Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker
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The office where I am network administrator switched most users to OpenOffice.org (OOo) back at version 1.1, and has followed the upgrade process to the current version 2.3 (a few poor users who have to exchange documents outside the office with high fidelity are still clinging to their MS Office 97). Our receptionist does a lot of general secretarial duties, including lots of letters, envelopes, and labels that involve mail merge. Since this seems to be a sticking point for many people, I am putting everything I have learned from helping her and have gleaned from various sources on the Internet together in this tutorial.
Run Window apps on Linux? It just takes a drop of mature wine
Wine is well-known on Linux forums. Many a new Linux user has sought to run their old Windows applications on their new operating system. Short of having a clear open source alternative that reads and writes to the same file formats â?? for instance, Open Office is a viable solution to opening archived Microsoft Word documents â?? the venerable Wine is regularly touted as the first option. Wine, simply put, facilitates running Microsoft Windows applications within Linux. The programs will display in their own windows just as if they were native Linux applications.
Enterprise Unix Roundup: Making Good on a Promise
One of the unsung heroes of the Unix realm is — I kid you not — IBM. Stop laughing, I'm serious. I completely realize that IBM is a (if not the) giant of Unix and Linux on just about any platform it makes, and to assign the label "unsung" probably sounds a bit ridiculous. But, at least in one area, I don't think it is given nearly as much credit as it deserves.
Google's Android arrives in Sydney
Android developer advocate, Dan Morrill had a prototype unit to show delegates when he presented on the Android platform and the software developers kit. iTWire was not able to get a look at it, but Morrill said his presentation was very similar to one given at the Google IO developer event in the US at the end of May, a video of which is available online. Morrill confirmed that the first Android handset would hit the market before the end of 2008, but declined to say who would manufacture it or to name any manufacturers that had commited to make Android handsets.
Kernel space: Interview with Andrew Morton
Andrew Morton is well-known in the kernel community for doing a wide variety of different tasks: maintaining the -mm tree for patches that may be on their way to the mainline, reviewing lots of patches, giving presentations about working with the community, and, in general, handling lots of important and visible kernel development chores. Things are changing in the way he does things, though, so we asked him a few questions by email. He responded at length about the -mm tree and how that is changing with the advent of linux-next, kernel quality, and what folks can do to help make the kernel better.
Ian Lynch's take on the BECTA fiasco
I have recently read an eye-opening email from Ian Lynch about what happened in the UK with BECTA. I have received his permission to republish here his thoughts. I think his email speaks volumes about what happened.
Linux Leads the Super Pack
As expected, the US has the greatest number of computers in the list, in fact slightly more than half. Of the rest, most (37%) are in Europe with a small number of systems in Japan (22), China (12) and India (6). Of much more interest, as I alluded to in a recent article is the penetration of Linux into this arena. Depending upon how you count the numbers provided by TOP500, between 85% and 89% of the Supercomputers are running some version of Linux. Of those that identify the distro, SuSE outnumbers Red Hat 10 to 1. No others are identified.
Lessons learned from NCSU FOSS class
Free and open source software (FOSS) is only beginning to find a foothold in computer science departments in North America. FOSS tools may be used in teaching or be the subject of research or special committees, but few departments include courses that introduce students to the FOSS community. As a result, when North Carolina State University created a FOSS graduate course in the 2008 spring semester, it turned to Red Hat to find an instructor with a suitable background of FOSS involvement and university teaching experience. Community manager Greg DeKoenigsberg recommended performance tools engineer Will Cohen, who now looks back at the experience with an eye to how what he and his students learned might help other instructors.
Simplifying infrared device configuration
Building a MythTV digital video recorder (DVR) is a series of small battles -- configuring digital sound, aligning your video sources and channel guide data, getting XvMC running, and so on. Any tool that simplifies one of those battles is welcome, and GNOME LIRC Properties promises to be just such a tool. It is a shortcut to configuring infrared receivers and remote controls, and although it is not perfect, it is a good step in the right direction.
Smart ACL management with Eiciel
The traditional file permission model, where read, write, and execute permissions are set on each file for the user, group, and others (UGO) has one drawback: It can't be used to define per-user or per-group permissions. For that, you need to employ access control lists (ACL). Eiciel is a graphical tool that integrates with the Nautilus file manager and allows for easy ACL management. The UGO model lets you associate only one group with a file. If you try to define read permissions on a file for user Charlie and read and write permissions for user Alexia, and Charlie and Alexia belong to different groups, you'll see what I mean. With ACLs, you can specify elaborate permissions for multiple users and groups.
