Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Geany is a lightweight text editor for Linux based on the GTK2 toolkit. Geany supports internal and external plugins, and it excels as a source code editor, since it includes basic integrated development environment (IDE) functionality. Here's an introduction to using Geany's built-in features, including the IDE and built-in development capabilities. Geany requires only the GTK2 (>= 2.6.0) runtime libraries (including Pango, Glib, and ATK libraries), and is not dependent on any X window manager or desktop environment.

A few weeks ago, the OpenSUSE Project announced the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, the "community" edition of SUSE Linux, Novell's commercial Linux distribution. Like most recent distributions, OpenSUSE is made up of the usual suspects, including GNOME and KDE-based desktops, Live CD and full DVD installation options, and an online repository of software that can be installed using a GUI tool.

The threat of reprisals from Microsoft lawyers has stopped Becta, the UK's technology quango for schools, from publishing the details of the three-year megadeal it agreed with Microsoft in April. Microsoft already forbids Becta from saying how much money UK schools spend on its software. The US multinational has also forbidden the British people from knowing how much it is charging their schools for its software.

The already crowded open source mobile phone software market just got more so as Nokia has announced plans to open up the Symbian operating system. Symbian currently has the biggest installed base of any mobile OS, which makes this announcement somewhat more surprising—market leaders generally do not radically change their successful methods. What it means for the various Linux mobile phone initiatives is unclear, but it certainly shakes things up a bit.

The Australian Open Source community has called for the consideration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the implementation of the Rudd Government’s Digital Education Revolution Policy. In an open letter that was submitted last week to the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gilliard, members of the community expressed its support of the Government’s investment in Australian ICT capabilities, education and training.

With the failed Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! given a fresh injection of oomph by Carl Icahn we reveal just who said what to whom in the ongoing war of words that could result in the biggest and most audacious technology sector hijacking the world has ever seen.

As David Lemming explained to us in describing OLPC Oceania's participatory development model, the area colloquially referred to as "Oceania" is really a scattering of small countries, many with populations less than half a million, scattered across the Pacific Ocean. They may be beautiful tropical islands, but their remote locations mean Internet costs and quality of service can be shockingly poor. Which makes the progress of OLPC Oceania all that more impressive, and I believe a model for how a one laptop per child program should be implemented in resource-poor countries.

In my last article I discussed two ways of installing applications on Ubuntu Linux. In this article I will be discussing two other methods for installing applications, which are roughly the same as downloading and installing a program from the internet. A few readers commented and pointed out that the information I provided didn't work for them. I am using Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution. I tried quite a few Linux distributions before settling on Ubuntu as it worked the best with the "Linux-unfriendly" hardware of my laptop.

When building software it's often useful to give each iteration of your build process a unique number. Many IDEs and RAD tools do this for you automatically. If yours doesn't and you're using a make file to build your code you can add an auto-incrementing build number to your project with a few simple changes to your make file.

In 2005, Alfresco was the first open source software company in the UK to capture venture funding, for its collection of enterprise document management applications. John Powell, formerly the COO of Business Objects, and John Newton, founder of Documentum, got together to launch Alfresco because they wanted to create a business that would have "global reach," according to Powell. Right from the start, Powell and Newton knew that the best way to do that was to create and market an open source product.

VMware ended a long-running battle over its strategic direction on July 8, ousting co-founder and CEO Diane Greene and installing Microsoft veteran Paul Maritz in her place. Investors pounded VMware's once high-flying stock on the shakeup and a warnings on sales growth. Still, Maritz's ascent could be just the tonic investors have sought as the company squares for a fight with the new CEO's former employer and grabs turf in the emerging cloud-computing market.

I had the privilege of giving not one but two talks at the Red Hat Summit, both about open source systems management topics. A good deal of this content was also shared with a different audience at FudCON, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. This was a great trip to Boston, and a fantastic chance to talk with users, administrators, and developers of all types. The first talk I had a part in was Func, which I co-presented with Adrian Likins.

Nokia released version 4.1 of it's Linux-based Internet Tablet platform Maemo last month. 4.1 is a minor update to the operating system, but it boasts two important features that answer long-held complaints: an improved open source email client, and migration to a package updating system more like that of a desktop Linux distribution. Tablet owners can download the update for N800 and N810 devices by visiting tablets-dev.nokia.com. As with previous releases, a valid device ID is required to download a firmware image. Upgraders can make a backup of their settings onto one of their tablet's memory cards, including a list of installed applications, which can be automatically reinstalled following the update.

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents. "Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Hans Reiser has led authorities to a body believed to be that of his estranged wife in the hills of Oakland, Calif. The area where the body was recovered is less than a mile away from where Reiser lived. She disappeared in 2006; he was found guilty of her murder in April.

Alienware, the PC manufacturer known for their high-end gaming notebooks and desktops, has been evaluating the business opportunity in providing a Linux OS option for some of their products. Phoronix reader Ahmad Yasser had contacted us to remind the Linux community that Alienware is running a Linux-based system survey to "gauge the level of interest consumers like you have in buying a new computer that features a Linux-based operating system."

At a time when graphical DVD rippers and encoders propose to make the backing up of your movies just a click away, a text-based application may actually be the best tool for the job. I've tried graphical rippers such as AcidRip, dvd::rip, thoggen, and RippedWire, with varying degrees of success. However, I've also had my share of headaches. Most times, any crashes or problems I experienced were related to the graphical components of the application or the desktop. It's not pleasant (to say the least) to leave your computer eating electricity all night, only to find in the morning that the ripping and encoding of a DVD failed because of an error purely related to GTK+ or Qt. It's even more frustrating when you realize that most of these applications are front ends to command-line programs.

Washington State University bookkeepers scratched their heads this spring when David Cillay submitted an invoice, for about $50, for an island. It was awhile before they learned he was buying land in Second Life, the online immersive virtual world where WSU has begun offering courses for students from across the globe.

HTML Purifier is a project that helps you ensure that HTML is valid and does not contain cross-site scripting attempts or other nasty attacks. With HTML Purifier you can allow users to post HTML content without letting them insert nasty code that will run in the browser of anyone viewing that HTML. An assortment of plugins let you use HTML Purifier with CodeIgniter, Drupal, MODx, Phorum, Joomla!, and WordPress. To get an idea of the cleanups that HTML Purifier can perform, head over to the demo page.

The basic framework of the intellectual property (IP) regime aims to “close down access to knowledge” rather than allowing its dissemination, Professor Joseph Stiglitz said at a 5 July lecture on “Who Owns Science?” Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Professor John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, launched Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation.