Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Banshee Project has achieved the first major, stable release of its eponymous music jukebox application. Banshee 1.0 features faster searching, browsing, and management functions, along with improved memory usage, faster start-up, and a more responsive interface better supporting large collections, project leaders say.

A third release candidate of Mozilla Firefox 3 has been issued with a workaround for a bug introduced in the latest 10.5.3 update of Mac OS X. The problem causes the operating system to hang on shutdown if an application tries to open the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin file, which is a browser plugin included in OS X and accessed by Firefox under certain circumstances.

Last week we learned how to make simple video screencasts on Linux with recordMyDesktop. Today we're going to record audio from a microphone, get acquainted with JACK, and convert MyDesktop's Ogg files into AVI formats. Even the most low-budget onboard sound chip should have a microphone input. Plug in your mic, and then make sure it is enabled in your mixer. If your system has only a single sound card, enter hw:0,0 as the recording device in your recordMyDesktop configuration. And that's all you need to do.

Co-founders Jake St. Peter and Thomas Ingham started Coalmarch, a Web applications development company, in 2004 after "about 10 years' background in Web development" for other companies, St. Peters says. After working for a company called gotickets.com, he and his partner decided to launch their own business, providing content management systems and shopping carts. They use open source software, but with it they built a proprietary package -- because, St. Peter says, that's what customers want.

Campsite is an open source content management system (CMS) tuned for professional journalists. Like its broadcast radio sibling Campcaster (which we covered last year), Campsite targets independent media operating in emerging democracies and countries in transition. The CMS's latest release, 3.0, is a major update designed to be simpler to install and maintain. Campsite is a free software project developed by the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), a New York-based non-profit organization. The project's name derives from its development hub, MDLF's Center for Advanced Media in Prague (CAMP).

To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.

When you think of databases usually MySQL or Oracle or even Microsoft SQL Server come to mind. Yet, object oriented databases have the potential to cut down coding nuts and bolts and speed up app development time – particularly for those migrating to Linux from Windows. Here’s one such compelling SourceForge hosted open source system to do just this.

Breathe new functionality into your router with Tomato third-party firmware for popular models of Broadcom-based routers, including popular models manufactured by Linksys. Most consumers and users don't know the code for Linksys firmware is entirely open source and based on Linux. That allows developers to create customized firmware that extends the functionality of the router through a plethora of new features. Tomato provides a robust set of advanced features that outperform the default Linksys firmware, and rival other open source firmware such as DD-WRT in terms of functionality. Many different routers support Tomato, including models from Asus, Buffalo, and Linksys; a full compatibility listing can be found on Wikipedia or in the developer FAQ.

With the simplest of tools, I created a set of dynamic web pages. The tools I used were a sparse set of lean text files for content, one template page and all augmented by some anorexic php code. It's my propensity to experiment hastily pasting in rash changes that some times I soon rue. Nonetheless, my making such mistakes were the source of my determination to implement the subset of dynamically driven web pages described here. The aforementioned experience changed my direction as a developer. That outcome was positive for me. Finally,I can recommend these techniques to others that have a similar conditions on their site.

One of the biggest arguments used against Linux in grade school level education is that we aren't teaching kids to use the applications they'll use in the "real world". As the Technology Director for a K-12 school district, I've heard that argument many times. After all these years, I still don't buy it. Truthfully, to really give kids a well rounded education, we should expose them to as many different types of technology as we can. Children should be comfortable using whatever tool is at their disposal to accomplish a given task. This isn't a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. For some reason, when it comes to computers however, the "Microsoft Mantra" is all too prevalent.

The Linux kernel includes support for performing RAID-1 in software. RAID-1 maintains the same filesystem on two or more disks, so that you can lose all but the last disk and still retain all of your data. This seems wonderful until you consider that an error in RAM, a power supply failure, or another hardware component in the machine can still potentially corrupt your precious data. With Chiron FS you can maintain a RAID-1 on the disks of two machines over a network, so if one machine goes down, you'll still be able to access your filesystem.

Have you ever wondered what Iused and %Iused mean in UNIX commands like df or what people are talking about when the say inode? UNIX and Linux systems both use inodes, and IBM AIX is no different. Discover what an inode is and why inodes are important to UNIX, the structure of an inode, and commands for working with inodes.

Nearly a year after the Free Software Foundation released an updated version of the General Public License - the GPLv3 - there appears to be a great deal of confusion about what the license actually means, if one goes by two recent publications.

Here’s a little sneak preview of some of the educational sessions at this year’s Summit. And who better to outline their talks than the speakers themselves? In this first installment, Rik van Riel talks about computing speed; Fedora developer (and Red Hat engineer) Bill Nottingham outlines his thoughts on the most recent Fedora release; and Tom Callaway sums up his plans to speak about the simplest ways to use RPM.

With the recent release of Puppy Linux 4.00, developer Barry Kauler and his team have provided a lightweight but functional Linux operating system. To help reduce size and include more functionality over the previous binary-package-based Puppy 3.01, Puppy 4.00 has been compiled from a Slackware 12-based source. Yet despite its small size -- the ISO file is a meager 87.1MB -- Puppy has an abundance of applications, with more than enough for an average user.

Media processing vendor Pika Technologies Inc. recently announced that its Warp appliance line is customer-ready and ready to slay the Nortels and Ciscos of the world in a bid for the small to midsize corporate telespace. Pika's hardware line, which includes the Appliance for Asterisk and Appliance for Linux, is bundled with an open-source platform that will let develops tweak the software to their telephony needs.

IBM announced the completion of a one-petaflop supercomputer that runs Red Hat Linux. Twice as fast as the previous record-setter, the IBM Blue Gene, the Roadrunner uses a hybrid design that combines 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips with 12,960 Cell processor engines.

When you think of Linux, you probably think of open source software and security, but not gaming. Most people think if you are into gaming, Windows is your only option. A few years ago this might have been the case but not anymore. So, if you are a Linux power user, or just prefer Linux, here are a few of your options for playing games on your Linux box.

Silos and walled gardens are giving way to collabetition in the mobile handset industry. Faced with customer demands to innovate at nearly light speed, mobile handset makers are discovering that collaborating and using open source software can help them develop products faster, writes Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation.

Lakin Hospital, a long-term nursing facility operated by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, has adopted an open source electronic health record. The implementation is part of an ongoing project that will unite all of West Virginia's state-run healthcare facilities through a contiguous electronic repository of patient information.