Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

"India is like a long snake. While its head is moving into the twenty-first century, the tail is still in the sixteenth. And there are people all over its body." Those lines by computer guru Ed Yourdon sum up the inspiration behind Jagriti e-Sewa ("Jagriti" means "awakening" in Punjabi and "Sewa" means "service"), a non-governmental organization (NGO) that uses open source technologies to bring much-needed knowledge and advice to farmers in the Indian state of Punjab.

Ralph Morelli, professor of computer science at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., has a double motive in spearheading the Humanitarian FOSS Project (HFOSS). The project's mission of providing free software development to help solve real-world social issues is a noble reason to rally the participation of college students who will spend their summers learning how to be part of the open source development community. But this NSF-funded project also hopes to show that humanitarian software development projects are a great way to revitalize undergraduate computing education.

If you've tinkered around with GoogleEarth, you know how much fun it can be to work with geospatial data. Whenever I need a good diversion, I fire up GoogleEarth to float above the skyscrapers of Manhattan or to see if they've built anything new in the neighborhood where I grew up.

The future of the operating system took center stage at the Open Source Business Conference here March 25, as a panel of vendor representatives debated the topic. Dirk Hohndel, the chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel, said the company was totally driven by what the market wanted.

Fujitsu Computer Systems announced that four of its ultra-light notebooks have passed compatibility tests with Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). The LifeBook U810, LifeBook T2010, and LifeBook P1620 ultra-mini PCs (UMPCs), and the LifeBook S6510 notebook have been "YES Certified" by Novell, says Fujitsu.

Originally posted on March 15th. The KDE 4.0, the latest version of KDE desktop environment, was released recently. On this occasion, we reached out to the founder of KDE project, Matthias Ettrich who started the KDE project back in 1996. Almost 12 years down the line, he's now working at Trolltech, hacking Qt. Here is what the KDE-Man had to say...

Today marks the first Document Freedom Day. Inspired by Software Freedom Day, which is now is now in its fifth year, DFD is intended as an annual series of grass root events worldwide "to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general," according to the About page on the DFD Web site. The day is planned not as an end in itself so much as the highlight of year-round efforts, many of which predate DFD itself.

Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith took the hot seat at the Open Source Development Conference here March 25, facing an hour of questioning from panelists and attendees. But before the grilling started, Smith gave a 30-minute address about the parallels between open-source and proprietary software business models.

I've recently been converting a bunch of old spoken-word cassette tapes to digital format. The Audacity audio editor (also available for Windows and Mac users) is the ideal tool. It's built-in effects -- which include normalising and noise removal -- make it even more useful, and it can save files in a variety of formats including WAV, AIFF, FLAC, OGG and MP3. But there's one trick it can't handle...

Experience has shown a weakening U.S. economy would be good for open source, as a shortage of cash is usually a major catalyst for innovation, particularly around open-source applications, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, said at the annual Open Source Business Conference here March 25.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia and other projects, has attracted substantial funding from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.

While Matt Asay and Paula Rooney chose the meat in Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst’s remarks at OSBC, others chose to play the political game of gotcha. So, is open source anti-American?

Red Hat hasn't done a good enough job of promoting its position as the leading Linux vendor, and also needs to do a better job of getting its customers involved with the community, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO and president, told attendees at the opening keynote at the Open Source Business Conference here March 25. "Our customers expect a lot more from us than we are currently delivering," Whitehurst said. "While we deliver the value of the community model to enterprises, we do a lousy job of getting those enterprises involved with the community."

Developing a business model around free and open source software (FOSS) can be a delicate balancing game. Many companies in this space opt for models in which revenue comes from sources such as services, rather than the software itself. However, the recently announced LinMin is taking a different approach with a new appliance and imaging appliance: Although it runs and works on FOSS, LinMin's software is proprietary. The company's reasons for this practice raise several core issues about the relationship between FOSS and proprietary software on one hand and business priorities on the other.

Vyatta today introduced the Vyatta 514, a networking appliance that combines Vyatta’s open-source routing and security software with a small form factor hardware platform. With integrated routing, firewall, and VPN features, the Vyatta 514 is ideally suited to connect small businesses and branch offices to the Internet or private networks. The Vyatta 514 provides all the security, performance, and functionality of proprietary networking solutions at a fraction of the cost.

Matthew Dillon posted on update on his evolving HAMMER filesystem, noting that it "passes all standard filesystem stress tests and buildworld will run with a HAMMER /usr/obj". He also noted, "pruning and reblocking code is in and partially tested, but now needs more stringent testing; full historical access appears to be working but needs testing." He added, "there are two big-ticket and several little-ticket items left. HAMMER will officially go Alpha when the big-ticket items are done, and beta when we get a few of the little-ticket items done." The two "big-ticket" items left to be completed are UNDO crash recovery code, and handling for full filesystems.

The BSD Certification Group, (BSDCG) held its first in-person BSDA certification exam session for systems administrators during SCALE last month in Los Angeles. Subsequent tests were then held held during FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, and Linux-Tage Chemnitzer in Chemnitz, Germany. During the events, we were able to catch up with several people involved in the testing. Here's what they had to say about the exam development process, the events themselves, and reasons for becoming certified.

Producing a video podcast entirely on Linux is not only possible but fairly easy to do. This article outlines the steps you can take to make a video podcast entirely on Linux, as I do.

The latest version of Tickets has been released, and this version is a major upgrade over previous editions. Tickets has been growing and maturing into a full fledged Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system. For those agencies that currently do not have a CAD solution, Tickets offers a free and powerful solution.

What have you heard about Linux? An operating system which is hard to learn with a shell for typing complex commands? Anyway, Linux was popular to be popular among geeks for decades and the general users were left aside when it comes to Linux. But amazingly, there are increasing number of layman computer users converting themselves from Windows to Linux nowadays. Most of the honor for this new trend should go to a few new developments of the area of desktop visualization such as Compiz and Beryl.