Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With Gizmo5, not only can you use your PC to make or get phone calls on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh PCs. But unlike similar programs, such as Skype, Gizmo5 uses open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jabber, which makes it interoperable with a variety of clients. Previously known as the Gizmo Project, Gizmo5 is both the name of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network (with its own servers and users, working over the Internet) and of a program that lets you communicate by using that network. Though it uses open standards, Gizmo5 doesn't qualify as open software itself. It uses several proprietary codecs, and the client code itself is closed source.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53 percent of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit. And such contributions would benefit the enterprise even more than it would the development community, he explained. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, 75 percent of software is written for in-house use. As Whitehurst pointed out, much of that code is never used—a true waste of resources. "Think how much software is written out there that is behind proprietary walls," Whitehurst said.

Acoustic Reality is a Danish company that sells speakers, amplifiers, storage devices, cables, and other products to build top-shelf home entertainment centers. It recently released eAR OS Free Edition, a free media center system built on top of Ubuntu that features a free version of the Acoustic Reality software technology used in the $100 eAR RT-OS Enterprise Edition and in the company's hardware Media 4 products. It provides a user-friendly media center along with a nice implementation of Ubuntu.

If you drift between distributions, one of the first things you might notice is that Gedit, GNOME's text editor, is not always the same on each system. For instance, in Debian, Gedit is a relatively simple text edit, while in Ubuntu, it sprouts features that Debian users may never have seen. The difference is the plugins that each distribution packages with Gedit and enables by default. Many of these plugins make only small alterations by themselves, but enable a dozen or more and you'll find Gedit transformed almost out of recognition, regardless of whether you are using it to write code or plain text.

Disasters happen to the best of computers. Luckily, open source apps like SystemRescueCD, dd, Partedmagic, BackTrack, Security Tools Distribution, Helix, and TestDisk can help recover important data and bring dead systems back to life.

French open-source data integration vendor Talend Monday unveiled its data-profiling application, which will allow companies to assess their data quality as a key part of data integration projects. In an announcement Monday, the company claims that its Open Profiler application is the first open-source data profiler to be released to the marketplace.

Neuros Technology is the developer of the Neuros OSD, a digital media recorder. The devices works with external hard drives to archive and copy your media. Unlike a normal DVR, the OSD can record from any source: set top boxes, DVD players, DTV signals. It is limited to standard definition signals (720x480 max), but works with a plethora of formats, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, FLV, WMV, DiVX and others. Other limitations include S-Video input (no component) and no support for digital signals from HDMI sources.

HP is opening up its Tru64 Advanced File System (AdvFS) to the open source Linux community in a bid to help further Linux file system innovation. The AdvFS file system, which has its roots in Digital Equipment Corporation's Digital Unix, is used in mission-critical deployments by HP customers. But HP, which gained AdvFS through a series of acquisitions, has its own flavor of Unix, HP-UX, with its own file system.

It's summer in the United States which means Google's annual season of code is in swing. This event has run over the past three years and is by all measures a successful happening. That it even happens is phenomenal enough and this year there's many great projects that will benefit, covering a wide range of fundamental open source applications as well as notable causes like the One Laptop per Child project.

The ears of attendees at Hewlett-Packard Co.'s annual technical conference seemed to perk up last week when HP CIO Randy Mott said that many companies are spending too much to keep aging systems running. "More and more of our resources are going to support old technology," Mott said at the HP Technology Forum & Expo 2008 in Las Vegas. He didn't specify what he considers old. But talking about the cost of legacy systems tends to get the attention of users who in recent years have seen HP discontinue technologies such as its Alpha processor, Tru64 Unix operating system and HP e3000 midrange server line.

The other day, I was trying to explain to my wife why I wanted to install Ubuntu on my Eee PC in place of Xandros. She is not tech-stupid. She’s quite tech-savvy actually. She just isn’t that Linux-savvy. I found myself spewing out a whole bunch of words I knew she wouldn’t understand. Why would any normal person know what a distro or a repository is? What’s a kernel? What’s sudo? Well, the sudo thing she got, because she’s a Mac user and has used OS X’s terminal before.

In my last article I talked about changing Linux so that software updates come from your ISPs local Linux mirror, which may not count towards your monthly download allowance. In this article I'll chat about how to install applications.

Mobile phones designed around Google's Android software may not be available until the fourth quarter of this year, and some companies are struggling to even meet that deadline, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing unidentified sources.

You get some positive news, such as the Amicus brief filed by the EFF and others in the Jammie Thomas case, which could net her a new trial. But also on Friday, the MPAA filed its own brief, one which basically says it feels evidence isn't necessary in the case of one of its copyright infringement trials.

["We have no actual evidence to prove the defendant downloaded the movies Your Honor, we just know they did." - Scott]

Due any day now is the Asus Eee 901, the successor to the subnotebook that did the most to kick off the cheap, yet fully useable, portable computing revolution. With so many cheap subnotebooks now on the way to Australia, is it worth taking the Eee plunge, or waiting a bit longer for more choice?

LXer Feature: 22-Jun-2008

In this week's Roundup we have Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu, Is Linux Ready for Firefox 3?, After 15 years in beta Wine 1.o finally arrives along with a review, an interview with Andrew Morton, AMD Makes An Evolutionary Leap In Linux Support, a Damn Small Linux 4.4 Review, the top 10 best GTK applications not included in GNOME and Nokia thinks that open source developers should play by their rules.

With the release of the Linux 2.6.26-rc7 kernel, the release of Linux 2.6.26 final is nearing. The big change in Linux 2.6.26-rc7 is the Intel and ATI DRM update we talked about earlier this week. That update brings R500 DRM support, updated microcode for all Radeon GPUs, and Intel GMA 4-Series (the upcoming X4500 Chipset) DRM support. Linus Torvald's mailing list message and short change-log can be read at Kernel Trap.

At first I thought that I was looking at a late April's fool joke. Then I was reminded of other potentially faked material involving Microsoft and OLPC. But the more often I look at the photos that Gizmodo has posted the more I believe that I'm really looking at a limited edition XO-1 that comes in red..

PlayOnLinux 3.0.5 has been released, its a minor update with the main change being improvements made to the integrated tchat client.

Here are five popular ways to capture desktop screencast for Linux