Starting SSH connections simply with SSHMenu
SSHMenu adds a button to your GNOME panel that displays a configurable drop-down list of hosts that you have might like to connect to with SSH. SSHMenu is packaged and available in repositories for both Ubuntu (as sshmenu-gnome) and Fedora (gnome-applet-sshmenu). Other SSHMenu packages available for both distributions do not include GNOME support. In those, the button for the SSH menu is started in its own window and an xterm is started when you wish to connect to a host with SSH. If you install the GNOME-aware SSHMenu packages, you can add SSHMenu to your panel by right-clicking the panel and choosing "Add to Panel..." and selecting the "SSH Menu Applet." When using the GNOME-aware SSHMenu, a gnome-terminal is started to handle your SSH connections, and you can select the profile gnome-terminal should use on a per-host basis. That lets you specify a font and background color in the terminal that can act as a reminder of which host that terminal is connected with.
Dynamic Content - Page Failure Notification
My previous article discussed a set of dynamic menus based upon no more than one, simple web page template, a few appropriate text files and absolutely minimal php code. There is a caveat, I dodged my responsibilities, i.e. I showed no effort to catch failures and errors. This was due to my initial code being flawed, hence, the first article was able to stress the core simplicity of the endeavor. Now, however, I attend to more serious business of both noticing failures and notifying those responsible.
Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 11.0: KDE with Stephan Binner
With openSUSE 11.0 just a few days away, it’s time to look at one of the stars of the show: KDE. In openSUSE 11.0, you get two KDEs for the price of one. Here we’ll take a look at what’s coming in KDE, and talk to one of openSUSE’s KDE contributors, Stephan Binner.
AtMail Open provides scalable, customizable webmail
Email: businesses can't stay competitive without it, but the bigger a company is, the more of a headache managing an email server can be. There are plenty of email management tools on the market, but many are expensive or lack easy customization. AtMail recently added an open source option to its product line that offers many of the same features commonly found in other Web mail apps, but for the low, low cost of free.
XML standards key in government - Steve Pepper
As the representative for Norway in the recent OOXML ratification process, Steve Pepper has become an outspoken critic of the IEC/ISO process. Pepper is also a passionate advocate of XML, open standards and Topic Maps. Here Pepper, who is in South Africa for the XML in Government workshop, speaks to Tectonic about what happened in Norway, Topic Maps and why open standards are important for governments.
SUSE Linux Rulz!
Already announced, the new winner is IBM’s RoadRunner – the first supercomputer to break the ‘mythical’ 1 TFop/s barrier. At a recent benchmark, it achieved 1.026 TFop/s on the Linpack benchmark. The OS is yet to be confirmed, but pretty-much every other IBM computer in the list is running a version of SUSE. I’ll be guessing much the same as you! Assuming the remainder of the list looks a lot like the previous list (November 2007), running second and third, we find a couple of IBM Blue Gene systems, then SGI and Hewlett Packard get a look in.
gPodder's no plodder when it comes to podcasts
Catch all of your podcasts in style with gPodder, a Python application designed to retrieve and organize your podcasts for easy playback. gPodder can handle both RSS 2.0 and Atom podcast feeds. As soon as you add episodes to the podcatcher, the application can download them using a few different protocols, including authenticated HTTP (for feeds that require a password) and BitTorrent. BitTorrent is especially nice for popular podcasts that have a lot of subscribers and large episodes, because you can use it to download from multiple sources, called seeds, and speed up your downloads.
Firefox 3 Is Given to the World – Or Maybe Not
As you may have noticed, Firefox 3 is released today. Excited by this prospect, the first thing I did when I got up was to rush to my computer to download it (yes, pathetic, I know). And what do I find? That only Firefox 2 is on offer. I go to the main Download Day 2008 site, and for all its flash/Flash zoomable graphics, I can't find any information about exactly when Firefox 3 will be publicly available, which seems crazy: the one thing this site should be doing is making it easy for as many people as possible to download Firefox 3.
Under-the-Hood Mac OS X Mozilla Firefox 3 Improvements Detailed
Mozilla Mac developer Josh Aas has written a weblog post discussing some of the under-the-hood improvements specific to the Mac OS X version of Mozilla Firefox 3. Josh describes how Firefox 3 has largely switched from Apple's legacy Carbon API (initially created to make it easier for developers to migrate OS 9 applications to OS X) to the more modern Cocoa. He also details how Firefox 3 delivers native-looking Aqua-style form controls in Web pages and explains how this actually has very little to do with the change to Cocoa.
Bringing the trashcan to the command line
The trash project allows you to interact with your desktop trashcan from the command line. It lets users "undo" deletions made with the trash command in a similar manner to restoring files from the trashcan in a desktop environment. For experienced Linux users, the trash command comes in handy when you want to put a file into the trashcan from the command line. Because trash implements the FreeDesktop.org Trash Specification, it plays nicely with the trashcan offered by the KDE desktop environment. That means you can trash a directory from the command line and see it in your trashcan from Konqueror. Unfortunately, the trash implementation in GNOME 2.20 did not communicate with either KDE 3.5.8 or the trash command.
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