Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The OLPC XO is a path-breaking, jaw-dropping piece of technology. And not just any traditional, consumer-focused (faster, shinier) way, but in specific and strategic areas that make the laptop perfect for developing world situations where it might be damp or dusty, the sun might be your light source at school, and you probably don't have reliable electricity at home. It happens to be that those same constraints also produce technological solutions that make the XO attractive to a certain set of users who want a no-frills, but highly functional laptop (like world travelers), as I mentioned in Part I -- it's lightweight, rugged, and low-power (solar chargeable), but powerful enough to connect to faint wifi, play movies, or review digital photos.

A while back, I wrote an article for Linux Journal's web edition entitled “Howto be a good (and lazy) System Administrator.” A couple astute readers, after reading the article, asked if I was familiar with the Nagios monitoring system, and I am. I've been using Nagios for a few years now. I had intended to write this article as a How-to on getting Nagios configured and running for the first time. However, it turns out that the documentation that comes with Nagios is really pretty good. And even if you do have problems, and I did, the user community is also quite responsive. So, rather than beating a dead horse, (with sympathy to horse lovers) I decided to continue the Good and Lazy Administrator Theme and discuss extending Nagios with custom service checks and custom notifications.

The splash screen for Writer's World Maker (WWM) announces that the program is designed to "help you to summon your imaginary worlds to the printed page." And, considering its flexibility and thoroughness in some areas -- especially defining characters -- at times it almost realizes this goal. However, interface problems, as well as a fannish orientation at the expense of detailed planning in other areas, makes it a program more suitable for wannabes than working writers. Now at version 1.0.31, WWM is available as source code and Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and Ubuntu packages. If the Debian package is any indication, though, these packages are not set up for dependency resolution. You must install the Gambas programming language packages for your distribution before you install WWM. You will also need to install Qt support if you do not already have KDE installed.

Normally, when Google releases a new application, I'm right there standing in line to be one of the first to try it. However, that was not the case with Google's latest effort, Chrome. Reports that the Web browser acted as an oversized keylogger through its OmniBox were not reassuring.

One of the cornerstones of the landmark interoperability deal between Novell and Microsoft was, and is, virtualization. Two years after they struck their agreement, Microsoft and Novell have extended their partnership. The partners are now finally rolling out a supported Linux on a Windows virtualization solution.

Lenovo Group Ltd. is cutting back on sales of desktops and laptop systems with the Linux operating system pre-installed. The PC maker said yesterday that it will no longer take online orders for computers pre-loaded with any flavor of Linux. Ray Gorman, a spokesman for the company, said that it will continue offering such machines only through its own or partner direct sales teams.

Canonical, the corporate backer of Ubuntu Linux, is hiring a team of designers and developers to make desktop open source software easier and more appealing to use. Canonical head and Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, said in a blog post yesterday that the company plans to hire a team of designers and user interface experts to contribute to not only Ubuntu’s usability but also to other upstream open source applications.

Sun released the code for its open source server-virtualization software Wednesday, and will make a commercial version of the xVM Server available next month. xVM Server can virtualize Windows, Linux and Sun's own Solaris operating system on x86 hardware from such vendors as Sun, HP, IBM and Dell, says Steve Wilson, Sun's xVM vice president. Previously, Sun's server-virtualization strategy focused on its own operating system and the Sparc chipset, he says.

Imagine a world without Linux. There'd be no cute Tux penguin or any notion of software freedom day. Netbooks would not have come about. But more strikingly, there wouldn't be the modern powerful tools that Windows systems administrators have come to love. That's right; Linux is keeping Microsoft honest and I'm going to expose the new Windows Small Business Server for what it is, along with those who resell it.

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) support, integrated with Pentaho’s Data Integration and Data Mining modules. PMML support from Pentaho can provide interoperability or migration alternatives for end user organizations that have traditionally been subject to the extremely high acquisition and maintenance costs of traditional, proprietary analytical and data mining platforms from companies like SAS Institute, SPSS, and Microstrategy. Now those organizations can take advantage of the cost benefits of commercial open source BI from Pentaho, while reusing their existing investments and providing continuity in their deployments.

In part two of this series, Akkana Peck takes us on a solar system tour via XEphem. We'll visit the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and learn how to get detailed information on thousands of far-away objects, and travel in time, both past and future.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn't like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature.

Red Flag is China's biggest Linux supplier. The Red Flag Linux distribution is based on Red Hat Linux. Red Flag recently announced the release of a beta edition of Red Flag Linux 7, called "Olympic Edition." While it contains the expected bugs of a beta system, it also gives us an opportunity to preview the next release of Red Flag. What I saw didn't blow me away.

Loosely speaking, in software terms, a wrapper is something that provides an alternate interface to another object. SMPlayer is an advanced multimedia player wrapped around MPlayer that provides a friendlier and more powerful front end to the underlying application. SMPlayer can play practically anything -- you can watch DVDs and VCDs, stream videos from a URL, or play audio CDs or MP3s. SMPlayer version 0.6.2 was released last month, and is licensed under the GPLv2. It is written using the Qt libraries (as most of KDE is; this practically ensures good integration with the KDE desktop) and thus can be used not only under Linux, but with Windows too.

Don't forget to pre-register for the coolest Linux event in the MidWest!

Virtual worlds come in all shapes and sizes, says Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming for Dallas-based research firm Parks Associates. Virtual worlds can be categorized by graphics type (2D, 2.5D, 3D), applications (enterprise worlds, social worlds, entertainment worlds, gaming worlds), and by demographics (adult worlds, teen worlds).

If you've ever looked in your /etc/fstab file, you have may have seen an entry that looks like UUID=62fa5eac-3df4-448d-a576-916dd5b432f2 instead of a more familiar disk drive designation, such as /dev/hda1. Such entries are called universally unique identifiers (UUID). You can use these 128-bit numbers to make hard disk management easier.

The SCHED_FIFO scheduling class is a longstanding, POSIX-specified realtime feature. Processes in this class are given the CPU for as long as they want it, subject only to the needs of higher-priority realtime processes. If there are two SCHED_FIFO processes with the same priority contending for the CPU, the process which is currently running will continue to do so until it decides to give the processor up. SCHED_FIFO is thus useful for realtime applications where one wants to know, with great assurance, that the highest-priority process on the system will have full access to the processor for as long as it needs it.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has failed spell out to the markets the precise cause of Monday’s catastrophic seven hour trading outage. The exchange carried out a series of upgrades and tests last weekend, but all LSE representatives are saying is that “there was a combination of software activities that coincided”, and these had caused the problem. The stock exchange has reiterated that the fault was not due to an upgrade on its high-speed trading platform TradElect.

Back in May when OLPC announced the XO-2 the organization also indicated that an XO-1.5 would be released in spring 2009. To date the only official information regarding the XO 1.5 is that it's supposed to have fewer physical parts and cost less than the XO-1.