Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Pardus is a GNU/Linux distribution funded and developed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Pardus has its own unique installer, package manager, configuration wizard, and control panel. This originality, and the developers' attention to detail, make Pardus worth a look. From the beginning of my experience, Pardus showed its attention to detail. The installer is so incredibly simple that even a Microsoft fan would be hard-pressed to complain. The installer hasn't changed much since we took a look at the previous release seven months ago, so I won't reiterate the process, but it's still worth mentioning how easy to use the installer is. My only complaint is that my choice of Dvorak for keyboard layout was not available as an option.

Yahoo is helping make location more global with the launch of its new Fire Eagle platform. Fire Eagle lets users update their location in one centralized place, then have that data broadcast to a number of services. The launch opens up new possibilities for developers. Because the platform is open, any service can put the data to use -- and plenty already are.

Who says you have to give up your must-have Windows applications when you migrate to Linux? If you can't leave some crucial Windows program behind, you can run it using CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux. Though today there are many great Linux end-user applications, some people still have "must-have" Windows applications -- Quicken instead of GnuCash, for instance, or Photoshop instead of the GIMP. That's where CrossOver Linux 7 comes in.

An important topic at Akademy is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many hackers here.

Its just been made official that the State of Pahang is migrating all its productivity suites to OpenOffice.org. This succinct memo from the State Secretary of Pahang entitled "Perlaksanaan Penggunaan Perisian OpenOffice.Org Di Semua Agensi dan Pentadbiran Negeri" (translated: "Implementation of OpenOffice.org suite in all State Agencies and Administrative centres") outlines the reasons for migrating, the benefits and how to proceed.

The Polish Ministry of National Education is advising schools and universities to use Open Source software. The recommendation comes at the end of a volunteer campaign to help schools switch to Open Source. The Ministry recommended in a statement that schools and universities use OpenOffice. The application suite is sufficiently mature and advanced to be used for teaching and for office use in education and science institutes."OpenOffice can successfully substitute proprietary applications and will result in significant savings on licenses."

Vyatta offers hardware and open source software for enterprise-level network infrastructure. Vyatta can turn any 32-bit x86 machine with at least one network interface into a network appliance that handles routing, firewall, and VPN tasks. The company released Vyatta Community Edition 4 in April, with improved scalability and feature enhancements. Large enterprises now have a low-cost alternative to proprietary hardware like the Cisco 7200.

Network latency and bandwidth are the two metrics most likely to be of interest when you benchmark a network. Even though most service and product advertising focuses on bandwidth, at times the latency can be a more important metric. Here's a look at three projects that include tools to test your network performance: nepim "network pipemeter," LMbench, and nuttcp. For this article I built each utility from source on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine. I used nepim version 0.51, LMbench version 3, and nuttcp version 5.5.5.

It used to be that travelers looking for the hippest getaway, the coziest hotel, or the best restaurant had to rely solely on travel guidebooks, which were often out of date by the time they were published. The Web, however, has spawned a new destination for those seeking travel information: travel wikis and online communities.

During the Emsys-sponsored Mobile and Embedded day at Akademy 2008 Nokia distributed 100 N810 internet tablets among the KDE hackers, and gave another 50 for the project to decide who to give to.

Guvnor is the business rules management system in Drools 5. When you deploy it out of the box, you get an unsecured web application that stores data in Jackrabbit’s embedded Derby database. This article explains how to tune Guvnor deployed on JBoss Application Server 4.2.3. This means that we will use the container’s configuration files and security infrastructure. We will cover enabling password validation based on an LDAP server, moving from the default data repository, and enabling SSL for better security.

It's been almost impossible to not stumble across laptopmag.com's hands-on experience with Windows XP on the XO since the article was published last Tuesday. In case you haven't seen it here's a link to the story called "Exclusive Hands-On With OLPC’s XO Running Windows XP" and the original verdict which read: "On paper, a dual boot XO gives kids the best of both worlds: the somewhat boring, but ubiquitous Microsoft OS and its giant universe of software together with Sugar, which is packed with learning tools for kids. However, our early peek suggests that the XP portion is not ready for primetime, as evidenced by the slow boot time, slow application load time, and trouble with multitasking and streaming media. We hope OLPC can fine tune the performance without increasing the cost."

A tech vendor-backed company that buys up patents in an effort to protect the Linux community from intellectual property litigation will soon launch a Web site to help inventors file defensive publications -- documents that make details of an invention public, preventing others from later making patent claims on it. "The more we can mobilize this community, the fewer patents that will actually be granted," said Keith Bergelt, who recently became CEO of the Open Invention Network. "Whatever happens in the patent reform world in the next [U.S.] administration is great, but we have to act now to stop the granting of patents that threaten Linux and open-source in general."

Developers from Nokia and Mozilla have been working hard to port the Mozilla Platform and Firefox to Qt and there are now some solid results available. An experimental build of Firefox Qt is available, and you can download the sources from Mozilla's mercurial repository. The plan is to merge the Qt branch into the central Mozilla branch to make the port official. KDE Dot News spoke to developer Oleg Romaxa from Nokia who came to Akademy 2008 from Finland.

HP has started shipping a $500 mini-notebook pre-installed with SUSE Linux. Boasting perhaps the largest keyboard in its class, the HP 2133 Mini-Note has an 8.9-inch WXGA display, 4GB of solid-state storage, 512MB of RAM, and a 1GHz Via C7 processor, with ExpressCard and SD-card expansion.

Like any true gaming fan, I like to share my gaming moments of glory -- that multifrag shot, and that super smooth drift around the S-bend. But most free and open source games don't record gameplay videos. Even those that do don't always make it easy to export videos out of the game. GLC is an audio/video capture tool that can capture videos in a variety of ways, and also encode them so that you can host them on your blog or upload them to video-sharing Web sites.

In his keynote speech at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer for Citrix Systems, announced the company's plan to open source Project Kensho, a set of tools that will help migrate virtual machines between different hypervisors and virtualization platforms. I sat down with Crosby, who joined Citrix from XenSource, where he had been chief technology officer.

A good way to see how your Web applications and server will behave under high load is by testing them with a simulated load. We tested several free software tools that do such testing to see which work best for what kinds of sites. If you leave out the load-testing packages that are no longer maintained, non-free, or fail the installation process in some obscure way, you are left with five candidates: curl-loader, httperf, Siege, Tsung, and Apache JMeter. Daniel Rubio already covered JMeter in detail, so I will not go into it again here, but I will compare it to the others in the final evaluation at the end of the article.

On Monday at Akademy, KDE's yearly world summit, the KDE e.V. held its general assembly, covering a wide range hot topics, regarding licensing and community scalability. While part of the meeting is dictated by intricacies of German association law, the AGM also provides a way of effectively solving issues arising in the KDE community and deciding on ways to move forward as an organisation. This year's KDE e.V. General Assembly endorsed a Code of Conduct, the Community Working Group and a Fiduciary License Agreement for KDE contributors.

Over the years, I've probably created thousands of reports for customers and co-workers. Usually, I have a web-based program that generates reports in either html or comma-separated format. The html format is a lot prettier and usually gives the user what they want. The comma-separated format allows the user to easily import the results into Excel, or into Open Office in the case of my more enlightened users. From there, they add formatting to the raw data and send the resulting report to whereever it's going. All this formating is done manually by customers who tend to want the same report periodically, so this results in a lot of re-work on their part. Most of the time, they're just happy to get the data and don't complain about having to pretty it up a bit. But there is a better way.