Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 23-24 February 2008. FOSDEM is a European meeting of free software developers, to listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software. We are looking for people to give a talk in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom.

[ Planning to be there to cover the event for LXer - hkwint ]

The next big frontier for Big Linux Build-out will be at a back end that's as close as anyone can get the front lines of big video production. That is, to consumers who are now also producers. And the parties in the best position to pioneer that frontier aren't in Seattle or Mountain view. They're in your home town.

Audio and video content are increasingly important components of the World Wide Web, which some of us remember, initially, as a text-only experience. Users of free software need not be told that the multimedia aspect of the net can be hard to access without recourse to proprietary tools. So the decisions which are made regarding multimedia support in the next version of the HTML specification are of more than passing interest. A current dispute over the recommended codecs for HTML5 shows just how hard maintaining an interoperable web may be.

Netgear has introduced five Linux-based networked attached storage (NAS) products. Targeted at "prosumers" and small to medium-sized businesses, Netgear's ReadyNAS NV+ systems offer higher capacities than previous Infrant models, and come in 1.5TB (terabyte), 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB versions, as well as a 4TB rackmount version.

The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two. Three years ago, McKesson's Acute Care Solutions offered its hospital and doctors' office applications to run under IBM's mainframe AIX or other larger server Unix. But customers were bringing smaller Intel-based servers into their hospitals and doctors offices. A small doctor's group had little use for an eight or 12-way Unix server, but a two-way Intel or AMD server was about right.

Researchers from Google have documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash content which leave tens of thousands websites susceptible to attacks that steal the personal details of visitors. The security bugs reside in Flash applets, the ubiquitous building blocks for movies and graphics that animate sites across the web. Also known as SWF files, they are vulnerable to attacks in which malicious strings are injected into the legitimate code through a technique known as cross-site scripting, or XSS. Currently there are no patches for the vulnerabilities, which are found in sites operated by financial institutions, government agencies and other organizations.

Sometimes putting together a best-of-the-year list is like pulling teeth. There simply isn't enough big news to fill the list out. That was not a problem for desktop Linux in 2007. This year was one of the most eventful years in desktop Linux's short history. While Mac OS X remains the most successful of all the Unix/open-source-based operating systems, the Linux desktop made great strides forward in both the office and in homes.

OggConvert is a simple, GUI-based video transcoder that outputs only to the free Theora and Dirac formats. It couldn't be any easier to use, and it's the quickest way to get a feel for the still-new Dirac codec. No need to tweak pages of arcane settings -- just drag, drop, and watch. You can download OggConvert as source code, or as a prepackaged binary for Debian, Fedora, SUSE, or Ubuntu. The latest release is version 0.3. OggConvert is written in Python, and uses GStreamer to perform its media conversion work.

Red Hat announced outstanding financial results for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 30. How outstanding? The Linux company's revenue for the quarter jumped to $135.4 million. That is an increase of 28 percent from the equivalent 2006 quarter and 6 percent from the second quarter of this year. Drilling down, Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions represented the bulk of Red Hat's income. The company's total RHEL income was $115.7 million. That brings RHEL's income up 30 percent year-over-year and 6 percent sequentially.

On Dec. 20, the Samba Group and the Software Freedom Law Center announced a deal with Microsoft that places all of Microsoft's network protocols needed for programs to work with Windows Server into the hands of the newly formed Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. The PFIF is a U.S.-based nonprofit corporation. It will make Microsoft's server network protocol documentation available to open-source developers such as The Samba Group, which creates programs for Windows Server interoperability, and private companies. This information is provided under an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) and developers must agree to the NDA before gaining access to the documentation.

In 2007, much of the open-source action happened outside the corridors of the usual corporate suspects. For years, the center of open-source software, at least from a commercial perspective, was with companies such as Red Hat, Novell, MySQL, and a number of smaller players. Those companies continued grinding away at their collaborative programming projects and support-centric businesses, but more unusual for the year were the new arrivals.

As promised, the second part of this series presents still more commercially available music and sound software for Linux. Come see (and hear) what your money will buy...

If you use Linux on your desktop, and you also happen to have a BlackBerry handheld device, you're probably aware that Research in Motion, the company that develops the BlackBerry platform, offers nothing in the way of support for its devices on Linux -- but the intrepid geeks in the free software world do. Thanks to to the efforts of the Barry and OpenSync projects, I just finished syncing my BlackBerry 8800 with my Evolution contacts on my Ubuntu 7.10 desktop.

The news that the operations chief from a major US airline, Jim Whitehurst from Delta, is taking over at Red Hat from Matthew Szulik is a further sign of the growing legitimization of open source and Linux in the eyes of corporate, mainstream America. It underscores how the “suits to sandals” ratio in the open source and Linux movement sliding further towards the suits. Whitehurst’s blue-chip background at the $16-billion-a-year Delta and the fact he’s an executive lured from outside of the IT industry rather than one who simply swapped one tech industry management job for another underscores the belief in open source as a business.

There are literally dozens of window managers that you can use with your favorite desktop environment to get a beautiful and appealing desktop. If you want to fine-tune your window manager, here are two programs that can help you control everything from application window size to pinning an application to all workspaces to fixing a position for your application windows to resizing desktops. One, wmctrl, works with any window managers that adheres to the Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH), while Devil's Pie is a window-matching utility, which means it can configure application windows based on defined rules.

After reporting strong quarterly earnings, Red Hat discloses it is replacing CEO Matthew Szulik. In a move that caught even Red Hat senior staffers by surprise, the Linux company announced on Dec. 20 that long-time president and CEO Matthew Szulik is resigning. He will be replaced by James M. Whitehurst, a former Delta chief operating officer, as of the first of next year.

An international venture called the Universal Library Project has made more than one million books freely available in digitized format. The joint project of researchers from China, India, Egypt, and the US has the eventual aim of digitizing all published works of man, freeing the availability of information from geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, providing a basis for technological advancement, and preserving published works against time and tide.

Our resident Master's student Gian Spicuzza chimes in this month with a great feature HowTo on Kernel Hardening! There are a number of ways to lock down a system, and RBAC (role based access control) is one of them. Read on to learn more about what makes RBAC so useful, and to read one of the best overviews on Low/Medium/High Security... The combination of the Linux kernel and GNU packages has always been regarded as a secure operating system, but can it be more secure?

DV and MiniDV camcorder tapes can be used for more than just storing audio and video recordings. If you have a camcorder and a FireWire connection to your computer, you can also use them to store files. Using DV tapes for data storage has its advantages. A 60-minute tape, in Short Play mode, can realistically store about 10GB of information at a speed transfer of around 3MB/second, while in Long Play mode it should be able to store about 15GB. Besides that, moving files to a DV tape is a good way to hide sensitive data, because few people would look there for that kind of information.

Sharing printers across subnets is not something that has been reduced to clicking a couple of checkboxes yet, and a lot of folks don't even know it can be done. With Linux it is fairly easy, but it takes some digging to learn how to do this. So Carla Schroder has dug, and today shares the spoils of her digging.