Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ubuntu founder and IT entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth tells Computing SA that picking open source software was not only good for South Africa but also important for the rest of the African continent. Shuttleworth says the goal for any country, including SA, should be sustainable economic growth, part of which is derived from the contribution made from a technology perspective. "In this context it is wealth creation that matters, since the former will potentially generate high-quality jobs."

Google has released a beta version of Google Desktop 1.1 for Linux. Google software engineer Jim Zhuang writes on his blog:"Because many people wanted to search and launch applications, we added that functionality to the product. Desktop for Linux now supports many more image formats and will show better thumbnails for them in your search results.

If OpenOffice.org's own bibliography feature doesn't really cut it for you, you have several choices. One popular bibliography solution is Bibus, a cross-platform tool that integrates nicely with OpenOffice.org. It is, however, not the only bibliographical tool out there. In fact, there is another nifty tool called Zotero that turns Firefox into a powerful research tool. More importantly, it comes with an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to use Zotero as a bibliography database. Zotero also sports a few clever features that make the process of creating and managing bibliographies much more efficient.

MDNG has an extremely frank article that is noteworthy by who its author is: a medical doctor who is president of an EHR company. The article states in number 1-4 that: the award an EHR received, the 'non-biased expert', the referred EHR using physician, and the respected physician leader of your local society may have been paid off by the EHR company to say favorable things about a product!

LXer Feature: 15-Oct-2007

So far in this randomly-appearing series I haven't talked all that much about Linux, but mostly camera gear. Today I'm going to talk about photography fundamentals. Because a skilled person can use an image editor to doctor any photo to look like anything, but for me that is not the point. I'm not interested in devoting my life to repairing inferior photos; I want to take the best-quality pictures possible and not have to spend endless hours mucking about to make them look like anything. So step one is Find Good Camera Equipment, and step two is Learn To Use It.

Here at Tectonic we spend way too much time online and a great deal of that time is spent doing research. QuickNote is one of the few Firefox extensions that make it possible for us to escape the Internet occasionally have lives in 'meat space'.

The parallels are there. At least enough of them to bring forward a comparison and force us to ask the tough questions. Questions not only between us, but questions that should be posed to the world....a world by the way that really doesn't see what we do. We've created a creature that now rules the Master. How do we stop it? And even if we decide we should...how do you fight a monster of this stature and strength?

LXer Feature: 14-Oct-2007

I have a lot of big stories for you this week. Linus gets mad, Amsterdam's open source test is successful, Red Hat and Novell get sued with a little help from Microsoft, 12 tips for KDE users, an article on how to protect your Linux system during startup, a review of KOffice and our own Sander Marechal interviews John Hull of Dell. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007," began the latest FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, posted by Brad Davis. He included a summary of the recent Google Summer of Code projects noting, "lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD." Regarding the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release he noted, "the bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about what's new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras' excellent summary."

The Dutch Consumers Association has called for a boycott of Windows Vista, after the software giant refused to offer free copies of Windows XP to users who are having problems with Vista. A spokesman for the Consumentenbond says that the product has many teething problems, and "is just not ready". The association claims it received over 5000 complaints about Vista. Many printers and other hardware failed to work, the association says, computers crash frequently and peripherals are very slow.

The Software Freedom Law Center will soon reveal the culmination of a year and half of steady revision and editing: a legal primer for free software projects, designed to make complex issues understandable to the layman. The primer, which will be disgorged on the Law Center’s web site on Monday, walks through issues such as the GNU public license (GPL) and how to use it correctly, copyright assignment and enforcement, and so on.

Andrew Morton posted his first -mm patchset against the recently released 2.6.23 kernel, preparing for a big merge of patches bound for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. He noted: "I've been largely avoiding applying anything since rc8-mm2 in an attempt to stabilise things for the 2.6.23 merge. "But that didn't stop all the subsystem maintainers from going nuts, with the usual accuracy. We're up to a 37MB diff now, but it seems to be working a bit better."

On October 11, 2005, proprietary software maker Xara announced its plans to open the source code to its flagship vector graphics package Xara Xtreme, and with the help of community developers port it to Linux. Today, two years later, the project is stagnant and on the verge of irrelevance, primarily because the company couldn't figure out how to work with the open source community.

The Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel is a security module designed to harden Linux systems through the addition of mandatory access control policies; it was covered here last August. Like SELinux, SMACK works by attaching labels to processes, files, and other system objects and implementing rules describing what kinds of access are allowed by specific combinations of labels. Unlike SELinux, though, SMACK was designed specifically for simplicity of administration.

When Red Hat announced its upcoming Linux desktop at its annual summit in May, the company predicted the Red Hat Global Desktop would be out by September. Now, delayed a bit, the new desktop Linux will be appearing in November, company executives are saying.

Who says you have to give up all your Windows programs to use Linux? Not CodeWeavers, with its latest version of CrossOver Linux 6.2. With this new version of CrossOver Linux, you can run more Windows programs on Linux than ever and such Windows mainstays as Microsoft Office--from 97 to 2003--Internet Explorer 6, and Quicken run better than ever. Even programs like Adobe Photoshop are coming along. At this point, I'd recommend that only people who are interested in helping to debug Photoshop on Linux give it a try, but I can see Photoshop running well on Linux sometime soon.

Rick Ross, founder of Javalobby, a popular site among Java developers, recently wrote an article about the One Laptop Per Child project and how cool it is. Ross also noted that OLPC does not appear on Sun Microsystems 2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, which outlines that company's social responsibility obligations. Ross thinks it's time to change that.

Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading commercial provider of open source-based electronic health record (EHR) systems and services, today announced an agreement to implement its OpenVista® EHR platform at Century City Doctors Hospital (CCDH) in Los Angeles. The 120-bed acute care facility, located in the west side business district adjacent to Beverly Hills, is implementing the OpenVista platform as part of an integrated information systems initiative established by the physician group that acquired, renovated, and opened the hospital in 2005.

This tutorial explores a few simple techniques to improve a portrait using GIMP. In particular, you’ll see a couple of new features introduced in the new GIMP 2.4, the Healing Tool and the Red Eye Removal filter.

Mandriva Linux 2008.0 comes in three editions. Mandriva One is a free single-CD live version that contains a choice of KDE or GNOME. It allows users to test their hardware and see how it looks before making any permanent changes to their hard drives. It includes an easy graphical installer. You can add software repositories to the software manager and customize it to your liking. This is a good choice for anyone who needs a live CD or those who aren't sure if they'd like to install Mandriva yet.