Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux Journal Products Editor, James Gray, spoke with Jim Lacey, Linux Professional Institute's President and CEO, about Linux certification today and its outlook for the future.

Entrepreneurs in Kenya are putting Linux to work to cut costs and maximise profits as they look for new ways to bring computing to users.One of these entrepreneurs is Patrick Mathenge, CEO of Mullard Electronic Limited, a firm trading in hardware and software from its Mombasa Road offices. The company is distributing Linux software that can turn a single computer into up to 10 workstations.

WordPress plugins for multimedia can make your blog more interesting. These four plugins make it possible to automatically generate and configure multimedia, making your site a richer experience for your visitors and for you. Odiogo is a free service that converts your blog posts into audio podcasts. The Odiogo Listen Button plugin for WordPress makes it easy for your visitors to listen to and even save the audio version of your posts.

A mere three years after starting the OpenSolaris project, Sun Microsystems today releases the first official OpenSolaris version. OpenSolaris includes the all-important Project Indiana, a project from Debian founder Ian Murdock to make OpenSolaris’ package management system more like that of Linux.

When I demonstrate software for Linux Journal, I tend to use Ubuntu as my operating system. The reason is simply because Ubuntu is extremely popular, but it begs the question, should the Linux community standardize on a single distribution?

[Geez, how did I know that Ubuntu would get the nod on that one.. - Scott]

Both big open source vendors have in the past month expressed intentions to stay within the enterprise space. Red Hat said in a blog post the consumer space does not pose a viable business proposition for it at present: "The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that todays Linux desktops simply dont provide a practical alternative...building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities."

The first supported first version of Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris, AKA Project Indiana, makes its debut today with additional backing from Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud. Sun is introducing three levels of paid support for the OpenSolaris 2008.5 code drop for developers and end users. Support starts at $49 per incident for developers and runs to $2,160 per system per year for tailored customizations, and includes 24x7 phone support along with fixes and updates.

PHP is the latest language getting the NetBeans treatment, with a PHP version of Sun Microsystems' open-source environment hitting early access today. Built on the same generic scripting framework that Sun used for Ruby, the NetBeans PHP bundle includes project management tools with refactoring and code completion to ease deployment. Sun hopes these features will, finally, wean users off Emacs and Bill Joy's vi.

Regular readers will know that I’ve rallied against Microsoft’s so-called “Get the facts” site for the last fortnight. Rather than give legitimate comparisons facing off Windows servers vs Linux options the site opts for bunkum and hogwash with sensational headlines that have no underlying substance. Here’s the state of play. First, let’s get the facts on Microsoft’s “Get the facts” campaign. Some readers have correctly pointed out this was something Microsoft promoted heavily a couple of years ago. While most all feedback has been very kind and positive some did question just what relevance this old campaign is to modern readers.

The International Organization for Standardization's OpenDocument Format standard is broken and needs to be mended, according to an expert who claimed to have carried out tests on the format. Alex Brown, a document-format expert who is convenor of the process to standardize Office Open XML (OOXML), posted a blog this week reporting the results of tests which he claimed revealed that OpenOffice documents did not conform to the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO's) version of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard.

Those people who frown at the Linux GUI (Graphical User Interface) haven’t actually experienced the 3D effects provided by Compiz. Compiz is a composite manager that adds visually pleasing 3D effects to your desktop - these include the cube effect and other window minimization effects that make things very appealing on your screen. For instance, drag a window and the window wobbles. Compiz also has plugin support which means that you can add more such effects to decorate your desktop’s look.

I was cleaning up my /home partiton when I noticed I had several tiny distros hanging around waiting to be tested. So I thought this might be a good time to write an updated Mini-distro Roundup. Unlike last time, the five contestants are all less than 88 MB in download size. The five contestants are CDlinux 0.6.1, Damn Small Linux 4.3r2, Puppy 4.0rc, Slitaz 1.0, and Austrumi 1.6.5. All of these are the latest stable except Damn Small and Puppy, that are release candidates. So, we'll cut them just a bit of slack in the stability department if need be.

Dell, HP and Lenovo have promised to push chipset vendors to make open source drivers for Linux. Representatives from Dell, HP and Lenovo made the commitment at a Linux Foundation conference last week, promising to include wording in their hardware procurement processes to "strongly encourage" the delivery of open source drivers for integration into the Linux kernel.

When I have a few spare time or just want to loosen up a bit, I always indulge myself into playing some computer games. Since most of my extra time is very limited, I usually pick those that are less stressful and less time consuming. I go for the old-fashioned and graphics card-friendly puzzle and arcade games. Call me boring, but these stuff are really addictive and highly entertaining. So, what are these games? If you are using Linux, some of these games are probably included out-of-the box with your distro. If you are using Windows, better tell your boss to switch to Linux if you don't want to be stuck to playing Solitaire and Minesweeper your entire office life.

NAC, Trustsec, PCI, Linux and more are all on the table as Cisco VP outlines the network giant's strategy moving forward. While the economy may be cool, the world of networking is anything but, according to Marie Hattar, VP of Network Systems and Security Solutions for Cisco. There are a lot of reasons why Hattar is so upbeat including new product initiatives, compliance drivers and overall customer sentiment.

"So this merge window was somewhat rocky in the sense that there was a lot of arguments about it, but at the same time I at least personally think that from a technical angle, we had somewhat less scary stuff going on than has been almost the rule lately," noted Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc1 kernel.

Microsoft has decided to withdraw from its bid to buy Yahoo, with Steve Ballmer citing Yahoo's demand for US $37 per share as just too much – but is the deal really dead? It had been shaping up as the tech world’s biggest ‘deal or no deal’ of 2008 – a multi-billion dollar takeover offer of Yahoo by Microsoft. But in the end, Microsoft has said ‘no deal’ and walked away, only willing to pay US $33 per share - itself a revised offer that added US $5 billion to Microsoft's original offer of US $31 per share, against Yahoo’s demand for US $37 per share.

Management software is one category where Microsoft has never quite measured up to competitors. Redmond hopes to change that with an unlikely weapon: using code from the OpenPegasus project to extend its System Center suite to Linux and Unix environments. Cross-platform management is the No. 1 customer request for System Center, and using open source code to get there represents recognition by Microsoft that it's far from a Windows-only world. It's also a significant move in the company's bid to be seen as a legitimate top-tier choice for enterprise management.

Apple Inc.'s ploy to gain browser market share by pushing Safari to users with an update tool normally used for security fixes failed to boost its overall share, a Web metrics company said yesterday. Instead, Safari's share fell last month to 5.5%, down from March's 5.8%, while Microsoft's Internet Explorer increased its dominance by growing to 76% from March's 74.8%. It was the first time Internet Explorer (IE) gained share since October 2007.

LXer Feature: 04-May-2008

With the release of the newest Ubuntu this week we saw a fair number of articles related to it including The Great Ubuntu-Girlfriend Experiment and Ubuntu man says Microsoft's about to 'swallow a hand-grenade'. We also have two LXer Features, Introduction to Secure Web Data Input and Accurate market share statistics and The $60 Billion dollar question for your reading pleasure. Also, The Top 75 Open Source Security Apps, KDE in Korea, Magnatune gives money to Open Source, How to Make People Love Linux and we have several Microsoft related articles as well.