Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

You can manage most of today's multimedia applications easily with ReMoot, a universal remote control program. ReMoot even provides an esoteric way of controlling your PC remotely from your cell phone or PDA, earning it top geek points. Start by going to the ReMoot site and clicking on Source Download to get the latest version, 0.4. The software consists of Perl and Ruby scripts.

It seems increasingly likely that Google, the ubiquitous tech company, is about to throw its hat into the race to develop the next big mobile device. Google's no gadget-maker, but it does develop quite a bit of software, and reports have been building that the company is relatively close to releasing the Gphone.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Image support in Parley, and support for formulas in the note feature of the Step physics simulation package. blinKen changes capitalisation to Blinken for the KDE 4.0 release. Theme work across kdegames, with better collision detection in Kolf. More XMP integration work in Digikam. Work on KConfig merged back into trunk/. Colour conversion system becomes fully operational in Krita. Continued work on the port of the Kickoff menu to KDE 4, initial work on a centred-button menu in Raptor. KIOFuse, the KIOSlave filesystem bridge, starts to be ported to KDE 4. An uncertain future for the Klipper applet in KDE 4.0, compared to its KDE 3.x form.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 104 for the week of October 1st.

Guest columnist Howard Fosdick has previously used Puppy Linux to successfully revive "mature" PCs. Now, he takes a broader, deeper look at the parsimonious distribution and its potential value on normal desktop PCs.

Google and IBM want their future employees to have large-scale cluster computing chops, so they're investing several million to get them while their young. The companies are teaming up to promote the study in academia. Their ambition is to lower the cost and logistics of collegial research on parallel computing — a technique that spreads computational tasks across many computers. Google and IBM hope to advocate the cause by offering the considerable gear necessary to universities remotely.

[Not directly FOSS related but still of interest. - Scott]

So you think your computer boots quickly? The newly-released Asus P5E3 motherboard includes an embedded Linux OS that can be booted in under five seconds and includes a browser and Skype application.

In Part 2 of this three-part series, you will learn what the best systematic approach should be to start solving any problems you might have in Linux.

From recent media reports, casual readers could easily believe that OpenOffice.org, the popular free office suite, is fragmenting. Slashdot reported last week that Novell is backing an official fork, while Ars Technica suggested that if what was happening fell short of a fork, then it was still "serious fragmentation" and "not a good thing for the OpenOffice.org community." However, a closer look at the situation shows that what is happening is less of a dramatic split than the airing of long-time grievances and the media's discovery of a long-established institution.

For Firefox users who are constantly referring to multiple pages, tabbed browsing is not a feature, but a way of life. There are enough of us that the Firefox addon page lists more than 110 extensions related to tabs. These extensions feature everything from simple add-ons to various means of saving tab addresses and sessions to thumbnails and collections of functions, as well as one or two uncategorizable ideas.

JD Frazer, Illiad of UserFriendly fame, has made a scientific discovery! A new element. I know you always wanted to know what 117 would turn out to be on the periodic table of elements.

Fans of OpenSUSE 10.3 will be pleased to hear OpenSUSE 10.3 has been released. So, what can you expect? For a start, an improved interface with the latest versions of Gnome and KDE, including a KDE 4 preview. Or, for those still tied to Windows, an improved Linux-Windows dual boot option, better Microsoft Office format compatibility (what else did you expect?) and the latest version of OpenOffice.org (2.3).

People Behind KDE releases the fourth and final interview in its series of interviews with students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - meet Marijn Kruisselbrink, Alexandr Goncearenco, Emanuele Tamponi and Vladimir Kuznetsov!

LXer Feature: 07-Oct-2007

Some of the big articles this week include Mono becomes a trap, are computers sold with no OS profitable?, an editorial by Carla Schroder, Swedish police save 400 cars by using MySQL, Is Ubuntu losing its crown to PCLinuxOS?, The Next Leap for Linux and a tribute to Ken Starks. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Last week I spent the day at eMDs talking with Dr. Winn and the excellent eMDs team. Sadly, I cannot talk about eMDs Open Source plans yet, but I can say that they will soon be making a big splash. I had some pretty cool pictures from my visit, including one with Robby the Robot, so post also servers to announce that I have migrated FredTrotter.com to wordpress, in order to be able to post pictures with my blog posts.

Uruguay's government this week announced the results of a study indicating that XO computers from the One Laptop Per Child project were a better value for the nation's schoolchildren than Intel's similar offering, the Classmate PC. The next step is likely to be a purchase agreement between OLPC and Uruguay for at least 100,000 laptops. Though nothing has been finalized yet, when asked what needs to happen for formal agreement to occur, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte simply says, "business closure."

If there's a better system repair kit than the Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD Linux distribution, we haven't seen it yet. The new 0.4 version of SystemRescueCd was released on Oct. 4. This new edition focuses on disk partitioning, Vista support, and data rescue tasks. In the past, we've found SystemRescueCD to be the best of the best when it comes to repairing troubled systems. We see every reason to believe that this version will be even better.

So, how are you liking FreeBSD? Do you believe it's something you work with, live with day after day? If you find you've gotten used to it, maybe the time has come to get more acquainted with one of the best features of FreeBSD: It's relatively painless to update the entire system by rebuilding it from code. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, our focus will be on security updates and optimization.

Has it been a while since you used FTP from the command line? While there are decent GUI-based FTP clients (such as gFTP), you can automate operations with the command-line version and handle file transfers with no user interaction at all.

It is Roktober time again at the Amarok Project and they are giving away an iAudio7 mobile music player to encourage donations. Roktober is the time to review the events of the past 12 months, start planning and do the fundraising for the next year. If you do not have the time to actively help with the project this is your call, for each €10 donated you will be given an entry into the prize draw. Amarok funds are spent on the webserver, travel & accommodation for developer meetings and event staff expenses. It has never been easier to help keep Amarok rockin'.