Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux kernel has merged three hypervisors into its mainline tree, starting with KVM in 2.6.20, and continuing with Xen and lguest in the 2.6.23 release of the kernel. Hypervisors let users run multiple operating systems on a host system. Lguest is the simplest of the three in terms of usability and implementation, which makes it a good candidate for helping you learn how virtualization works.

It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify. Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. The Alpha 6 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features.

linux.conf.au has an interesting structure which differentiates it from most other events. Every year, a completely new set of organizers takes over the event, moves it to a new city, and puts its own stamp on it. They have a great deal of freedom in how they run LCA, but there is still a group of Linux Australia members and past organizers who keep an eye on things and help ensure that the event does not run into problems. The result is a conference which has a lot of fresh energy every year, but which is also reliably interesting. Many attendees consider it to be one of the best Linux events to be found anywhere in the world.

Brasero will replace Serpentine as the CD-writing utility in the upcoming April release of Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named Hardy Heron). Brasero extends the functionality of Serpentine to include data CD and DVD projects, file integrity checking, and multisession support. Why replace Serpentine, a dead simple solution for burning audio CDs? It features tight integration into the GNOME Desktop Environment, with support for Rhythmbox playlists and drag and drop file management from Nautilus, as well as the ability to extract audio from video files.

The European Union yesterday announced that it will invest US$1 million in a study to find the best open source tools for use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The grant of €703 000 was awarded to a consortium of 11 members, including Canonical, backers of Ubuntu Linix, and the University of the Western Cape.

In an email to the Wine mailing list late last week, Google software engineer Dan Kegel described how Google has been contracting the CodeWeavers Wine team to improve support for PhotoshopCS on Linux and how Google employees are using their free time to fix Wine bugs.

Months after its initial announcement, the Mozilla Foundation's new nonprofit branch Mozilla Messaging, finally opened for business for the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client on Feb. 19. The commercial side of Mozilla, Mozilla Corp., had announced in July what was by then already an open secret: Its focus would be on the Firefox Web browser. That left open the question of what to do with Thunderbird. In September, Mozilla Corp. announced that it would be spinning off Thunderbird into its own company with the working name MailCo.

The SCO Group was offered a sweetheart of a deal on Valentine's Day last week when Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners (SNCP) gave the embattled Unix vendor $100 million to bail itself out of bankruptcy. The company's CEO, Darl McBride, isn't feeling the love, however. When the deal closes, he'll "resign immediately." Already angered by McBride's claims that Linux contains code that belongs to SCO, many in the Linux community were overjoyed when the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September. Now, a company once thought to be at the end of the line seems poised to walk another mile.

Usually, the North American computer giants introduce their latest and greatest products to the U.S. market first, with Europe an afterthought. Not this time. Dell is bringing its latest Ubuntu-powered laptop, the Inspiron 1525, to the Europeans first. Americans will need to wait until later in February for Dell's newest Ubuntu Linux computer.

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future.

Perhaps the number one reason why people neglect to back up their desktops is the lack of workable solution. It can be difficult to find a method configurable enough to suite everyone's needs. One promising answer may be Restore, an application for enterprise and data center backup for Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux systems. It is GPLv2-licensed and freely available to download as a set of Debian/Ubuntu packages, virtual machine, or 455MB installable live CD.

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it. Yet, in practice, community members judge distributions all the time. They don't use a single metric, and at times a distro's appeal is as simple as the fact that it is new or has released a new version. Yet, whenever community members choose a distribution to download or to build their own distribution upon, or to borrow a tool from, they are making a verdict on it.

"To quote you a number of years ago: 'Linux is evolution, not intelligent design'," noted Greg KH, quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Linus expanded on the statement, "evolution often does odd (and 'suboptimal') things exactly because it does incremental changes that DO NOT BREAK at any point." He continued, "in other words, exactly *because* evolution requires 'bisectability' (any non-viable point in between is a dead end by definition) and does things incrementally, it doesn't do big flips." When alternative examples in evolution were pointed out, Linus suggested that the kernel was much simpler than a mammal and more similar to bacteria:..

The debate over the OOXML (Office Open XML) format and the competing ODF (open document format) is still alive and kicking, but Microsoft just wants everyone to get along. The software giant had been lobbying for its OOXML format's ratification as an ISO standard at a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva later this month, after a failed attempt in September last year.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced DreamSpark – an ironic name, since it actually lays bare Microsoft's worst nightmare: that more and more of tomorrow's programmers are growing up using free software for their studies, which means that as they move out into the world, there will be less and less demand for Microsoft's tools, and even fewer programs written for its platforms. Its answer? This:..

Many companies offer LAMP hosting, but some of the cheaper LAMP providers do not allow SSH access, reserving that feature for higher-paying customers. Without SSH you may think you'll have trouble executing commands on the hosted server. Not so -- PHP Shell allows execution of some commands without having SSH access to the LAMP server.

Microsoft Corp. is giving students free access to its most sophisticated tools for writing software and making media-rich Web sites, a move that intensifies its competition with Adobe Systems Inc. and could challenge open source software's popularity.

To Southern Californians February means several things. Winter storms bring snow to the San Gabriel Mountains. Most college students will have returned to school for another semester. Early flowering plants have started to bud and bloom, attracting bees. Most important of all however, is the coming of SCALE, the annual Southern California Linux Expo.

The British manufacturer will unveil the "One" laptop at The Education Show, which is to be held in Birmingham from February 28 to March 1. According to Elonex, the Linux-based laptop will boast a 3-hour battery life, Wi-Fi, a flash-based hard drive, a "hard-wearing case" and a "wireless music server", and will weigh less than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds). However, the company has refused to release any hard specifications for the device ahead of the show.