Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux-based eX2 in-flight entertainment system (IFE) from Panasonic Avionics was the big winner at this year's Avion Awards, sponsored by an IFE trade group. The Best Overall IFE awards went to Emirates, Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways, all running variants of eX2. This Red Hat-based system also is installed on Qantas Airways and on Boeing 777s operated by Delta and Continental. eX2, the newest version of Panasonic's in-flight entertainment systems, offers not the canned radio stations of yesteryear, but rather audio and video on demand, games, and even online books, depending on the carrier.

Will democratizing sustainable housing be enough to change Canada? It’s too early to tell, but there’s a start. Open source can make sustainable designs available. Nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it. The Now House is one sustainable housing design project created by one small team. What would happen if one hundred teams created projects like this?

Michael D. Setzer II, the leader of the project once known as Ghost for Linux (G4L), recently received a cease and desist email message from a lawyer representing Symantec. The company is demanding that the project change its name because the use of "Ghost" violates a trademark held by Symantec for its Norton Ghost disk imaging software.

Some lawsuits begin quietly, others are launched with great fanfare. The Software Freedom Law Center and two BusyBox developers have recently decided to take the latter approach to address a GPL compliance problem.

Accessing your home server safely can be problematic, especially if you don't have a fixed IP address, but with Linux, DynDNS, PAM, and NX Free you can create a safe remote access path to your machine. A few months ago, I had to travel from my hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay, to New York. As I would be staying abroad a few weeks, I had to make sure I could access my home server safely. Despite Linux's stability, I had to allow for my family having problems back home, and I couldn't depend on giving instructions over the phone or by messaging.

Prowling the x86 server warpath, Sun today revealed its roadmap of products set to bring the company fully into the virtualization brouhaha. The server maker's new xVM virtualization platform will span across its server, storage, and networking product lines. The first offering will be comprised of a hypervisor and management software set to be released next year. Sun laid down the roadmap basics at a press meeting in San Francisco.

The heated battle between paper companies and proprietary EHR companies for market share is always fascinating to watch. Linux Medical News labs weights in on the subject by doing a rigorous, side-by-side comparison of Paper company products vs. Proprietary Electronic Health Record software company products. The results may surprise you.

Microsoft has announced (NY Times Article) Health Vault. What should have followed here is a review of the service by my actually trying it. I was in the process of registering when I began reading the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and I had to stop right there with my review when I read it. In addition to the contract being lengthy, it specifically states: "In using the Service, you may not:..

On Oct. 4, Novell released openSUSE 10.3, the newest version of its popular community Linux distribution. This version of openSUSE includes a flexible Linux-Windows dual-boot configuration, improved user interface, Microsoft Office file compatibility with the latest OpenOffice.org office productivity suite and enhanced multimedia support.

Although the National Health Council recommends you to keep a personal health record and take it with you to your doctor,it’s one thing to document your medical information…It’s another to know when and how to use it. Open MedicDrive,a collaborative open architecture based application has launched the educational Wiki for advancing and educating users about the role of Healthcare Information Technology in Personal Health Record Management.

You've been ripping CDs for years, but what about those dusty cassette tapes in your attic and all that bargain-basement vinyl at used book sales? With Audacity, you can capture those vintage tunes, clean up their sound, and carry them around on your MP3 player. Audacity is a powerful free cross-platform audio editor. It includes tools such as noise removal filters and automatic track splitting that can speed up the process of turning your antique audio into shiny new MP3s or Oggs.

Kino is a video editor that allows you to produce your own video masterpieces using only free and open source software. With it, you can capture and edit clips from your video camera, add titles, insert still images, create transitions between scenes, and output the result in a number of formats. Best of all, it's easy to learn to use. But don't rely on the version in your distro -- grab the 1.1.1 release from SourceForge.net and build it yourself.

The KDE 4.0 Release Event Team is pleased to announce a contest for the KDE 4.0 Release Event. The winners of this contest will be flown out to Mountain View, California on January 17-19, 2008. Hotel and meals will be covered for them during the event.

LXer Feature: 04-Oct-2007

This was originally going to be a comment attached to Build 'em Right, Build 'em Strong, Build 'em Linux. Then it grew and grew, and I decided that Ken deserved his own feature. And then I realized that there are a lot of unsung heroes of FOSS, so watch this space for future installments. I encourage all of you fine LXers to write your own "Heroes" features- there are a lot of people out there who deserve some recognition.

So what does Linux offer for the ace digital photographer who doesn't want to splurge on a Mac? Carla Schroder offers a look at one great tool, Digikam.

Adobe has released its first version of Flex Builder to support Desktop Linux. This version of its internet application development tool was released early to get feedback from developers and their priorities for additional features.

Last month, just one week after IBM announced it would help with OpenOffice.org's development, the company released Lotus Symphony, an office suite based on OpenOffice.org code. I found a lot of slick features in Lotus Symphony, but I worry that Symphony could affect the OpenOffice.org community adversely. Lotus Symphony includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation tool. You'll have to register with IBM to download Symphony. Installing the office suite is a no-brainer, and requires 490.5MB of disk space.

ARM today flexed its mobile muscle by revealing a fairly broad coalition focused on developing a version of Linux well-suited for future smart phones.

You can send and receive messages from most Web-based email services with your favourite email client by using FreePOPs, a webmail access daemon. Web-mail accounts can be annoying to work with, especially if you've got several with different service providers, all of whom offer non-standard user interfaces to get and send email. Some webmail services offer a free or extra-cost POP/SMTP (read: regular email) access option, but FreePOPs can help you avoid the extra-cost plans.

You could get 18.4 copies of Vista Home Premium for that. One of the favourite public refrains of the FOSS movement is that Windows is too expensive, and that Microsoft swindles consumers, governments, taxpayers, penguins, and orphans.