Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Fonts in Linux are crazy. Most Linux distributions ship with a big blob of serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts, and there's barely a pixel's worth of difference between them. In this article, we'll demonstrate how to better manage fonts in Linux, no matter what distribution you're using.

Novell Suse Linux is positioning itself to be the corporate Linux of choice for today's multi-OS corporation thanks to a series of agreements with companies such as SAP and Microsoft.

Last week's announcement of a patent infringement suit against Red Hat and Novell set in motion speculation about motives, theories, agendas, and behind-the-scenes players. If you've been feeling like you need a scorecard to keep up, then you're in luck.

I’m sitting in a session at Adobe Max Europe listening to Senior Product Manager Laurel Reitman talking about what a great open platform Adobe is creating. She refers to the open sourcing of the Flex SDK; the open bug database for Flex; the ISO standardization programme for PDF; the donation of source code to Tamarin, the Mozilla Foundation ECMAScript 4.0 runtime project, and the use of open source projects such as SQLite and Webkit within AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime which lets you run Flash applications on the desktop, and the fact that AIR will run in due course on Linux, though the initial release will be Mac and Windows only.

The KDE Community is happy to release the third beta for KDE 4.0. This beta, aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase, also marks the freeze of the KDE Development Platform. We are joined in this release by the KOffice project which releases its 4th alpha release, bringing many improvements in OpenDocument support, a KChart Flake shape and much more to those willing to test.

By the end of this month Sun Microsystems will release the first developer version of OpenSolaris in its "Project Indiana" incarnation.

"It contains lots of scheduler updates from lots of people - hopefully the last big one for quite some time," began Ingo Molnar,describing his merge request for thelinux-2.6-sched git tree. He continued,"most of the focus was on performance (both micro-performance and scalability/balancing), but there's the fair-scheduling feature now Kconfig selectable too. Find the shortlog below." Ingo noted,"code that is touched outside of the scheduler: the KVM bits were acked by Avi, the net/unix change is trivial and only affects sync wakeups, ditto the fs/pipe.c changes - but i can push those separately if it needs an ack from David first."

In this week’s Creative Commons Artist Spotlight, we interview French artist Philippe Mangold about his CC-licensed work available at Jamendo.com.

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has shown all the loyalty of a free agent athlete. Just a few months after resigning from Linspire, Carmony has traded in his old company's Linux operating system for Ubuntu.

The concept of a Electronic Medical Record (EMR) 'source code escrow' had to be dreamed up by proprietary EMR marketing departments. Source code escrows give a false sense of security and confuse buyers from getting the real thing: Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) licensed EMR software. Source code escrows sound good on the surface but even a cursory examination reveals many practical flaws. A source code escrow is defined by Wikipedia as a:"...deposit of the source code of the software into an account held by a third party escrow agent. Escrow is typically requested by a party licensing software (the licensee), to ensure maintenance of the software. The software source code is released to the licensee if the licensor files for bankruptcy or otherwise fails to maintain and update the software as promised in the software license agreement."

I've been pacing the chumby maternity ward for nearly a year, waiting for this unique wireless device to see the light of day. I recently took delivery of my own little bundle of chumby joy and, at first look, I think it will make a great addition to my growing gadget family.

For those who are tired of cleaning out an inbox full of junk, Roaring Penguin's latest anti-spam software has been released. Although it isn't open source, as the Penguin-based company name might suggest, there is a version for small enterprises which can be used free of charge.

Ubuntu 7.10 arrives Oct. 18, and not long after that Dell will start shipping that version of the Ubuntu Linux desktop on its laptops and desktops. "We will offer Ubuntu 7.10 preinstalled on our systems soon," said Anne Camden of Dell corporate communications, in an e-mail interview. "For customers who are interested in updating their existing Ubuntu systems, we advise them to visit the Ubuntu 7.10 page on our wiki, which will go live [Oct. 18] after the official launch."

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony was pretty gung-ho about the company's upcoming release back in June. He said it would "fill some key holes in our current offering." Unfortunately Linspire 6, released last week, lacks the refinements you'd expect in a distro you pay $50 to download. It drops some key distinguishing features, and in return gains only some Microsoft technology as spelled out in the Microsoft patent covenants Linspire agreed to. This release seems to be about deferring to Microsoft.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, will announce its third annual desktop Linux survey on Oct. 17. This survey is not designed to measure how popular the Linux desktop is or how popular one desktop distribution is over another, although it will also measure some of that kind of information. What the survey is really designed to do is to pinpoint areas of user need in order to focus development efforts and accelerate the global adoption of Linux desktops and clients.

Linux vendor Novell is heading off after the small business sector now with its latest release, the Novell Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition (say that in one breath). The suite is a desktop-to-server setup that the company says is tailored to meet the needs of small businesses.

Theoretically, search engines should find all the best Web sites and rank them at the top of their search results. Unfortunately, due to the gap between artificial and human intelligence, this doesn't always happen. Users have the ability to alter the rankings by doing search engine optimization (SEO) -- a two-edged sword that can either be beneficial or harmful, depending on whose hands it's in. You can improve your site's search-engine rankings by using free or open source software (FOSS) tools for SEO.

In a surprising announcement, which will no doubt stir up the open source community, the Open Source Initiative said that it had approved two of Microsoft's licences as being fit for open source software.

In this guest column, technology marketing consultant Kim Brebach, who last month published an essay titled "13 Reasons why Linux won't make it to a desktop near you," discovers why desktop Linux has thrived despite what he terms its "troubled childhood."

Openads, formerly known as phpAdsNew, is one of the more successful open source development projects. Its online advertising software is used by many thousands of domain owners who want to make a profit on their Web content by selling advertisements. Scott Switzer, the project leader, recently went commercial with the project, securing $5 million in venture capital and a new CEO straight from Skype. The key to the company's success? "I have really seen the value in what a community can give to a software project," he says.