stronger. To date at least 15 national governments, including countries such as South Africa, Brazil, and Italy, have adopted ODF as a government standard according to the ODF Alliance. And earlier this week Sweden national standards body approved ODF as a national standard in that country.

Google unveiled the first Android-powered cell phone last week, a T-Mobile-branded device dubbed the G1. Comparisons to Apple's iPhone were immediate -- and that is a good thing for Android, when you consider what a raucous and contentious week it was for iPhone developers. Initial G1 reviews were generally positive, but several reporters complained that when they asked about specific missing applications and features, the reply came back that third-party developers "are welcome to add that." In open source circles, that sort of comment is often regarded as a dodge, what a proprietary vendor says when dumping source code over the wall with no intentions of developing it further.

Carla Schroder takes us on a tour of some of the excellent Linux package managers: RPM, dpkg, and the sophisticated dependency-resolving package managers, aptitude and Yum. Learn how to find out what is installed on your system, find files and packages, install and remove software, and update your Linux system smoothly and reliably.