Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Those enterprising folks at Game Cube Linux (GC Linux) claim to have developed a proof of concept version of Linux running natively on the best-selling Nintendo Wii games console. The software exploits the Twilight Hack, a quirk in some versions of the Zelda game that lets external software to be loaded without performing hardware modifications. The hack fools the system into loading code from an SD memory card.

The GNOME Foundation has turned its attention to accessibility for people with disabilities. To help improve both Web accessibility within GNOME and the project's long-term direction, the Mozilla Foundation is joining the GNOME advisory board, and plans to help improve integration of the XUL development platform with GNOME. Even more significantly, the GNOME Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Canonical are jointly sponsoring a $40,000 outreach program to help improve accessibility in GNOME.

Gnuplot can generate sophisticated graphs and output them in vector or bitmap image formats. It can produce many graph types, and you can customize the way the output will look to a great extent. But the customizability of gnuplot can work against it when all you want a simple line graph comparing two series of data points. In those cases, gplot lets you use gnuplot to create simple graphs using more semantic options to customize the appearance of common graph objects.

A few weeks ago I promised to bring in some more general news from the world of Linux audio software development. Alas, my plans were ambushed by the happy intrusion of the release of Renoise for Linux, but I'm back on track. As promised, here's more straight reporting on the world of Linux sound and music software, starting with some news about recently released music notation programs.

Time is running out to register for Idlelo 3, the third African Conference on Free and Open Source Software and the Digital Commons. The conference will be held in Dakar, Senegal between 16 and 20 March. Previous Idlelo conferences were held in South Africa and Kenya.

Free-to-air (FTA) ethnic television in a variety of languages beamed from satellite straight to your Linux PC? No problem -- here's how. FTA provides programming that is quite different from the channels beamed by the regular commercial providers. Looking for the latest news from Germany or Spain or Greece? How about a program describing the Canary Islands, the news from Radio France International in Portuguese, or a channel from Argentina dedicated to the tango?

Technology news comes in many flavors— product debuts, security revelations, acquisition antics, et cetera et cetera— but one of our very favorite is legal wrangling. Today's news is filled with items of interest from the legal side of the tracks, so lets get our wigs on and get rolling.read more

Google has claimed that Microsoft's proposed Office Open XML document standard is unnecessary and should be rolled into the rival OpenDocument Format. In a Monday post on Google's official blog, open-source programs manager Zaheda Bhorat said the issue affects everybody who uses editable documents.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service reduces hardware and software costs while increasing system flexibility and reliability

The FOSS healthcare community is very small, and we all know tend to know each other. We go to many of the same conferences, we track the same mailing lists (mostly openhealth) and we track the same blogs (you are reading it...). One of the refreshing things about our movement is that once in a while, someone will have the same ideas, for the same reasons and start working without any contact with the blogs and mailinglists that I follow. For me, meeting Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck was one of those moments. I meet Janice about 30 minutes before her talk and we immediately hit it off.

The Linux Standard Base (LSB) project aims to keep subtle differences between implementations of the operating system from making applications incompatible across distributions. Last month's release of LSB 3.2 continues along that road, furthering compatibility and encompassing new standards for multimedia and scripting languages. The original goal of the LSB project was to provide a vendor-neutral standard for running environments, libraries, formats, and other system software, thus defining a reference platform such that any program that could successfully run on it could run on all distributions that complied with the standard.

Apple has fired a cease and desist order against the developers behind the open-source Hymn Project. Hymn develops software that strips Apple's FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology from user's iTunes purchases, allowing music fans to play their music on devices other than those from Apple. iTunes customers can legitimately lose FairPlay DRM in order to play their music on other devices by burning a CD of their songs, and ripping that CD into a different format.

"The job is to remove obstacles in the way of the community," says Paul W. Frields, speaking about his new position as Fedora Chair. After only a few weeks in the position, Frields is still learning his way around and getting to know his colleagues, but already this vision is a common refrain in his comments, underlying all his comments about what he hopes the Fedora project will achieve while he is coordinating its efforts.

Adobe Systems has confirmed it will help sponsor the work of the SQLite database project, joining a new consortium alongside Mozilla and Symbian. SQLite, which is an embedded SQL database engine with core source code in the public domain, has been built into the firm's newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software.

Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.

Instant messaging helps us connect with people online in real time. Many Linux users IM with either Pidgin (formerly Gaim) or Kopete, two applications that handle multiple IM protocols. Here are three alternatives to the top names that each focus on one of the major IM protocols, and offer some pretty cool options.

This report is an update to the risk report published in Red Hat Magazine in April 2007. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first three years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimize the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped.

OpenProj 1.0 was recently released by Projity, which offers a related commercial product called Project-On-Demand. OpenProj is written in Java and licensed under CPAL 1.0, and versions for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux can be downloaded from SourceForge.net. CPAL -- the Common Public Attribution License -- is a relatively new open source license, submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval last July. It is recognized by the Open Source Initiative as an open source license, but the FSF has not yet classified it. In spite of its approval by the OSI, I found the license difficult to parse, and recommend you have a lawyer review it so that he can advise you on what you can and cannot do with the application and the code before making a major investment of time and effort working with CPAL licensed code.

VMware today inked a quartet of software deals with server giants Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens. The agreements will infuriate Microsoft which is struggling to get its own virtualisation offering onto the market. VMware said that, under the agreement – financial terms of which remain secret – its ESX 3i hypervisor will be embedded in servers produced by the four manufacturers.

Linux will become the mobile operating system of choice in time but it still needs to break the proprietary hold the major players have over the mobile sector, says Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.