Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Xandros bought Linspire the other day, and nobody really noticed. Neither Xandros nor Linspire has won the hearts and minds of Linux users or developers. Both are sold as Linux for the Windows user. Both sell versions of GNU/Linux that are easy to install and use, and both have tried, with varying success, to break into the business and consumer desktop market that is currently owned by Microsoft.

The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade.

OpenLogic Inc., a provider of enterprise open source software, wants other open source software developers to shake hands over a partnership program that will give it control over an alliance of support services for other vendors' products. OpenLogic, which already supports 400 open source packages in its certified library, announced its new vendor partnership program on July 8. The partnership program is designed to let commercial open source software vendors share in the revenue OpenLogic receives from its customers for providing support for the commercial software. EnterpriseDB, which sells a relational database based on PostgreSQL, and JasperSoft, which develops an open source business intelligence platform, are among the first to share in the revenue-sharing venture.

Linux opportunities in the South African market are increasing but skills are still a significant stumbling block. This is according to Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa. Beetar, who took over as Novell SA head in January, says that South African market has been a little slower in its uptake of Linux than expected but growth in the sector is constant. “There is still significant insecurity about skills in the market,” she says.

Beginning Monday, I will begin my role as community manager for the Linux Developer Network for the Linux Foundation. In that position, I will begin by helping to re-launch the LDN effort, turning that site in what should become the premier development and technical resource for anyone interested in coding for Linux. The Network will feature in-depth technical articles, white papers, community forums, and wiki-based content that will provide the most up-to-date information about the technology behind Linux. When I leave, LT will be left in the more than capable hands of author and Linux expert Carla Schroder, which means it will continue its editorial charter of providing links to the broadest range of Linux and open source news, opinion, and tutorials.

The ability to run both console and graphical programs securely on a remote system using SSH brings you a great deal of freedom. When the communications link to that remote system has high latency, however, running interactive programs such as a text editor on the remote machine can become a real test of your patience. The bcvi project lets you edit files on a remote system using gvim (or another editor) on your local desktop machine to avoid the latency. Even without latency issues, bcvi is a handy tool when you want to use gvim to edit a file on a server that does not have gvim or the X libraries installed.

There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they'd be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed. I was a bit puzzled at some of the complaints, because I use KDE, and when I didn't like something, I would just change it. For example, if I didn't like the new menu, I could right click on the menu icon and it gave me an immediate choice to go back to the old one. How hard is that? Could it be that at least some of what we are seeing is our old friend Stick in the Mud?

One way to evaluate the security of a Web browser is to determine what percentage of its users are using the latest version. In a study released on Tuesday by S. Frei et al, it was found that Firefox users are most likely to be up to date. Keeping the browser updated to the latest version these days is paramount.

Our colleague Joe Barr sometimes described himself as a doddering old geek. Many knew him as a Linux evangelist; others knew him from his ham radio activities. And those of us who worked with Joe knew him in all of his sometime irascible, often funny moods. Joe was always one of our favorite people, and we are devastated to report that he died at home, unexpectedly, last night.

[We lost one of our own last night. - Scott]

SliTaz is a new micro GNU/Linux live distribution designed to run from RAM (a recommended minimum of 128MB) and installable to a hard drive or USB device. The current version, SliTaz 1.0, weighs in at a light 24.8MB and provides a nice selection of applications that run on a lightweight desktop. You can store user data and settings on persistent media, and support for more than 400 additional download packages is available.

Its stock price is in free fall and it still faces a potential takeover led by rogue investor Carl Icahn. However, Yahoo can still fire shots across the digital bows of Google and Microsoft; it is inviting third-party developers to use its search technology so they can build their own search engines. Yahoo calls the new strategy "BOSS," which stands for Build your Own Search Service.

Bell Labs alumni Stephen Johnson tells about the creation of Yet Another Compiler Compiler (YACC), and offers some advice to programmers as well: You can't rewrite a program too many times.

Back in issue #164 of Linux Journal I reviewed a trio of Linux-compatible games from Grubby Games. Well, the developers have recently added a new game to their lineup called The Amazing Brain Train. This game follows in the footsteps of other recent "brain training" games that have appeared on console and handheld game systems over the past couple of years. Like all of Grubby Games' offerings, The Amazing Brain Train is available for the Linux, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems. When purchasing the game, their online store will attempt to detect which OS you are using and offer it up as a sugestion as the version you probably want to buy, but you are still given the option to purchase whichever OS version you would like.

n OpenBSD developer has discovered and fixed a bug in the software that has been traced back to an AT&T version of Unix from 1975. OpenBSD is a variant of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a widely used, open-source, Unix-like operating system. BSD's variants include OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, and it forms the basis of Apple's Mac OS X operating system.

The Foundation is a Nokia-led consortium that was recently established to grow and open source Symbian over the next two years, while incorporating Symbian-derived platforms such as Series 60 and UIQ into the main operating system. Nine new members are joining, of which three are operators: 3, América Móvil and TIM.

ISO Secretary-General Alan Bryden was recently inteviewed by Georgina Prodhan, European Technology Correspondent of the Reuters news agency on issues related to the adoption of OOXML as an ISO/IEC standard. Reuters released a condensed version of the interview on 26 June. Here is the complete text of the interview.

The Novell-sponsored openSuSE project for Linux released openSuSE Build Service 1.0 on Wednesday, providing developers with access to code repositories for the openSuSE Linux distribution and making it easier for developers to contribute code. Build Service features a collaboration system for working on Linux packages or solution stacks, according to a statement from the project organizers. The new release can scale to larger projects and expands the scope of Build Service to building the entire OpenSuSE release.

Once upon a time, long ago, there was someone from a faraway country in South America doing an advanced program at MIT in Boston, where he met with the soft-shell stage of the One Laptop Per Child project. This person eventually went back to his country, started meeting and inviting locals to learn about OLPC. He kept in touch and received a couple visits of now long, long gone and forgotten OLPC employees. Eventually he called his team the "Grupo OLPC (country name)".

In this article, I attempt to catch a menu choice error quickly and redirect to a common error page template. Despite this being my preferred route I was dissatisfied with its execution. I later abandoned this code for a simpler option. Nonetheless, I think it is instructive showing you attempts that fail. Very oddly, I now think I know how this might be accomplished. However, I am limiting myself here to tested methods; I may get to it later. Until then this and the next article desmonstrates tested approaches including their misdirections.

The Government of Canada has angered those who believe that a proposed copyright law threatens the country's open source business model. Russell McOrmond, a member of the Canadian Software Innovation Alliance (CSIA), says that Bill C-61, the proposed copyright legislation unveiled by the government last month, ignores just about every recommendation made by CSIA, a coalition of open source businesses and supporters, in a white paper.