Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Asustek Computer plans to share its experience with open-source software in its popular Eee PC low-cost laptop at the OpenTechSummit Taiwan 2008, which runs from April 25 to 29, the company said. The Taiwanese PC vendor is the largest corporate sponsor of the event and is currently selling the most popular laptop that carries an open source OS, the Eee PC.

Today's Web development tools offer capabilities that go beyond basic HTML editing. I compared three Web editors for Linux -- Screem 0.16.1, Bluefish 1.0.7, and Quanta Plus 3.5.7 -- to determine how well they handle today's Web editing needs.The three programs are similar in many ways. All three are primarily code editors with syntax highlighting, smart indentation, and other features to make writing and editing code easier. Screem is tightly integrated with the GNOME desktop environment, while Bluefish will run on KDE and GNOME. Quanta Plus is a KDE application distributed with KDE.

A break-in can happen to any system administrator. Find out how to use Autopsy and Sleuthkit to hit the ground running on your first forensics project. There are certain aspects to system administration that you can learn only from experience. Computer forensics (among other things the ability to piece together clues from a system to determine how an intruder broke in) can take years or even decades to master. If you have never conducted a forensics analysis on a computer, you might not even know exactly where to start. In this guide, I cover how to use the set of forensics tools in Sleuthkit with its Web front end, Autopsy, to organize your first forensics case.

he boards of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation have issued a call to co-host Akademy and GUADEC, the flagship conferences of the KDE and GNOME projects respectively, during the Summer of 2009. This would be the first time that the conferences are to be co-hosted. The combined conference is expected to have around 800 attendees, being one of the biggest meetings of free software developers in the world. The content of the conferences will be organized independently, with a number of co-ordinated cross-over sessions with appeal to all attendees.

[Now this is cool! - Scott]

As part of the on-going agreement with Novell, Microsoft is identifying and converting unsupported users of Linux to the latest versions of Suse Linux. After a long period of doubt, skepticism and criticism over their agreement, Novell and Microsoft are finally starting to see the benefits of the 5-year alliance originally announced in December 2006. Continuing to dabble with the ‘dark side,’ Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell said in a recent press-release, describing the outcomes of their alliance with Microsoft, "It's very encouraging to see that our business and technical collaboration continues to resonate with customers around the globe."

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning. There is a delicate balance between having a hard disk spinning down and up too frequently and leaving it spinning around the clock. If you have a filesystem that you want to have near instant access to but do so on an infrequent basis, you might like to use spindown to automatically spin down the disk containing that filesystem after you have finished accessing the drive.

Microsoft's Office 2007 Word documents do not conform to the newly-approved Open XML (OXML) international standard. Alex Brown, who heads up the group responsible for maintaining the OXML standard at the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO), revealed the less-than-pretty findings in a blog post late last week. He said that OOXML, which last month – in the face of heavy opposition – just scraped in enough votes to be passed as a standard by the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), does not adhere to the latest specifications of the draft standard (ISO/IEC 29500).`

[This is funny and sad at the same time. - Scott]

We live in the age of the spinmeister, the age when language is used more as a means to confuse than to educate, an age when obfuscation is preferred to clarification. Hence, one should not be surprised to find Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation, referring to a face-to-face meeting of kernel developers and industry people as a "high bandwidth set of interactions." The Foundation, one must bear in mind, was formed at the beginning of 2007 by a merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards

Imagine an application that combines the features of a wiki and a Web-based notebook. It may sound like an unusual mix, but Luminotes wiki notebook is living proof that this combination works rather well. Similar to TiddlyWiki, Luminotes treats notes as separate items which you can manage individually and show and hide as you see it fit. This makes Luminotes a perfect tool for managing notes in a non-linear manner.

Vyatta, the leader in Linux-based networking, today announced Vyatta Community Edition 4 (VC4), the latest release of its reliable, commercially supported open-source network operating system. VC4 delivers significant scalability improvements and expanded application support to the pre-existing router/firewall/VPN feature set and achieves a 10X price/performance advantage over proprietary network solutions.

A non-profit open source project with high-profile backers has released beta code for an open source Flash media player, with a media server in the wings. Open Media Now's Gnash player runs standalone or as a plugin, and may run better than Flash on constrained devices.

Personal data safety is big business lately. There are a variety of ways to protect your identity or keep your personal information from the prying eyes of dishonest people, but Eric Wolbrom has what he believes is a unique service. Keep You Safe makes it possible for subscribers to store all their personal data securely in a virtual online "safe deposit box," and share the key with someone they trust. When Wolbrom, a self-described "security geek," finally had the chance to launch Keep You Safe, he knew that building it on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) was the best way to keep his customers' data secure.

The GNU/Linux command line and desktop are both sophisticated interfaces, but they are mostly separate realities. You can drag text into a virtual terminal from the desktop, or use Edit -> Copy to move text in either direction, but by default moving files and directories between them is impossible -- a problem that often requires extra switching between them if you frequently work in both. Dragbox is designed to solve this problem and connect the two interfaces -- at least if one of them is GNOME -- through what might be described as a combination multiple clipboard and simple file manager.

Baker College of Flint, Mich., defeated defending champion Texas A&M University and four other regional winners from across the country to capture the third annual National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, which concluded in San Antonio, Texas, over the weekend. Texas A&M finished a close second, and the University of Louisville took third. Also competing for the championship were the Community College of Baltimore County, Mount San Antonio College of Los Angeles County, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Tokamak, the first International meeting of Plasma was held in Milano in northern Italy over the last weekend. 14 people joined the fun and spent some days hacking on the KDE 4 desktop shell. For the most part, it was like meeting friends, only that some had never met each other in person before. The meeting was filled with small sessions, such as discussing target users for Plasma to optimise the Plasma interface for. Topics were target users, underlying technology, scripting, integration with other parts, webservice integration, visual presentation, porting of Plasma to new technology in Qt, Italian profanity and how everybody loves pizza.

One of the more interesting technologies I've been exposed to in the past year is the Force.com platform. Salesforce.com, well known for their Software as a Service CRM product, has taken the expertise they've garnered delivering a high-capacity application to a global market, and used it to offer the underlying infrastructure to application developers.

Tim Bray, the co-creator of XML turned Ruby on Rails enthusiast, has told developers to face up to lingering performance problems in the scripting stack. In a keynote at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference last week, Bray called Rails "a big deal, a hot deal". And the Sun Microsystems director of web technologies is walking it likes he talks it: he's using Ruby on Rails for all his development.

The Redmond giant’s PR spin has gone into overdrive to warn budding potentials away from the evils of Linux and open source. The messages are consistent: Linux may be free, but there’s a catch; it has a higher total cost of ownership, a lower return on investment, less support and is a less sound platform. I declare bunkum. And here's why a Microsoft implementation at Video Ezy was a bad choice.

A new version of Ubuntu, a version of the Linux OS, is released on Thursday. Mr Shuttleworth said the success of the Asus Eee PC and the work of the One Laptop Per Child programme had driven awareness of open source. "There has been a sea change in the way people think of Linux, which is very healthy," he said.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes.