Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

During a tutorial today on-stage at linux.conf.au, Sun Microsystems and Frontline donated a server to the KDE project, available for shipment within hours. Aaron Seigo, Plasma developer and KDE e.V President, accepted a certificate from Ross Cunningham of Sun Microsystems and David Purdue of Frontline on behalf of the KDE project.

The really big problem in document formats is what's going to become the next office document format: Microsoft's proprietary Open XML or OpenOffice's ODF (Open Document Format). A far more minor but nonetheless very annoying problem is what do you do about Microsoft's ClearType Collection typefaces: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel?

Back in 1999, free software believer Joshua Rand and his friend Oscar Mondragon were talking about the changes they predicted were coming for the Internet. Not long after that, the bubble burst and things did change, for the worst, many said. "We didn't subscribe to that theory," Rand says. "We saw the Internet becoming a platform for applications and services long before the term Web 2.0 was coined. With the growth and proliferation of things like Web-based email, the next logical step was, why not everything else? Why not more personal productivity tools and office tools?" That was the beginning of Sapotek.

Using VNC to remotely access your desktop, applications, and documents sounds like a great solution when you are out and about, but it has a few significant drawbacks: you have to leave your machine turned on, the VNC protocol is not secure, and often you need a dedicated VNC client to access your desktop. Ulteo, the company started by Gaël Duval of Mandriva fame, is set to offer an alternative solution. Ulteo gives you access to a full-fledged KDE desktop hosted on the company's own servers while taking care of the behind-the-scenes stuff. While the service is still in beta and by invitation only, I had a chance to take it for a spin, and I found it promising.

It looks like Asus is going to seriously expand the "Eee PC" product line. The new family of low-cost, Eee products will include the E-DT (desktop), E-TV, and E-Monitor

The Linux desktop may be moving forward slowly in the United States, but it's a vastly different story in Europe. Today, Jan. 30, Chris Kenyon, Canonical's director of business development, announced on a Canonical blog that "the Gendarmerie Nationale [the French national police force] announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next three years."

Sun Presentation Minimizer (SPM) represents free software's answer to PPTminimizer. Designed for OpenOffice.org 2.3 or StarOffice 8 Impress and released under the Lesser GNU General Public License, SPM is an extension that creates a wizard that guides you through reducing the size of your presentation, making it easier to transport and, on some systems, quicker to run. Those who present large slide shows -- especially graphics-heavy ones -- will find it a well-designed and effective addition, although several features require more work.

Trend Micro is suing Barracuda Networks over its use of the free open source antivirus software, ClamAV. If it wins, open-source advocates fear it threatens all users of the free software and will legitimize the use of patent law to attack OSS. Following months of legal threats issued to Barracuda Networks, Trend Micro is suing its rival over its use of ClamAV--a product maintained by U.S. open-source company Sourcefire--on the grounds that Barracuda Network's use of the software in some of its own products infringes a patent held by Trend Micro on applying AV via gateway proxy servers.

[Here is your overblown article title for the day - Scott]

Think about the differences between stories and facts. Between generating interest and pursuing knowledge. Between grabbing attention and building out what we know. Then think about the connections between the freedom to build code and the freedom to inform one's self and others. Because the former is a model for the latter.

Libferris allows you to index and perform full text search on a number of file formats, including PDF, manual pages, and office documents. The recent availability of packages of libferris and its dependencies for Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE makes it simpler to use the library to provide a file server search interface for the Web. Libferris was initially created to provide a virtual filesystem interface, similar to GnomeVFS and KDE's KIO. Over time libferris has gained sophisticated support for indexing and searching filesystems

The French gendarmerie has blown a big framboise at Microsoft by ditching Windows XP in favour of Ubuntu. The paramilitary police force is to switch 70,000 desktops over to the Linux OS, two years after switching its browsers to Firefox, and three years after dumping MS Office for OpenOffice. Deputy director of the force’s IT department Colonel Nicholas Geraud said the change will be gradual, according to the AFP. 5,000 to 8,000 machines are to make the switch this year, with the rest swapping over the next four years.

In mid-January of 2008, the French Linux distribution maker Mandriva and its Japanese counterpart, Turbolinux, announced a partnership to create a common base Linux system, as well as a joint development lab, logically dubbed "Manbo-Labs". As each each player in the distribution game seeks to offer a compelling product that sets itself apart in a competitive, innovation-packed marketplace, we are curious to know how the players themselves view their strategies. Linux Journal Products Editor, James Gray, recently caught up with Mandriva CEO, François Bancilhon, to find out his take on the new partnership.

Yesterday I had a nice surprise in my email inbox. Paul Grinberg from PCLinuxOS contacted us with a the announcement that he had built a server rpm which provides a painless setup of the GNUmed server backend. Imagine my surprise when a few tweaks to the spec file were enough to make this work on openSUSE. Wow. We now have the full end to end solution available for users. All it takes is: 'zypper install gnumed-client gnumed-server'

In April 2007, I bought my wife a digital SLR for her birthday. I also took this chance to install Fedora 7 on her computer. I am familiar with using digital cameras under Linux and had no desire to figure it out on Windows. Within a couple hours, Fedora 7 was installed, and I was able to download images from the camera to her computer. We tried several photo management programs like gthumb and f-spot. We stuck with gthumb, using the standard directories, as this was more natural for how we worked.

Prefacing a series of 196 patches, Greg KH noted, "due to the low level nature of these patches, and because they touch so many different parts of the kernel, a number of the subsystem maintainers have asked me to get them in first to make merging other trees easier." Linus Torvalds agreed and quickly merged the patches into his tree.

LinuxSecurity.com: Setting up a web server with Apache on a Linux distribution is a very quick process, however to make it a secure setup takes some work. This article will show you how to make your Apache web server more secure from an attack by effectively using Access control and authentication strategies.

I love planning but I hate planning software. It's an interesting problem. When I am working on something alone I tend to outline the project, estimate each piece and be done with it. My estimates tend to be accurate and the project gets done.

My first brush with mouse gestures on the Opera browser was an accident, but the ability to quickly move backward or forward in the browser history, open new windows, close tabs, and more without using the menus or moving the mouse toward the navigation toolbar won me over immediately. Nowadays, this feature is available in Firefox and Konqueror too, and you can even configure mouse gestures for GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project is well on its way to producing a free, user-editable street-level vector map of the world. OpenAerialMap (OAM) is similar in scope, committed to building a free, bird's-eye photographic map of the world. But it faces a unique set of challenges. The project's browseable world map uses a JavaScript-powered zoomable interface similar to OSM's, and can even render OSM data as a layer on top of its own photographic tiles.

While you can quickly find an article about a particular topic using Wikipedia's search capabilities, there are other ways to explore the online encyclopedia that break away from the traditional search box approach. With Indywiki, for instance, once you've found the article you're looking for, you can continue to browse related topics visually, because Indywiki processes the current and related articles and extracts images from them. When you click on an image, Indywiki displays the article that the picture links to.