Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Debian development team yesterday announced the second update for Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, or Etch. Stability enhancements and an updated installer top the list of updates in this release.

LXer Feature: 29-Dec-2007

Thanks to a friend who knew a friend who knew someone else, I was lucky enough to get my hands on a Chumby for a few days even though it is only available as a limited preview and not outside the Unites States. It's probably one of the first Chumbies in Europe. I only had it a few days as it was only lent to me by the owner, but this gave me ample opportunity to play with the device, give a thorough review and hack it a little. And what fun I have had!

When the Everex gPC ($199 direct, without monitor) was announced, it received some fanfare as a bargain-subbasement "green" Linux-based PC, or the (quite unofficial) "Google PC," available at your local Wal-Mart. Everex, a firm known for producing cheap laptops for big-box stores, supposedly designed it for nontechnical yet Web-savvy users who like to go on the Web to see their friends' pages on social-networking sites or YouTube videos. Google and Google Apps are a central part of the gPC's raison d'être, but thus far the gPC is not a Google-licensed product. "G" also stands for green, since the gPC uses a low-powered VIA C7 processor. But as with the Google aspect, gPC's energy-efficient status is to some extent smoke and mirrors, as I'll explain later. The gPC does have a green-colored theme and start-up screen, so it has that much going for it. But the good news ends there.

OpenEMR HQ, an Oklahoma based firm focused on supporting, consulting, and expanding the popularOpenEMR software system, has scheduled the first OpenEMR Public Training for January 18th 2008. The training, to be held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, will focus on installing, customizing, and administering an OpenEMR system on Linux and will be held from 8:00am to 12:00pm CST. Due to effects of the recent mid-west ice storms, the company is only accepting registrations for the training by telephone and can be reached at 918.919.4624 and will cost $350 USD per person with group discounts available. More information can be obtained by emailing training@openemrhq.com or calling the OpenEMR HQ offices at the number above.

Perl is a dynamic scripting language widely used in everything from Linux system utilities to Web servers to full-blown graphical enterprise applications. Just in time for Christmas, there's a new version of perl, the first in over five years. The first update since 2002 to the "practical extraction and report language," perl 5.10 adds both new language features and an improved perl interpreter, according to community site Perl Buzz.

Thanks to the Samba project, documentation about Windows networking protocols is now available to free software developers who want it. With the help of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Samba has hammered out an agreement for obtaining the documentation and has set up the new Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF) to make it accessible to other free software projects. The announcement marks the end of nearly a decade of litigation that began when Sun Microsystems requested documentation for the Microsoft Active Directory to build software interoperable with Windows. When Microsoft refused, Sun lodged a complaint with the European Commission, which launched a five year investigation into the issue.

One of the things we plan to do different in the Geek Ranch (see What's New Down Here?) is build a lot of domes instead of conventional buildings. The reasoning behind this is that they are quicker to build, cost less and use mostly local materials and that which is not local (in particular, steel) is used in lower quantities than in conventional construction. Before you ask, while we will have storage buildings and other parts of the facility build as domes, if you are thinking about a trip to the Geek Ranch for your getaway, yes your casita will also be a dome. It seems like geeks are the least likely to have a problem with something non-conventional.

Historians may argue whether it was Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who famously said, "Après moi, le Déluge" ("After me, the deluge"), but what cannot be argued is that, today, Deluge is the name of an efficient BitTorrent client that you would do well to try. Unlike other BitTorrent clients that consume high levels of RAM and CPU usage, Deluge is lightweight and unobtrusive. To help cut down the bloat, most of its functionality is available as plugins, so you can streamline its runtime requirements. Deluge is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Windows, Macintosh, and Linux versions are available, and you can run Deluge in KDE, Xfce, GNOME, and a number of other desktop environments.

This is a great time to be your own recording and sound engineer. There are all kinds of great digital recording gear, from tiny portable recorders to multi-channel mixer-recorders with CD burners, and Linux has a wealth of good-quality audio recording and editing programs.

At Tectonic we love Firefox (and so do most of our readers). Over the course of 2007 we reviewed many of the best Firefox extensions available and now, as the year-end closes in, we offer the top-five of these we could simply not live without.

LJ Gadget Guy Shawn Powers managed to keep us busy one-upping each other in the office today -- he wanted to know who got the geekiest gift this holiday season. Of course he proved to be the geekiest of all when he went as far as producing a full video review of his gift.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Trolltech-sponsored development continues on Phonon backends. Support for saving to remote URL's in Gwenview. A "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the train clock bla in Plasma. "Switch Tabs on Hover" can now be disabled, and other refinements in Kickoff for KDE 4.0. Work on a debugger (with a SpeedCrunch-inspired interface) for KHTML. Work to support the most recent release of the Flash (version 9) multimedia plugin in Konqueror...

If you've been running Linux long enough to have upgraded your system more than once, you probably have several Linux kernels lurking around your system. If you discover that a certain application no longer works for you, you can go back to a previous kernel to try to run your program. GRUB, the boot loader found in most Linux distributions, lets you choose among operating systems and kernels installed on your box. Many people, however, fear that messing with GRUB may ruin their system, because of its many esoteric options, and configuration file text that often contains no help comments. QGRUBEditor can help you view and edit the GRUB boot loader from a graphical user interface.

Find out more about Nipper, an open source network devices security auditing tool, and why companies can benefit from it.

I'm a little old to believe in Santa Claus, but then again, there are some things I believe in that are even more far-fetched than Saint Nick. We'll get back to that later. It was 2:30 in the morning and I had been working for a friend, delivering some computers and helping those who received them get them set up. It had been a long night and I stopped by my "boss's house to drop off the company van and get into my own truck to go home. I was surprised to see the lights on and knowing that everyone should be in bed, I walked quietly to the front door and slowly turned the knob. It's ok, I almost live there anyway and I have a key. I work pretty close to my "boss".

College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. To help bridge the gap, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed an OOP language to create computer animations using 3-D models, called Alice.

As the open-source movement gains momentum, patent companies are suing.

ARAHUAY, Peru - Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

LXer Feature: 23-Dec-2007

It looks like people are starting to get their hands on some OLPC's and the reviews have started coming in too. We also have a review of Carla Schroder's new book, KOffice takes a stand against OOXML, screenshots of the BBS's new iPlayer and Damn Small Linux 4.2, Open Source alternatives to Adobe, how to make a holiday slideshow and one of our readers has a Debian adventure of their own.

A report generator to visualize query results with gnuplot has been added. Exception handling has been improved. The Snellen Chart has been reactivated. KVK handling has officially been included. More hooks and an improved example hook script were added. Demographics handling has been extended to now really support multiple names, addresses, comm channels, and external IDs. Furthermore, there are lots of GUI-accessible configuration options that were always there in the backend but didn't have a frontend to them. File format handling in document management has seen improvements.