Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In an iHealthBeat Special Report, experts on open-source software discussed the next steps for Open Health Tools, an initiative designed to encourage the use of the software and promote interoperability in health care.

Ubuntu, Linspire, and Freespire users can now install "Google Earth" with a single click, says Linspire. The desktop Linux distributor has added support for the free mapping application to its CNR ("click-n-run") installer, a user-friendly tool currently beta-testing for a wide variety of desktop Linux distributions. Linspire said the version of Google Earth that CNR supports will work with Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 (32-bit), Linspire 6.0, and Freespire 2.0. Presumably, it will also support Ubuntu's Hardy Heron release scheduled for tomorrow, as Linspire has promised CNR support for that release.

The ability to import and export data is crucial to any database management system, and OpenOffice.org Base is no exception. While you may be surprised to discover that OpenOffice.org lacks a dedicated import/export feature, it does allow you to get data into and out of a database in a variety of ways.

A step-by-step tutorial on setting up Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) desktop (GNOME) has been published on HowtoForge.com. Written by Oliver Meyer, the six-page tutorial, called "The Perfect Desktop," covers basic configuration, and then steps through installations for over a dozen Linux applications. Mandriva has been around for awhile, but the distro was substantially updated for the 2.6.22.9 Linux kernel in a Mandriva 2008 release in October.

Stripped-down operating systems made specifically for virtual machine appliances have tickled the fancy of the Linux collective, and these types of systems are keeping commercial distributors busy pushing out their versions of the concept. Last September at VMworld, Canonical unveiled Ubuntu JeOS — pronounced juice and short for "just enough operating system." The idea was to rip out general purpose software from the OS, leaving only a lightweight container that ISVs can customize for their particular application. This in theory makes an appliance smaller and more efficient in a virtual environment.

Using toast takes the burden out of building, installing, and keeping track of software built from source. You can use toast to build and maintain software installed in your /home directory as a regular user, or to set up software for all users in /usr/local. toast can obtain packages over HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and via SSH and CVS. It can handle most archive formats, as well as .rpm and .deb packages.

Thanks to a wonderful new open source tool called Wubi, downloading and installing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux is now a snap for Windows users. It’s a pity the Ubuntu development team still hasn’t taken the hint with its latest release, Hardy Heron.

All your phones, are belong to Google — a brief overview of Android, the new software stack created by Google for the Open Handset Alliance. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is an industry trade group comprising more than 30 technology and mobile companies. The focus of the OHA is to accelerate innovation in the mobile application and hardware space and to provide consumers with a more comprehensive and inexpensive mobile device experience. Android is a new, mobile application development framework developed by Google for the OHA that represents part of a greater promise from OHA members to make the open platform an industry success.

Ubuntu 8.04, dubbed Hardy Heron, is out this week and Linuxophiles worldwide are excited. It’s not hard to see why, but is this really the much-fabled year of the Linux desktop? Will the Heron match the unmet hype of predecessor Gutsy Gibbon? And let me tell you just how spectacular and cool Wubi is.

Good systems administrators know that implementing a robust backup procedure is one of their most important duties. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most complex and least fun. When the phone rings and there's a panic-stricken user on the other end who has just lost a crucial document, you need to be confident that you can promptly recover his missing files. Failure to do so can bring about a speedy end to a promising career in systems administration. So what's a budding sysadmin to do? Download the latest release of Bacula and watch those backup woes disappear into the dark of night.

Linux is expanding its influence outside of the world of smartphones, and is poised to take a significant share of the mid-range mobile phone market as well, according to a new study from ABI Research. The study, released this week, found that efforts to promote and standardize Linux on mobile phones are paying off, while problems relating to Linux's processor requirements are being alleviated.

Frustrated software programmers unable to sign up to the voluntarily run community of developers behind the Debian GNU/Linux operating system have criticised the management of the project. Voicing their frustration on discussion forums, including Planet Debian, developers had begun to question the Linux-based operating system's future, according to reports.

Red Hat has published a "preview release" of Fedora 9, the next version of its freely available Linux distribution, which will be the last public release before the final edition next month. The final version of Fedora 9 was initially planned for next week, but the release has been put back by two weeks to 13 May, according to the Fedora Project.

SCO has filed its monthly operating reports for SCO Group and SCO Operations for the month of March, and it looks like SCO Group has achieved its goal of having no money left for Novell, although it's hard to tell, since the document for Group is almost blank. I totally know nothing about accounting, so I'll just list what I notice, and you can figure out what it means.

Preparations for Akademy 2008 are in full swing, but KDE e.V. is already looking forward to next year and asks potential hosts to submit proposals for Akademy 2009. For the first time we also invite proposals to hold Akademy and GUADEC, the GNOME community conference, in the same location. More information can be found in the Call for Hosts for Akademy 2009 below or in the joint press release of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation.

On Thursday, the Ubuntu 8.04 magic happens. The operating system - called Hardy Heron at playgrounds around Silicon Valley - goes up for download in its various forms, most notably Server and Desktop. Like most open source jobs, these Ubuntu OS releases are protracted affairs. Canonical, the corporate body behind Ubuntu, has already told everyone what to expect with the OS during the beta process. We covered most of the major new features last month and won't bore you with the details again.

Bob Bickel, co-founder of Ringside Networks, says companies need to harness the power of social networking and entice customers to visit corporate Web sites with the same eagerness they show for sites like Facebook. He believes the Ringside Social Application Server -- an open source platform that puts social networking tools on any existing Web site -- is the answer CEOs are looking for.

Robert Shingledecker has announced the final release of Damn Small Linux 4.3. From the changelog: "Updated Firefox browser to version 2; updated murgaLua to 0.6.8; updated nano-tiny to 2.0.7; updated and consolidation of mydslBrowser with new mydslBrowser.lua; new picture puzzle added to Games collection; new calculator.lua replaces Calcoo; optimized minirt24.gz - much smaller; new background and theme for both JWM and Fluxbox; updated 'noicons' boot option to suppress icons in JWM; fixed removal of mydsl extensions on traditional hard drive installations; dropped SCSI modules for needed space - available in the modules section; fixed CD recording scanbus device error by adding scsi/sg.o module; updated editor.lua - menu issue resolved for new murgaLua version...."

One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject. As the name suggests, Writer's Tools is a collection of various utilities that might be useful for writers. It's a little rough in places, being only at version 0.9.27, and possibly a little idiosyncratic, but like Emacs, Writer's Tools is so varied that it undoubtedly has something for everyone, regardless of their writing habits.

Registration is open for the tenth annual edition of OSCON (Open Source Convention), as well as for a co-located Ubuntu Live conference. Scheduled for Jul. 21-25 in Portland, Ore., O'Reilly's OSCON 2008 is expected to draw some 2,500 open source experts, visionaries, and hackers.