Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

OpenSUSE 10.3 was released last week, and I quickly downloaded the new version to update my two openSUSE boxes. Here's a chronicle of the updates and some problems that surfaced during the process.

Last week we learned how to sanely organize our vast digital photo archives with Digikam. Today we'll look at Digikam's built-in editing tools. You'll be able to do a surprising amount of your editing work without ever leaving Digikam.

CPUs are today much more sophisticated than they were only 25 years ago. In those days, the frequency of the CPU core was at a level equivalent to that of the memory bus. Memory access was only a bit slower than register access. But this changed dramatically in the early 90s, when CPU designers increased the frequency of the CPU core but the frequency of the memory bus and the performance of RAM chips did not increase proportionally. This is not due to the fact that faster RAM could not be built, as explained in the previous section. It is possible but it is not economical. RAM as fast as current CPU cores is orders of magnitude more expensive than any dynamic RAM.

The new KOffice 2.0, sometime in the first half of next year, according to reports, will run on Linux, BSD and -- for the first time -- Windows and Macintosh platforms. For those who don't know, KOffice is the office suite meant to complement the KDE desktop environment used in many Linux and BSD distributions. Well, KOffice isn't new, per se, but it's new to non-Linux/BSD users. While I've had a hell of a time getting the typographical quotes to face in the right direction in KWord, the word-processing component of KOffice, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that, overall, KOffice is a better-written piece of software than the big dog in free office suites, OpenOffice.

Curl, the rich programming language specialist back from obscurity, is turning to open source to gain a foothold in rich internet applications (RIA).

Here's a great little article on how to work with the Free Software Community: "...With that intent in mind, let’s explore seven principles that will make your life easier when engaging free software types.

Every year, Linux enthusiasts in India's capital, New Delhi, hold a conference to help spread word of free and open source software (FOSS). This year they called their conference Freed.in, and had more talks and attendees than they've had in the past. While the event was a wonderful opportunity for the FOSS community to interact in person, discuss issues, and brainstorm solutions, attendees were overwhelmed by the number of talks jammed into a two-day schedule.

Back in the late 1990s,when the KDE and GNOME desktops were getting started, KDE had the reputation of being the most suitable choice for new GNU/Linux users, especially those migrating from Windows. Whether this generality is still true is debatable (personally, I could never see much difference between the two desktops), but KDE remains one of GNU/Linux's most popular graphical interfaces, as well as one of the most easy to learn.

A "significant portion" of development teams continue to use Linux as their primary embedded OS, a recent VDC survey finds. Additionally, the results suggest the trend will persist, "as the majority of current Linux users surveyed plan to use Linux again as their primary operating system on future [embedded] projects."

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into ODT (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents. Using odtwriter, you can generate ODF files on machines that don't have ODF-compatible word processors installed, such as those running lightweight Linux distros, or simply compose documents in a text editor and leave the task of properly formatting them to odtwriter.

Ubuntu's leader has thoughts on Microsoft CEO's latest claims that Linux and open source violate Microsoft's intellectual property.

Ubuntu-based Linspire 6.0 includes CNR service, proprietary software and Microsoft technology. It also bundles in Microsoft patent covenants following a deal with the software giant last year.

Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0.

Cinelerra, one of the only serious video editing and compositing tools available for Linux, can cause frustration for users trying to install it on Ubuntu Studio. Fortunately, after several attempts, I found a way to install it easily.

"Finally. Yeah, it got delayed, not because of any huge issues, but because of various bugfixes trickling in and causing me to reset my 'release clock' all the time. But it's out there now, and hopefully better for the wait,"

While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. KOffice 2.0, to be released sometime in the first half of 2008, will be cross platform like many other applications in the KDE suite built with the Qt4 GUI toolkit.

While in Britain last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took a swipe at just about everything - from one of the world's largest Linux vendors to a social networking company he may end up buying. He insisted that Red Hat violates MS patents. He compared Facebook to GeoCities. He even accused Google of reading your email.

The GIMP image editor is preparing for the start of a new development cycle, and you can have your say in the way the next version looks by submitting a mock-up to the GIMP UI Brainstorm blog. User interface designer Peter Sikking spoke with us about the project and how it fits into the larger work of creating the GIMP's UI.

Ralf Baechle posted the Linux/MIPS architecture merge plans for the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel. The diffstat for all changes showed, "435 files changed, 14274 insertions(+), 10196 deletions(-)", about which Ralf noted, "the number of patch lines and files is inflated by two large whitespace cleanup patches."

Uli Drepper is a Red Hat developer and the lead contributor and maintainer of the GNU C Library (glibc). Watch the first , second , and third videos in this series as well.