Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Beginning today, anyone interested in getting an XO computer through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has a chance to grab one. The Give One, Get One (G1G1) program is open to US and Canadian residents who want to purchase one XO laptop for themselves for $399. Order between today and November 26, and you'll receive one of the green and white laptop computers. The other will be sent on your behalf to a child in a developing nation. US donors will also receive free access for one year to T-Mobile wireless hotspots located throughout the country.

So you've written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your Web site, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension. An extension is just a plain zip archive containing, besides the macro itself, a few XML-based files that OpenOffice.org needs to properly install the package. Theoretically, it's possible to create the required XML files in a text editor, but it would be as effective as digging a garden using a teaspoon. Fortunately, there is a tool that you can use to create an extension in a point-and-click fashion.

Promises made are promises kept. Novell announced at August's LinuxWorld in San Francisco that it would be bringing SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1 to Chinese users, and that day is almost here. In a blog posting, Kevan Carmony, a Novell spokesperson, announced that SLED systems preinstalled on Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 commercial desktop PCs will be available later this year.

Firefox includes an option for bookmarking all open tabs, but heavy users of tabs will find that this option is hardly enough. When you are researching a subject, the particular combination of tabs matters as much as the individual ones -- and, besides, selecting the tabs to open individually can be tedious if you are dealing with several dozen. And what happens if your session crashes before you have a chance to bookmark? You can address such concerns by installing Session Manager, a highly customizable add-on for preserving the state of the window after you close the browser.

LXer Feature: 11-Nov-2007

Some of the big stories this week include the Open Document Foundation, a call for papers for SCaLE 6x, four ways to extract the current directory name, the BBC admits a massive underestimate of its Linux users, Linux Backups For Real People, Part 2, a Linux game company opens its doors, Vista vs. desktop Linux: One year in and never use Babel Fish to talk to a foreign minister.

After a much publicised spat between Mandriva and Microsoft over an 11,000 computer deal with the Nigerian government it seems Nigeria has decided to stick with Mandriva Linux, the original plan.

Handwriting recognition, like its cousins speech recognition and optical character recognition, is a domain still dominated by proprietary products. Where there are Linux solutions, such as the one in Nokia's Maemo Internet tablets, they are often closed source plugins protected by patent claims. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find CellWriter, a small, straightforward handwriting recognition tool that integrates easily with modern Linux desktops. CellWriter provides a small, grid-like window into which you write with normal pen strokes. Thus it works best with a pen interface, such as a Wacom tablet, but that isn't strictly required.

When you travel a lot, once in a while it just seems that you are on "The Trip from Hades", and you wonder why you travel as much as you do.read more

Linux Mint is a derivative distribution of Ubuntu. Its purpose, according to its Web site, "is to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." Unfortunately, it falls short in at least one of those areas, and suffers from several other disappointing shortcomings. Mint comes in two primary editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs and plugins, and a light edition, which does not. Like Ubuntu, both versions use GNOME as the user interface, though there are other versions of Mint available which include Xfce and KDE.

Reader Jeff tipped us off to this exciting news: Electronic Arts will donate the original SimCity city-building game to each computer in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

Quick, name some virtualization programs that run on Linux. Time's up. If you're like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you're already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

Microsoft and Novell are using the one-year anniversary of their interoperability agreement to tout the increasing number of enterprise customers who are signing up because of the benefits offered through the collaboration. The two companies announced Nov. 8 that Microsoft will give 30 new customers three-year priority support subscriptions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. These agreements were negotiated over the past quarter, and they bring the number of such deals to about 60 that have taken place over the past year.

A stark future awaits American health care if the Veterans Affairs (VA) system and Cerner is allowed to go forward withannounced plans to replace the VA's successful public domain laboratory software, in need of update, with a proprietary one. The VA would give large amounts of cash that would greatly assist a single proprietary company in dominating EHR software in both the public and private sector. A free, thriving EHR ecosystem will be destroyed and replaced with a monopoly or cartel at great expense in which the quality, privacy and security of such software is a trade secret, un-examined and un-examinable. If this is allowed, it could lead to Americans essentially renting their own medical data back from the Cerners of the world at great expense.

After almost a year since Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing, it's time to re-evaluate it and decide if it's finally the equal of the best of the desktop Linuxes. That's not a facetious question. Yes, in terms of market share, desktop Linux hovers just over 1 percent of all users, while Microsoft claims that Vista by this summer had already sold more than 60 million copies. I'm not impressed, and you shouldn't be either.

Can SCO escape Novell's wrath? Will SCO CEO Darl McBride emerge rejuvenated and ready to continue the Linux legal wars by selling SCO's Unix business? These and many more questions will be answered in the next episode of "As SCO Turns." In our last chapter, SCO appeared in front of a bankruptcy court on Nov. 6, 2007, in Delaware. When the news that SCO was applying for Chapter 11 bankruptcy first appeared, most assumed that was the end of SCO and its seemingly endless lawsuits against IBM, Novell and other Linux-related companies.

Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer, which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations. Although LaTeX Beamer is capable of considerable complexity, you need to know surprisingly little in order to produce a slide show.

Red Hat has delivered an early Christmas present to ISVs. At a press conference Nov. 7, the leading Linux company announced that in 2008 it will release a new appliance version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1: Red Hat Appliance Operating System.

In order to navigate and jump between dozens of websites with sanity intact, James Archibald tries out another Firefox add-on, Tab Mix Plus, and finds himself very, very impressed.

Last week we got our backup hardware in order, so today we're going into detail on backing up our data to a locally-attached backup device. We'll learn how to configure which files to backup, and create an easy one-word-command backup.

Red Hat announced Nov. 7 the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, with integrated virtualization. In claims that Red Hat representatives were well aware are extremely broad reaching, they said the new release will provides the most compelling platform for customers and software developers ever, with its industry-leading virtualization capabilities complementing Red Hat's newly announced Linux Automation strategy. It offers the industry's broadest deployment ecosystem, covering stand-alone systems, virtualized systems, appliances and Web-scale "cloud" computing environments.