Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.

phpLogCon provides a user-friendly Web interface to your system logs. It can handle logs from both Linux and Windows systems, so an administrator can log in to a single phpLogCon site to see what is happening on all the machines on a network. phpLogCon is not available in the Ubuntu, openSUSE 11, or Fedora 9 repositories. It will be in Fedora 10 and is packaged in the Fedora development repository. I'll download and build phpLogCon version 2.3.9 from source using an i386 Fedora 9 machine.

The initial beta product is available in 122 countries and 40 languages but for Window (XP and Vista). Google says Mac and Linux versions are now high priority but these are still months away. However Google's vice president product development, Sundar Pichai, said that, with the launch of the Windows beta, development resources had been redeployed to accelerate the Mac and Linux versions. Chrome is completely open source and Google says it will remain that way. Its rationale being that, because every one of Google's services is delivered through a browser it is in its interest to engender competition and innovation in the browser market to ensure users' experience of Google services is optimal.

A decision to dismiss appeals against the controversial fast-track approval of a Microsoft document format has provoked six members of global standards-setting body ISO to question ISO's relevance. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela -- countries with fast-growing IT markets -- had appealed against ISO's stamp of approval for Microsoft Office Open XML,

Another front may be opening in the battle for mobile platform supremacy. Microsoft is rumored to be planning to launch its own mobile application store. If the buzz is true, Microsoft may not be as late to the party as some would think. Android hasn't yet debuted. Apple, for its part, is facing push-back on many fronts.

I've noted before that writing to MPs/MEPs seems to be remarkably effective in terms of generating a response. The naïve among us might even assume that democracy is almost functional in these cases. I'm not sure whether that applies to something as large and inscrutable as the European Commission, but it's certainly worth a try, especially in the context of open source and open standards.

Google launched an open-source web browser claimed to feature "enhanced stability and security." Downloadable now for Windows and expected soon for Linux and MacOS, Google Chrome features a new JavaScript engine, a private browsing mode, and tabs whose memory areas are protected from one another.

Open-source middleware maker Continuent has launched a database scale-out stack called Tungsten, which supports open-source databases like MySQL and proprietary wares from the likes of Oracle Corp. Last week, the company published code for Tungsten Replicator, a master-slave replication tool for MySQL, wrote Robert Hodges, chief technology officer at Continuent, in a blog post. Master-slave replication allows a "master" database to sync up with a number of "slaves," allowing a workload to be scaled out.

Sam Ramji is a busy man. As Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy, his job is a big one: overseeing the company's initiatives in Linux and open source. Wait a second – Microsoft’s strategy in open source? Yes, that’s right. The planet’s largest software company, whose relationship with open source has been, at best, hypercompetitive – Linux partisans might describe it less diplomatically – is reaching across the divide to the (formerly) enemy camp.

The Debian project will continue to its tradition of naming releases for characters in Pixar's classic animated movie, Toy Story. With "Lenny" in the final stages of preparation, Project Maintainer Luk Claes has announced that Lenny's successor will be named for "squeeze," a three-eyed space alien.

The open source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it is less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology's most powerful companies is now on the battlefield. So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Intel Corp. has snapped up British Linux house OpenedHand Ltd. in another sign of the growing interest in the use of the operating system on mobile devices. In a statement posted on OpenedHand's Web site, the company said that it is looking forward to working with the chip giant. "The OpenedHand team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Centre and will focus on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, the optimized software stack for Intel Atom processors," according to the statement.

In my last article for Linux Journal's web edition, I discussed a web-based program that queried an SQL database and output a native Excel file. That article was based on a program I wrote for a customer some time ago. Today, I'm going to write about doing the exact opposite; today's program will accept an Excel spreadsheet, collect data from it, and make additions to an SQL database. This program is also based on a program I'm writing for a customer. In fact, I wrote both programs for the same customer.

Google is getting into the browser game with its first beta release of Chrome. The long-rumored open source project is scheduled to become available to users in 100 countries Tuesday, starting a new battle for loyalty within the Internet Explorer and Firefox user bases. Chrome boasts a slew of features designed to improve stability and speed.

With the recent release of Microsoft's Hyper-V shaking up the hypervisor market, we decided to conduct a two-part evaluation pitting virtualization vendors against each other on performance as well as on features such as usability, management and migration. Microsoft and VMware accepted our invitation, but the open source virtualization vendors - Citrix (Xen) and Red Hat (Linux-based hypervisor) - were unable to participate because they are undergoing product revisions. That left us with a head-to-head matchup between Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware'smarket-leading ESX.

Finnix is a live CD distribution designed to assist system administrators in such tasks as system recovery and network monitoring. Based on Debian testing and Linux kernel 2.6, Finnix helps with filesystem and partition manipulation as well as with data recovery, installation of other operating systems, and boot record repair. Finnix works on both x86/AMD64 and PowerPC systems. The latest release, version 92.0, fixes the Debian SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) vulnerability that was present in previous releases.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a month-long celebration of the GNU Project's 25th anniversary with a video in which British actor and comedian Stephen Fry expresses his support for free software. The GNU Project, as most free software community members are aware, is a collection of free software projects whose creation is usually taken as marking the start of the free software movement. Today, GNU software makes up slightly less than 15% of the typical GNU/Linux distribution, according to Matt Lee, a campaigns manager at the FSF.

Juliet Kemp uses some Perl examples to demonstrate techniques for keeping all of your scripts, regardless of what language they are written in, understandable and useful. So that when you look at them six months later, you actually understand what you did, and they still work.

The head of South Africa’s government open source working group, the chief technical officer of the State IT Agency (Sita) and The Shuttleworth Foundation, have laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from it website.

Well Labor Day is here and gone again, and the footloose, fancy-free days of summer are over for another year. It may warrant the shedding of a small tear or two, but we here in the Linux community are fortunate to have so much uplifting and entertaining news these days to keep our spirits up.