Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open source adoption is growing rapidly, but adopters in U.S. are lagging behind European enthusiasm, according to software provider OpenLogic. OpenLogic announced Tuesday it has discovered more than 300,000 open source package and project installations in use around the world through its Open Source Census. OpenLogic initiated the global survey last December.

In this ENP classic, learn how to colorize and test your Bash prompt, run your own local timeserver, deliver customized MOTDs that change, and create elegant ASCII art. Carla Schroder shows you how to do all these things the easy way.

After holding an invitation-only conference for key open-source developers and community members in each of the past two years, the Linux Foundation is expanding its events schedule to add a conference focused on a broader attendee base. In an announcement today, the San Francisco-based consortium, which sets Linux standards and works to promote the use of the open-source operating system, said it will hold an event called LinuxCon next September that will be open to anyone who wants to attend.

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.

The Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora Games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram, had announced the release of Omega 10 Beta this past weekend. Omega is a desktop/mobile Linux distribution that is based upon Fedora but includes packages from the Livna RPM repository. The Omega 10 Beta release is roughly equivalent to the Fedora 10 Beta to be released tomorrow, but integrates multimedia support not found in Fedora along with delivering other added functionality.

With this installment I complete my survey of Java-based sound and music applications that run under Linux. Again I've focused mainly on production software.

Concern over the original distribution plan was what got me writing for OLPCNews.com. The belligerent anti-pilot-project attitude, the requirement to buy the laptops in lots of 1million units, and the hushed discussions about the costs beyond the "$100" laptop. Rapid, bulk deployment is not a good model to introduce technology, particularly in a resource-constrained environment. If you look at case studies of technology diffusion or successful ICT4D deployments (the Grameen Bank Village Pay Phone Project for example), you see the very social process of technology adoption, as people judge their usage of a new technology based not only on features and promises, but about lived experiences of their friends and networks.

Last week was so ugly the economic conditions had me up on YouTube looking for things to put a smile on my face, and I found two -- one that has the"Pimp My Ride" folks pimping an IT shop with an Xbox -- not some marketing group's best moment -- and an HP ad spoof that has Steve Jobs selling HP computers.

A mail transport agent (MTA) provides the "plumbing" for your email system by taking mail from a client application such as Evolution or Mozilla Thunderbird and routing it to the correct location on the right machine. There are plenty of good MTAs, such as Postfix, Sendmail, and qmail, but these popular mail servers require a large amount of configuration, and may be overkill for users who merely want to set up an MTA to test a Web development project or need to move mail around locally. Smail is a better alternative for these scenarios because it generally requires no configuration, and its memory footprint is less than the more fully featured MTAs.

California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, believes that open-source software should be used in elections involving electronic voting machines, to protect against error and fraud. Speaking in Cambridge, MA, [on Thursday] during a panel discussion at the EmTech organized by Technology Review, Bowen noted that individual counties are currently responsible for purchasing voting machines. Often the choice is left up to an IT professional who may lack detailed knowledge of cryptography and computer security. But the biggest concern, according to Bowen, is a lack of access to the machines' underlying code. "Many times, a person has no legal right to review the software, even if they could," she said.

You don't have to blindly trust that your email encryption is working- tcpdump lets you see it with your own eyes. Carla Schroder shows how easy it is to wiretap computer networks, and how to read everything that travels over your wires.

I started this installation fully expecting this to be my last use of Ubuntu. Having fought with the 7.10 version I hardened myself to expect similar flaws that would make my further use of this distribution impossible. Hence, I did not prepare myself as I had the last time. Nonetheless, while there were some disconcerting, intermittent failures I am, for the present, decided to use this version of the Linux desktop. Indeed, this article was written on that desktop.

Microsoft is to include the popular open source jQuery library in its Visual Studio development suite. jQuery is an open source Ajax framework for developing rich web applications. At the same time Nokia has also said it would use jQuery for its mobile web development. The move will add to the momentum around jQuery as Microsoft and Nokia join the likes of Google and Amazon as well as thousands of other websites using the framework.

Last week marked the release of GNOME 2.24. Those who already use GNOME will appreciate the new additions, but there's nothing compelling enough in the new version to convince fans of other desktop environments to make a switch. Although the upcoming releases of several Linux distributions will be including GNOME 2.24 as the default desktop, you can download and compile it yourself or by using Garnome now if you want to check it out sooner. The release notes make mention of a live CD being available, yet it's nowhere to be found on the GNOME BitTorrent page or by Googling.

I wasn't at the Linux Plumber Conference in Portland, OR, but everyone who pays close attention to Linux knows that Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer and Novell engineer, blasted Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, for contributing "In the past 3 years, from the 2.6.15 kernel to 2.6.27-rc6, Canonical has had 100 patches in the Linux kernel." That, as Kroah-Hartman pointed out, means Canonical "did 00.10068% of all of the kernel development for the past 3 years." In other words: almost nothing.

Well, Android made its first showing last week in the form of the new G1, and as is so often the case when a brand-new product arrives, there were at least two noticeable effects. The first was a general quickening of the market's commercial pulses, as consumers began to salivate over the iPhone contender and new latest thing.

At first sight, the Read It Later (RIL) extension looks redundant -- after all, you can use Firefox's own bookmarking functionality to save Web pages for later reading. But dig deeper, and you'll discover that it offers enough nifty features to make it a must-have tool for most users. When installed, RIL adds three elements to Firefox's interface: an icon in the Address bar, a button in the main toolbar, and a Click to Save button in the bottom right corner of the Status bar. Adding URL of the currently opened Web page to your reading list is as easy as clicking on the Read Later icon in the address bar.

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have Microsoft all over the place with articles on the advertising campaign and how Stanford and Harvard are teaching MS business tactics. Also, lists of cool desktops you may have not seen, alternative operating systems and the Linux Foundation says we should all support IBM. Sorry for the lateness in posting, had to fix my own darn links..

Free software inevitably runs into the body of law known collectively as "intellectual property." Many developers do their best to avoid the legal side of things whenever possible; others seem to like nothing better than extended debates on the topic. Regardless of one's own feelings in the matter, the fact remains that the legal system exists, it affects our lives, and that we can only be better off if we understand it. To that end, O'Reilly has published Intellectual Property and Open Source by Van Lindberg.

LM_Sensors, the leading open-source project for providing hardware monitoring support on Linux (such as with component temperatures, voltages, fan speeds, etc), had its last official release in May with version 3.0.2. While the changes aren't as substantial as the LM_Sensors 3.0 release last year, Jean Delvare has today announced the release of LM_Sensors 3.0.3.