Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux does everything that many users want it to, but some people have tasks that require Windows applications. You can dual-boot both operating systems, or run Windows in a virtualized environment on Linux. Alas, virtualization makes the guest OS almost useless for processor- and RAM-intensive tasks like editing videos and playing games. Now, a Ubuntu-based distro called andLinux takes cooperation with Windows to a whole new level.

Via Technologies has laid out a new initiative to improve support for the open source development community. The chip maker will launch an official Via Linux website this month as a first step in the programme.

In about 100 days, the United States Federal Government will be required to be running large portions of their systems on IPv6. Now, for the few non-technical in the crowd, it means that the address your PC uses to connect to the Internet, in most cases, is IPv4.

The International Organization for Standardization has called for "personal attacks" to cease in the debate surrounding Microsoft's Office Open XML standard. The move came as an ISO committee meeting in Norway attracted protesters, who gathered to call for the retraction of Open Office XML (OOXML) from the ISO standardization process.

Jeremiah Gray wants to provide an interesting way to learn about Linux, so he's created a new comic strip, called Hackett and Bankwell, about the open source operating system. The strip will be published as a series of comic books that Gray hopes will appeal to new Linux users, but he says it is "more than just a comic book version of a Linux training guide."

If you click this link, you can see my house. That vehicle in the driveway is my 1991 Ford Ranger. I give you that link without hesitation, because with the current state of technology, it's a simple point and click to get my address, and a copy/paste after that to get a map. I'm not so naive that I consider an unlisted phone number viable protection from the prying eyes of the world. Does that mean privacy is dead? Well, I'd argue yes and no.

Attention computer animators -- if you've ever felt limited by working in three dimensions with tools like Blender, check out Pencil, an open source, cross-platform animation app that lets you create in glorious 2-D. Pencil mimics hand-drawn animation techniques, but it's easy to use and produces high-quality output. You can download source code packages as well as pre-built binaries for Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The latest release is 0.4.4b for Macs and Windows boxes, and 0.4.3b for Linux. The differences between the two versions are minor, but include a change to the file format, so if you run Pencil on multiple platforms, you may want to stick with 0.4.3b until the Linux build is updated.

Keeping the files on multiple machines synchronized seems to be a recurring problem for many computer users. Until I discovered Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) I never really had a completely satisfactory solution. What we'd like to be able to do is efficiently keep two or more servers completely synchronized with each other no matter what gets changed on any of the servers. In the simplest case, we have a production server and a backup server that we need to keep in sync. We might have a cluster of servers used in a load balancing configuration. In the worst case, we might have a group of computers where changes are occurring on any or all of the devices. Consider the case where we have a computer at the office, a laptop, and a work computer at home. We want to be able to work from any computer at any time.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

The Debian GNU/Linux project will be led by Steve McIntyre from April 17 onwards after he was declared elected on Saturday US time in the 2008 elections.

Years ago, Florida Hospital in Orlando faced problems with its IT system, much of which relied on proprietary software. Innovative projects were abandoned due to high costs, and disaster recovery time was unacceptably long. So the hospital turned to open source. It was difficult at first, but officials say things are becoming easier as OSS goes more mainstream.

Xfce isn't for everyone, but for servers or minimal desktop systems, it's just what the doctor ordered. Rather lightweight in Window Manager terms--weighing in at around 63MB--Xfce arrives with a full complement of applications from Abiword, gnumeric, and pidgin to CD/DVD burning software (Brasero), Thunar File Manager, and a host of administrative applications. For this article, I am reviewing the Xfce Fedora Spin based on Fedora 8 and Xfce4.

If you like to customize your applications' appearance, then Firefox themes probably haven't impressed you. Although there are hundreds of themes available, typically all they allow users to do is change the icons and background color of your browser -- not too exciting. Personas for Firefox offers a new way to customize the browser. Though the project was quietly introduced last year, it recently moved into Mozilla Labs, where work has begun in earnest to give users more than just a way to change icons from blue to green. While right now Personas aren't much more than fancy skins, they're easy to change on the fly, and the prototype shows that Mozilla plans to give Firefox users more customization options than ever

It is time to wake up and smell the elephant in the room. Vista is struggling to achieve escape velocity. Microsoft finds itself the butt an international joke, but does not seem able to get a grip. The issue of choice of platform is once more up for grabs. Of course there is an alternative; a popular computing platform whose design attracts universal admiration. But although we all look forward to literally punching in the numbers, the Wii does not yet quite hack it (use of a dread phrase coming up) 'in the enterprise'.

The findings from the fourth-quarter 2007 Open Source Industry and Community survey is out. The authors say the results show open source is effective in combating trade deficit and that IT professionals involved in open source earn more than their more proprietary colleagues. Let’s check it out.

Open source software benefits professionals in all industries: government, Internet, business, education, and even health care. Expensive software and subscriptions for anti virus systems, supporting electronic medical records and even phone or e-mail communications can put on a strain on small clinics as well as larger hospitals. Open source tools are free, highly customizable, and secure enough to handle the sensitive data that medical professionals often work with. Read below for our list of the top 100 open source software tools that benefit health care professionals.

LXer Feature: 13-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a Gartner report stating that Open Source will quietly take over, a comparison of CrossOver Games vs Wine 0.9.58, Nine Improvements Needed in KDE and a couple of articles on Abiword. Microsoft is all over the news with the OOXML vote having taken place and they released 14,000 pages of code in an attempt to make the European Union happy, I have a funny felling it is not going to work. And Rob Enderle shows with up some FUD for your enjoyment.

Looking to boost the Web, Sun is working on a royalty-free and open video codec and media system, company officials said Thursday afternoon. "The main benefit is that you don't have that now and there are markets, key markets like the Web, that are in need for the Web 2.0 experience a foundation of royalty-free for the media element," for audio and video, said Rob Glidden, global alliance manager for TV & Media at Sun.

Linux usage has grown fast over the past several years as the operating system moved from perimeter Web servers to workloads much closer to the heart of the business, while gaining a broad following of contributors and commercial users. But the days of these easy advances may be past.

While changing to a great OS like Ubuntu , I had to make some sacrifices , one of them being : less gaming. I'm not seeing I ended my gamer " career" , buy i start to look for smaller web games , or testing the big LINUX games that everybody was talking about. ( Tremoulos,Quake Wars,Nexuiz,Battle For Wesnoth).