Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

More people are converting to Linux platform and it seems that they are not regretting the conversion. It was after the church service when there was a tap on my shoulder. "Hey Neil, just letting you know that you converted me" said the voice. I turned around. There before me was Gary (not his real name), a member of our church. Before I had the brainpower to wonder why it was that a Christian in our church had just announced that I had converted him, he continued. "I'm using Linux"

Mercury Computer Systems announced a Linux-based engineering development kit (EDK) for a 7-10 pound computer that targets small ground, naval, and air vehicles. The "ruggedized" PowerBlock 50 (pictured at left) supports multiple processors to provide "well over 100 GFLOPS of processing power," according to Mercury.

OfflineIMAP allows you to read your email while you are not connected to the Internet. This is great when you are traveling and really need an attachment from a message but cannot connect to the Internet. You can use OfflineIMAP to sync all your email during the night so that it is all instantly available when you wake up. This is a security trade-off -- you gain speed and availability for your email at the expense of having to properly protect the local copy of all the email that is created on your laptop.

Want to run web applications on your desktop without a browser? Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) does exactly that and now an alpha release for Linux is available. Adobe has already released AIR 1.0 for Windows and Mac but apparently the Linux version has been delayed while Adobe waited for Flash for Linux to be finalised. Air makes it possible to run a range of applications (usually web applications) on Windows, Linux and Mac using the runtime environment.

The programme committee of the Akademy 2008 KDE contributor's conference would like to thank everybody who already has submitted a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008. The conference programme is beggining to gain shape. Due to popular request the program committee would like to solicit additional proposals and has decided to extend the deadline for submission of proposals to Monday, May 12th. Tell the world about your contribution to KDE. Tell the community what cool things you have done with KDE. Submit your proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008 no later than Monday, May 12th 2008, 23:59 UTC, to akademy-talks-2008@kde.org.

Packt Publishing has published a book about administrating Scalix, an open source email and calendaring software package. Author Markus Feilner and the publisher have generously agreed to share a sample chapter on the the Scalix Administration Console (SAC), excerpted from the work, Scalix: Linux Administrator’s Guide.

KDE Italia is attending this year'sOpen Mind Free Software event from May 8 to May 10, 2008. This event is tailored for all people with an emphasis on young students. Giovanni Venturi and Daniele Costarella will give a presentation on KDE 4 as well as provide further information on KDE applications during their workshop. Open Mind is located atVilla Bruno - San Giorgio a Cremano - Napoli - Italy. There will be a KDE Italia booth at the event where you can go for more information on the team as well as KDE. Please stop by and say hello to Giovanni Venturi and the rest of KDE Italia.

In a new series of People Behind KDE interviews, we visit the United States of America to meet a KDE developer with an affinity for education, accessibility, and Asian culture, a person who works on getting you Hot New Stuff - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jeremy Paul Whiting.

Sun Microsystems officially launched OpenSolaris (OS) today. Available pre-built as a combo live/install CD, the initial binary distribution download of the OS features a GNOME user interface, highly fault tolerant ZFS root filesystem, IPS package managment, and "DTrace" tuning tools.

"I'm a genuine old fart," says Tim Bray as he looks back at his three decades in computing. Widely known for his standards work on XML and the Atom syndication format, at an age when many former developers have moved entirely into management, he seems to have found a niche that takes advantage of his experience. As director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, his job is to keep current with Web and general programming and to encourage adaptation of new developments within the corporation. At the recent Open Web Vancouver conference, Bray talked to Linux.com about how he fills his role at Sun, and the trends he sees in computing.

Reality, as good writers know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. SCO's recent performance in the U.S. District Court in Utah is a perfect example. With years to prepare, SCO executives made some remarkable statements in their attempt to show that SCO, not Novell, owns Unix's copyright. While this case is not about SCO's claims that IBM and other companies placed Unix IP (intellectual property) into Linux, Novell's attorneys decided that they would address this issue as well. One presumes that, since this may be their one and only chance to attack SCO's Linux claims in a courtroom -- what with SCO facing bankruptcy -- they decided to address this FUD once and for all.

Its been been six months since Puppy Linux 3.01 was released and today Barry Kauler announced Puppy 4.00, aka Dingo. Clocking in at a minimal 87MB download, Puppy 4.00 is a lightweight desktop Linux alternative ideal for low-end machines, or for users who want a little less clutter and more speed from their desktop.

Everyone knows what a Linux shell is -- you open up a Linux terminal window (such as Konsole or xterm), type in some commands, and there you are, using your Linux shell. Write your commands to a file, make it executable, run it, and you're a shell programmer. But did you know that there are different shells that you can use, and that each shell operates in a slightly different way? My personal favorite is the Korn shell; by the end of this article, it may be your favorite as well.

Linux Journal Products Editor, James Gray, spoke with Jim Lacey, Linux Professional Institute's President and CEO, about Linux certification today and its outlook for the future.

Entrepreneurs in Kenya are putting Linux to work to cut costs and maximise profits as they look for new ways to bring computing to users.One of these entrepreneurs is Patrick Mathenge, CEO of Mullard Electronic Limited, a firm trading in hardware and software from its Mombasa Road offices. The company is distributing Linux software that can turn a single computer into up to 10 workstations.

WordPress plugins for multimedia can make your blog more interesting. These four plugins make it possible to automatically generate and configure multimedia, making your site a richer experience for your visitors and for you. Odiogo is a free service that converts your blog posts into audio podcasts. The Odiogo Listen Button plugin for WordPress makes it easy for your visitors to listen to and even save the audio version of your posts.

A mere three years after starting the OpenSolaris project, Sun Microsystems today releases the first official OpenSolaris version. OpenSolaris includes the all-important Project Indiana, a project from Debian founder Ian Murdock to make OpenSolaris’ package management system more like that of Linux.

When I demonstrate software for Linux Journal, I tend to use Ubuntu as my operating system. The reason is simply because Ubuntu is extremely popular, but it begs the question, should the Linux community standardize on a single distribution?

[Geez, how did I know that Ubuntu would get the nod on that one.. - Scott]

Both big open source vendors have in the past month expressed intentions to stay within the enterprise space. Red Hat said in a blog post the consumer space does not pose a viable business proposition for it at present: "The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that todays Linux desktops simply dont provide a practical alternative...building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities."

The first supported first version of Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris, AKA Project Indiana, makes its debut today with additional backing from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud. Sun is introducing three levels of paid support for the OpenSolaris 2008.5 code drop for developers and end users. Support starts at $49 per incident for developers and runs to $2,160 per system per year for tailored customizations, and includes 24x7 phone support along with fixes and updates.