Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You've given us the best shot we'll ever have of taking the desktop. But it gets even better! Microsoft has also announced that it will be releasing Windows 7 on January 2010. They'll blow that ship date. Microsoft has never set a shipping date it could meet. But, who in their right mind would now buy Vista?

Linux Certified sells Linux laptops and offers IT training to individuals and organizations. Its product line ranges from small, affordable units to performance laptops that cost well over $2,000. The company's customer list boasts the likes of Boeing, NASA, the US Army and MIT. But if recent trends are any indication, Linux Certified and similar companies that specialize in selling computers that run Linux are about to see some of the world's largest computer companies warm up to the open source operating system. Major manufacturers have begun to take notice of Linux's potential on the laptop.

Openmoko will distribute a mass-market version of its open Linux phone through five distributors in Germany, France, and India, it announced. The Neo Freerunner features an open hardware design, and a Linux-based operating system that users are free to modify. Previously, OpenMoko phones have been available only in limited quantities, mostly to open source mobile phone software developers. Today's announcement appears to signal the forthcoming release of OpenMoko's first product aimed at the mass market.

Last fall when the two mega-distros openSUSE and Mandriva both hit the mirrors, it was difficult to decide which I liked better. In an attempt to narrow it down, I ran some light-hearted tests and found Mandriva won out in a side-by-side comparison. But things change rapidly in the Linux world and I wondered how a competition of the newest releases would come out. Mandriva 2008.1 was released this past April and openSUSE 11.0 was released just last week.

Facebook is a wonderful example of the network effect, in which the value of a network to a user is exponentially proportional to the number of other users that network has. Facebook's power derives from what Jeff Rothschild, its vice president of technology, calls the "social graph"--the sum of the wildly various connections between the site's users and their friends; between people and events; between events and photos; between photos and people; and between a huge number of discrete objects linked by metadata describing them and their connections.

Different GNU/Linux distributions provide incompatible systems for package management, and to date no one has quite figured out a foolproof way to get the best of them all. But where the alien utility tries to convert between major package formats, and Smart and Klik try to imagine new, universal forms of software installation, PackageKit has the more modest goal of supplying a universal front end that leaves the native package systems intact underneath. As Richard Hughes, the project lead for PackageKit, puts it, "PackageKit is a glue layer between the distro-specific parts, and some prettiness."

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own. You can customize an Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron live CD to make a good bootable utilities disk by adding and removing packages from the standard installation. Specifically, you can remove most of the Ubuntu applications and install antivirus, a partition recover tool, a few disk utilities, and a rootkit checker, among other things. I'm going to create the live CD within an Ubuntu installation, but the directions should work for most Debian-based operating systems, and can be easily ported elsewhere.

Created as a simple solution for managing documentation, DokuWiki has evolved into a powerful and flexible wiki suitable for most tasks involving collaborative editing. DokuWiki doesn't use a database back end (all pages are stored as plain text files), which makes it easy to install and maintain. Its access control list feature offers a user-friendly and flexible mechanism for restricting access to certain pages and namespaces. You can also extend DokuWiki's default functionality using plugins, and there are hundreds of plugins to choose from.

Zenwalk is one of the most promising Linux distribution. Based on Slackware, the distro is lightweight, simple and stable. We decided to make some questions to Jean-Philippe Guillemin, Zenwalk’s creator, regarding future plans and developments about this “GNU-Linux Operating System”.

The KDE Community is proud to announce the second beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 2 is aimed at testers, community members and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 2 is available as binary packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due for final release in late July 2008.

Yesterday we reported on the Linux Foundation's message they have issued on the behalf of more than 140 kernel developers: Binary-only kernel modules are harmful and undesirable. While no vendor was singled out in this message, the biggest hardware manufacturer that has yet to provide any real level of open-source support is NVIDIA Corporation.

Openmoko, creator of the first completely open mobile computing platform, today announced agreements with five distributors for the Neo Freerunner Open Source mobile phone. Today, Openmoko will begin shipping the next generation Neo Freerunner to Pulster, Golden Delicious Computers and TRIsoft located in Germany, Bearstech in France and IDA Systems based in India.

At the end of my travails that described configuring a mixed dual monitor setup under Ubuntu 6.06, one digital and the other analog I mentioned two pertinent thoughts. One was my intention to test the dual monitor configuration abilities of later Ubuntu versions, which I heard were easier. The other was an observation, quoted here: "... even known errors need not be deadly, however, easy to do mislabeling of port numbers are a killer.", which again proved to be true, albeit, on a very weird installation of Ubuntu 7.10.

Canonical isnâ??t wasting any time getting Ubuntu ready for UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). The company just announced on June 24 that the developer release of Ubuntu MID Edition 8.04 is ready for testing. Ubuntu MID, formerly Ubuntu Netbook Remix, based on standard Ubuntu. It has been customized for use with Intelâ??s new Atom processor, but its heart is pure open-source Ubuntu Linux.

Canonical on Tuesday released its first publicly available developer edition of Ubuntu for mobile Internet devices. One option for Ubuntu MID's user interface. One option for Ubuntu MID's user interface. Ubuntu MID works on two devices at present, the Samsung Q1U and the Intel Crown Beach development station for building devices using the company's Atom processor. It also can be run on ordinary computers through the KVM virtualization software. A MID--a concept Intel is aggressively promoting--is a mobile device larger and more like a regular computer than, say an Apple iPhone, but smaller than an ultraportable PC.

Marseilles, France-based Nexvision has announced a network IP (Internet protocol) video camera design that incorporates the Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci TMS320DM6467 processor. The Linux-based CamHD hardware/software reference design is equipped with an Altera Cyclone III FPGA (field-programmable gate array), and boasts a claimed 1080P HD resolution.

With optical character recognition (OCR), you can scan the contents of a document into a single file of editable text. This article, which focuses on scanning books, describes the steps you need to take to prepare pages for optimal OCR results, and compares various free OCR tools to determine which is the best at extracting the text. First, fire up your distribution's package manager to fetch a few packages and dependencies. In Debian, the required packages are sane, sane-utils, imagemagick, unpaper, tesseract-ocr, and tesseract-ocr-eng. You may also install other language packs for Tesseract -- for example, I installed tesseract-ocr-deu for German text.

One of the things that initially attracted me to OLPC was that we Nepalis could it make it our own. So often ideas and initiatives that come from the West are pre-packaged and controlled. With XO's we can localize the Sugar interface, develop activities that accord to our needs and culture, and come up with power solutions that work in our particular environments. One of the key things that we needed to localize was the name of the laptop itself. This has happened in an unexpected manner.

Cooperative Linux (coLinux for short) occupies a unique niche in the field of virtualization -- that of running GNU/Linux natively in Windows. Although begun in 2000, the project has only recently released version 0.72, but it has given the underlying technology to several other higher profile projects such as andLinux and Ulteo Virtual Desktop. Now, with the current interest in attracting Windows users to GNU/Linux, as evidenced by such tools as Ubuntu's Wubi and Fedora's Live USB-Creator, the technology behind coLinux seems overdue for a closer look.

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