Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Calao Systems has started shipping half a dozen expansion modules for its tiny USB key-sized Linux computer. The company has also launched a new low-powered USB computer that runs FreeRTOS, and offers CAN and LIN (local interconnect network) bus expansion.

What's new in this release (see below for details):

- Many more gdiplus functions implemented.
- Improved graphics tablet support.
- Many Richedit fixes and improvements.
- Support for HWND_MESSAGE windows.
- A lot of new MSHTML functions.
- Many fixes in MSI registry handling.
- Initial implementation of the inetmib1 DLL.
- Improvements to the quartz renderers.
- Various bug fixes.

If you work some of the time on your laptop and some of the time on your desktop box, making sure that your work is updated on both machines is a must. Many tools can help you accomplish this, from command-line tools such as scp and rsync to generic graphical applications like Konqueror or Krusader, to more specific tools like Unison. Komparator and KDiff3, a couple of KDE applications with interesting features, may offer better ways of syncing your work.

"I've always done the things that nobody else wanted to do," Michelle Bisson says, explaining how she became the only woman on the core team for the Joomla! content management system. "I say, 'Oh, that needs to be done? Okay, I'll do what I can.'" This outlook is responsible not only for making her one of the founders of the Joomla! project, but also for giving her an unusual degree of insight into how non-developers can contribute to free and open source software projects (FOSS).

Steganos Locknote is a handy little GPL-licensed utility for Windows, built using the Crypto++ class library. It is designed to keep text files secure, so you can store your sensitive information and passwords without having to worry about the information falling into the wrong hands. At 312KB, Locknote is quick and easy to download, and requires no installation. Once you have it, just double-click the icon. Locknote presents you with a small text window with instructions for using the program. Highlight and erase the instructions (don't worry, Locknote displays the same instructions each time you open it) and type or paste your own notes into the window.

In a move aimed at consolidating their efforts to support Linux use on mobile phones, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum is merging into the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation. The two groups — consortiums of suppliers of components such as chip sets, Linux operating systems, mobile application stacks and handsets, as well as regional and global wireless service providers — said they hope that joining forces will make the platform stronger.

Text editors are important for many tasks, from editing configuration files, nudging cron jobs, and manipulating XML files to quickly pushing out a README. Luckily, there are a number of interesting editors available. Here's a brief introduction to nine intriguing choices. While some may be better suited to certain tasks, it's no one tool is better than another for all tasks. Try them all and use the ones you like best.

June is Bandwidth Conservation Month (well, not officially, but let's say that it is), so if you have multiple machines running an APT-powered Linux distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu, you should take a look at apt-proxy, a utility that caches package downloads in a shared pool for all interested parties on your LAN. This saves you both the time and the bandwidth it costs to download the same updates for more than one computer.

After steadily losing membership this year, one of the earliest mobile Linux groups will close and join another faster growing initiative. On Thursday, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum plans to announce that its activities will be folded into the LiMo Foundation starting in July. The groups had slightly different activities although for a time many companies were members in both. The loss of one such group is likely good for the overall mobile Linux market, which has been criticized for being fragmented.

Red Hat Inc (RHT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the world's largest publicly traded provider of Linux software, reported on Wednesday a quarterly profit that met Wall Street expectations as its revenue grew 32 percent. Net income rose 7 percent to $17.3 million, or 8 cents per share, in its fiscal first quarter, from $16.2 million, or 8 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

While thinking about some of the recent stories on the over-hyped Windows XP on the XO I realized how ridiculous it seems for anyone to get excited about an operating system released in 2001. An operating system that is the successor of Windows ME! So instead of going down memory lane and mocking Microsoft I decided to compile a little overview of a cutting edge Sugar demo that I was shown when I was at OLPC HQ in Cambridge, MA some weekends ago. The demo setup was prepared by Alex, an intern at OLPC, and its goal is to show off some of the cool features that you can get to use on your XO when you spend some time tweaking the thing.

First thing out of the gate on Monday's news cycle was the announcement from HP that it is committing its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) code to an open source license. Not just any open source license, either; AdvFS is now under the GNU General Public License (v2), which officially makes AdvFS free software.

Linux is coming to an ultraportable near you! Sure, the oft-touted “year of the Linux desktop” is seen in the same light as such notable phrases like “the cheque’s in the mail”, “I’ll respect you in the morning” and “Duke Nukem Forever is being released” but there’s no denying the smash-hit success Linux is enjoying in the budget price ultraportable market. These are the Linux desktops that will catch on and here’s why.

You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You've given us the best shot we'll ever have of taking the desktop. But it gets even better! Microsoft has also announced that it will be releasing Windows 7 on January 2010. They'll blow that ship date. Microsoft has never set a shipping date it could meet. But, who in their right mind would now buy Vista?

Linux Certified sells Linux laptops and offers IT training to individuals and organizations. Its product line ranges from small, affordable units to performance laptops that cost well over $2,000. The company's customer list boasts the likes of Boeing, NASA, the US Army and MIT. But if recent trends are any indication, Linux Certified and similar companies that specialize in selling computers that run Linux are about to see some of the world's largest computer companies warm up to the open source operating system. Major manufacturers have begun to take notice of Linux's potential on the laptop.

Openmoko will distribute a mass-market version of its open Linux phone through five distributors in Germany, France, and India, it announced. The Neo Freerunner features an open hardware design, and a Linux-based operating system that users are free to modify. Previously, OpenMoko phones have been available only in limited quantities, mostly to open source mobile phone software developers. Today's announcement appears to signal the forthcoming release of OpenMoko's first product aimed at the mass market.

Last fall when the two mega-distros openSUSE and Mandriva both hit the mirrors, it was difficult to decide which I liked better. In an attempt to narrow it down, I ran some light-hearted tests and found Mandriva won out in a side-by-side comparison. But things change rapidly in the Linux world and I wondered how a competition of the newest releases would come out. Mandriva 2008.1 was released this past April and openSUSE 11.0 was released just last week.

Facebook is a wonderful example of the network effect, in which the value of a network to a user is exponentially proportional to the number of other users that network has. Facebook's power derives from what Jeff Rothschild, its vice president of technology, calls the "social graph"--the sum of the wildly various connections between the site's users and their friends; between people and events; between events and photos; between photos and people; and between a huge number of discrete objects linked by metadata describing them and their connections.

Different GNU/Linux distributions provide incompatible systems for package management, and to date no one has quite figured out a foolproof way to get the best of them all. But where the alien utility tries to convert between major package formats, and Smart and Klik try to imagine new, universal forms of software installation, PackageKit has the more modest goal of supplying a universal front end that leaves the native package systems intact underneath. As Richard Hughes, the project lead for PackageKit, puts it, "PackageKit is a glue layer between the distro-specific parts, and some prettiness."

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own. You can customize an Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron live CD to make a good bootable utilities disk by adding and removing packages from the standard installation. Specifically, you can remove most of the Ubuntu applications and install antivirus, a partition recover tool, a few disk utilities, and a rootkit checker, among other things. I'm going to create the live CD within an Ubuntu installation, but the directions should work for most Debian-based operating systems, and can be easily ported elsewhere.