Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This is the first in a two-part series from Summit presenter and Red Hat/Fedora engineer Bill Nottingham. It is based on the talk he gave at this yearâ??s Red Hat Summit. Part two will be published later this week.

RSOL PC (that company name seems an unfortunate choice to anyone with a British or Australian ear, even if it doesn't have the same connotations in its US home) has announced a series of computers based on generic components but is playing up the potential for running a variety of operating systems. The specs are pretty typical - 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 500G hard drive, DVD burner, 2G RAM, nVidia GeForce 7300GS video card, Gigabit Ethernet and so on - and the only operating systems the company is actually selling are Windows XP and Vista. Fedora or Ubuntu Linux are available as factory options as a service to customers.

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications.

Gospel Direct and Maranatha Record Co., sister companies based in South Africa, have exercised their faith in a Linux-based accounting program. Jaco Jacobs, manager of the finance and IT departments at Christian music and book retailer Gospel Direct and at Christian record label Maranatha Record Co., says that the companies chose Quasar because of their dissatisfaction with applications such as UltiSales and Syspro.

Don't complain about your situation; do something about it. That's the gist of what Danese Cooper, senior director of open-source strategies at Intel, said in her keynote at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here. Cooper said her talk, titled "Why Whinging Doesn't Work," was initially written for women, and she gave a version of it at a women's conference recently. Cooper said she came up with the idea for the talk after receiving an e-mail from Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, saying, "Can you girls please stop whinging about this?'"

Finding hardware that works with GNU/Linux is hard enough. But if you also want a completely free system -- one that requires no proprietary drivers or firmware to run -- then the task is almost impossible. While resources like OpenPrinting and the SANE database for scanners offer guides to simple functionality, advice on free systems is almost non-existent. To fill this gap, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been developing its own hardware list, and, as the next logical step, has been working with Los Alamos Computers (LAC) to develop a line of free (as in speech) computers pre-installed with GNU/Linux.

Results of a recent poll show that the stagnant economy may be leading more organizations to adopt open-source software to save on licensing fees, according ot the Open Solutions Alliance. Customers also are concerned about interoperability between open-source software and Microsoft Windows.

To help developers audit Web application security, Google has released an open source tool called ratproxy. It is a non-disruptive tool designed for Web 2.0 and AJAX applications that produces an easy-to-read report of potential exploits.

IDG World Expo has teamed up with open source security gateway provider Untangle and electronics recycler Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) to host an Installfest for Schools at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco next week. Volunteers will refurbish older discarded computers with free and open source software (FOSS) before they are donated to schools in need.

The sluggish economy is contributing to commercial open source sales, but customers still rank interoperability with proprietary software and vendor viability among their top concerns, according to a new survey from the Open Solutions Alliance. Most of the companies surveyed, including independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators that vary in size and business model, showed a clear increase in sales and services related to open source, with 83 percent of respondents on track for a year-on-year revenue increase this year, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) said.

Microsoft has quietly released to manufacturing a tweaked version of Windows XP to run on the One Laptop Per Child XO computer. Microsoft's marketing and communications wonk James Utzschneider offered some detail about its forthcoming release in a blog post late last week.

This tutorial series will take you through some tips and tricks on migrating from MS Office to OpenOffice.org 2.4. You'll see how to replicate some of the functionality and features that are lacking in OpenOffice.org. Soon you'll be more comfortable using OpenOffice.org for just about all your desktop publishing needs.

Day 3 of this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium featured a number of sessions, most notably a keynote address by Ubuntu founder and space tourist Mark Shuttleworth, who called for the greater Linux community to start thinking about discussing syncronicity, his term for having major software releases synchronised. The conference wrapped up on Saturday with some final interesting sessions and statistics.

Xataface is a framework for the LAMP stack designed to allow non-technical users to edit the contents of MySQL databases through a Web interface. While phpMyAdmin is a great tool for database administrators and those who are familiar with SQL and database design, Xataface aims at allowing less technical people to modify the database.

LXer Feature: 27-Jul-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a Linux vs. Windows RAM test, Apple and Mark Shuttleworth make a plash at OSCON, SCO's future is all dried up, the Washington Post asks for help in building a web tablet, 10 tricks for lazy Admins and our own Hans Kwint has a bad experience with LVM.

Yesterday I learned about a club in my city that exclusivly plays CreativeCommons-licensed music. ...They use a CC-BY-SA licensed excerpt fromOpenStreetMap on their flyer...And while talking about OpenStreetMap. Here are two examples from OSM which shows that this effort has so much potentiality in being vastly superior than existing proprietary map data.

How long before the carriers and the FCC admit that the new transmission medium for radio is the cell system? And how long before they also recognize that the cell system is properly part of the Net's infrastructure and not just cordless telephony with messaging tacked on?

The Debian GNU/Linux team today released the fourth update for the current stable Debian release, codenamed Etch. The latest release corrects a number of security issues as well as, for the first time in Debian’s update history, adding support for new hardware.

Glacier Computer is offering two Linux distributions as options on its Everest PCs. The company announced this month it is offering customers a choice of IGEL Linux or Fedora Linux distributions. The rugged Everest PC line targets customers in the warehouse, freight, distribution, and field service markets. The Everest model is an all-in-one industrial computer deployed into harsh environments containing extremes of temperature, vibration, shock, or moisture. The most common installations are on forklifts, dock doors, manufacturing floors, and construction vehicles. The Everest has a color display and touchscreen. Customers now have options that include Linux, Windows XP Professional, and Embedded XP.

The Open Web Foundation introduced itself to the world last week at OSCON, the Open Source Convention, held in Portland, Ore. The consortium of individuals and Internet companies is an effort to build a home for community-driven specifications on the Web. The organization follows open source models already seen in the Apache Software Foundation.