Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The quest to get GNU/Linux to run well on a laptop has been a long running challenge. In this piece, Ed looks at his success with OpenSUSE on a Dell Latitude laptop.

"Grok" is a word that you may not know, but it has been in use since the 1960's. It is commonly taken to mean "understand" but it is so much more than that. Do you grok open source? The word is the key to understanding why talented developers give of their time.

Novell and SAP have announced that they will customize SAP's enterprise applications to work even more efficiently with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its associated virtualization and identity management technologies. According to the press release, Novell and SAP will optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center applications, further promote SAP's SUSE Linux-based Business All-in-One solutions and work within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program on behalf of customers in ways related to SAP's GRC (governance, risk and compliance) practices.

Gnash, the free software Flash player, has released its first beta. The new release is a milestone for both the project and the GNU/Linux desktop, which remains dependent on the proprietary Adobe player for handling Flash files (.swf). Although Flash support is not complete in version 0.8.2, Gnash has now reached the point where it is usable for the most common everyday purposes, such as watching videos on YouTube -- a point that Gnash was exaggeratedly reported as having reached last June. However, in many other ordinary circumstances, Gnash's success remains hit or miss.

In order to carry samples of my audio and video work to tradeshows, I need to be able to play a wider variety of audio and video formats than is available on any of the pocket devices out there. Fortunately, the open source Rockbox operating system doesn't require sacrificing nifty features like FM tuning and recording or voice recording and playback. And format compatibility is not the only reason one might want to install Rockbox. In fact, Rockbox was developed primarily with another purpose in mind: improving sound quality.

I was surprised last week to see a posting from Michael Tiemann, the President of the Open Source Initiative and a VP at Red Hat. Any posting with a subject of line of "Simon Phipps Was Right" is bound to catch my eye, but this one was especially unexpected because in the original discussion I had thought that Michael was largely right!

A little under a week ago, GNOME co-founder and Microsoft admirer Miguel de Icaza called me a jihadist. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that. When a man from Mexico uses words from the east one is unsure what he means to convey - but I thought it would be worth examining in detail the great developer's sayings.

With new social networks launching everyday most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto, typo and other open source solutions. Yet there isn't an open source social network platform, until now. Built with Ruby on Rails this open source project has all the basic features you will need to setup a basic social network.

Over the past 2 years I've been getting into Linux more and more. After getting over my initial fear to move away from Windows, I realized in order for me to stay away from M$'s OS I would need to get my favorite applications to run in Linux. That's where Wine comes in.

Alexandre stated back in October 2007 that he knew of no 1.0 release blockers even then, and suggested we pick Wine's 15th anniversary for the actual date. Depending on how you look at it, there are several possible birthdays for Wine. Given that the exact birthday is a bit fuzzy, we'll simply continue with our normal biweekly release dates. That puts the 1.0 release at June 6th if it's ready by then, or June 20th or July 4th if it's not.

[I personally never thought I would live long enough to see a 1.0 release from Wine :-) - Scott]

Pat Quinn, the vice president of IT at lighting manufacturer Acuity Brands Inc., is quick to admit the irony. Nine years ago, he opted to go with an enterprise resource planning system from Oracle Corp. primarily because of Windows. "At that time, Oracle was one of the few vendors that could run on Windows, and we had a real Windows bias," Quinn said. Today, although Acuity Brands still considers itself a Windows shop -- many of the company's applications are developed in .NET and run on Windows -- its Oracle enterprise systems run on Linux.

2008 Linux/Open Source on Wall Street will focus on enterprise Linux and open source technologies, and their adoption in the datacenters of financial markets firms. Killer applications, including virtual appliances and virtualization, Linux-as-a-Service and realtime/low latency Linux will be explored, as will the practicalities of deploying open source stacks in business-critical, high availability scenarios.

Glyn Moody wrote an interesting article for the Guardian earlier this month titled “Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft.” It got me thinking about commoditization; specifically pondering the question: Is Linux driving the O/S towards commoditization as many would have us believe? The key point of Mr. Moody’s article is that several converging market forces are poised to impact Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system and productivity software markets.

PARSIX 1.0 is a Persian Linux distribution, created by a team in Iran and built on a Debian base. It comes as a live CD in which the default languages – ironically, I have to say, given the prickly relationship between the leaders of Iran and America – are Persian and American English. I always have some initial concerns about using Linux distributions whose first language is not my own, simply because of my own linguistic limitations. However, I had read good things about Parsix so I cast aside my doubts and dived in.

Hewlett Packard will start shipping some of its notebook and desktop computers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preinstalled later this year. “We are really excited by this deal because of the power that the HP distribution channel brings, the reach they have and their commitment to interoperability. I am very enthusiastic about what this relationship could bring,” Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian told eWEEK in an interview here at its BrainShare 2008 conference.

"I lost a day-and-a-half this week due to a disk that decided to get read errors due to an unfortunate power outage, and had to spend too much time regenerating my normal setup," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc6 kernel, "but I don't think I lost any emails, and things seemed to have calmed down a bit, so here's to hoping that -rc6 is starting to look better."

Novell used its BrainShare 2008 conference here to start talking publicly about its development plans for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, the next version of its server operating system. Among the company's lofty goals is to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that will be supported by a new tool set designed to quickly build specialized images.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth spent about $20 million to go into space, and he never got farther away from Earth than a few hundred miles. Using three free software programs, you can look at and virtually travel to places millions of miles away without leaving your GNU/Linux desktop or paying a dime. The GNU GPL covers all three programs, and most major distributions include all of them as packages.

In the last year, a growing number of companies based on free and open source software (FOSS) have come out of stealth mode. One of the latest is Acquia, which provides services for organizations that use Drupal, the popular content management platform. "Until now," says Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's vice president of marketing, "there hasn't been a Red Hat or Ubuntu of the Drupal world." Acquia plans to fill that gap by selling subscription services that will improve what Whatcott calls the "few rough edges and gaps" in Drupal, at the same time that the company establishes itself in the eyes of community.

Sun Microsystems is endorsing a Java project from the Eclipse Foundation, but don't think the battle for figurehead status in the Java community is over. The EclipseLink project has been selected by Sun as the reference implementation for the Java Persistence 2.0 API, which is working its way through the Java Community Process - the rival Java forum to Eclipse. EclipseLink will be used with Glassfish, the Sun-led Java Enterprise Edition application server implementation.