Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

On various women's mailing lists, a subscriber has raised the idea of a distribution developed "for and by women." So far, the idea has met with a cool reception. It might even be a troll. However, if such a distro ever gets underway, it would be very much in the spirit of the community, and might give more women the background and confidence to reduce the gender gap in free software.

Neutrino Consulting provides IT services for small companies that don't want or need an in-house technology departments. Michael Wacht, Neutrino's founder and principal, says because he offers open source software alternatives to his clients, they get to choose the "best of the best," avoiding big license fees and vendor lock in. That, he says, makes Neutrino more competitive.

A privately held German company with offices in the U.K., U.S., Cyprus, and Malta is touting its Linux-based thin-client technology as a climate change remediant. "2X Ltd" says businesses can halve computer-related electrical consumption by replacing PCs with Linux-based thin clients and its centralized management software.

Well Ubuntu 7.10 final release is just around the corner. Hopefully in October we will see it released. Today we have done a short quick look at the beta release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Various screenshot images of the new desktop plus a short flash video highlight this article. Hurry up October!

Linspire, the troubled Linux distribution vendor, has recently lost a top executive and a lead developer to the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu, has hired former Linspire staffers Randy Linnell and Brian Thomason.

The same way tabbed browsing revolutionized the web experience, GNU Screen can do the same for your experience in the command line. GNU Screen allows you to manage several interactive shell instances within the same “window.” By using different keyboard shortcuts, you are able to shuffle through the shell instances, access any of them directly, create new ones, kill old ones, attach and detach existing ones.

Long-time Tectonic supporter and contributor Ian Gilfillan is heading up a group of Cape Town free content advocates that have launched a bid to host Wikimania 2008, the annual conference of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation behind Wikipedia. Give them your support.

According to the all-knowing (or pretty darn close) Tim at HIS talk "Frank Pecaitis and Medsphere have parted ways". Apparently Pecaitis now works for GE. From what I can tell. Frank Pecaitis was the last of the old-guard leadership still active at Medsphere. Modern Healthcare already broke the story that Ken Kizer is leaving Medsphere"when a successor is found" which apparently has not happened yet. Who is left at Medsphere? This is exactly what I had hoped to prevent: An ongoing pointless lawsuit, leaving the two brother founders twiddling their thumbs, and a company that is tearing itself apart.

One of the most welcome additions to OpenOffice.org 2.3 is a new export filter that allows you to save Writer documents as MediaWiki-formatted pages. That's all fine and dandy if you are using MediaWiki, but what about other wiki systems? The answer to this question comes in the form of the OpenOffice2UniWakka export filter. While it's designed to work with the UniWakka wiki, with a bit of hacking you can adapt it to other wiki systems as well, even if you are not familiar with XML and XSLT.

Linspire, the company behind the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux operating systems and CNR.com, a free Linux software delivery service, has announced the immediate availability of its first commercial paid support offerings for Freespire 2.0 users.

Most of the core virtual memory subsystem developers met for a mini-summit just before the 2007 Kernel Summit in Cambridge. They came away feeling that they had resolved a number of VM scalability problems. Subsequent discussions have made it clear that, perhaps, this conclusion was a bit premature. They may well have resolved things, but it is not clear that everybody came to the same resolution.

Users running Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system are getting something a little extra thrown into their contracts: developer support. Sun is wrapping extended support for its Solaris Express Developer Edition, previously only available to application developers, into existing and new Solaris customers' contracts without charging extra, the company said.

The Internet most of us experience is not the World of Ends suggested by the end-to-end system design concepts around which the Net was originally architected and built. Instead we have something that is faster-than-dialup, and faster-than-it-used-to-be; but is not The Net. Instead it is the part of the Net that's left in a pipe that's optimized for television, for one-way few-to-many "content delivery" and for locking users into client roles, while servers labor somewhere else.

O’Reilly is running an interesting series of articles written by a number of different women in tech, about how they got to where they are and their adventures along the way. It’s a good read with a lot of different experiences and viewpoints. http://www.oreillynet.com/womenintech/

Are you a crafter of icons, sounds, backgrounds and splash screens, or even window manager themes? Selecting the right license for your artwork to coexist with free software is no trivial task. Creative Commons (CC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) licenses each have their advantages, but they are mutually incompatible. The two groups are beginning to move toward simplifying the situation, but in the meantime there are several things you can do to make license compatibility easier.

What would happen if manufacturers were responsible for the disposal of their used-up products? The Computer Take Back Campaign (CTBC), a coalition of environmental groups across the United States, hopes that the result would be both a national recycling network and the removal of hazardous materials like lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants from products so that companies would not have to worry about them later. The CTBC has been promoting this idea with limited success since 2002, but this year it finally seems on the brink of acceptance.

Taking some tentative steps into the world of web development, James Archibald discovers the sleek power and functionality of the Web Developer extension for Firefox. Although aimed at 'real' web developers, the extension proves to be handy for the novice too.

Software maker Red Hat Inc., which had planned to introduce a new version of its Linux software for personal computers in August, said on Tuesday that the product won't be out until next month at the earliest.

At the large school in Mexico where I'm employed as a system manager, I proposed (and got) a Linux server to replace an old Windows 2000 file server and domain controller for the alumni. I then was faced with the task of adding 3,000 users to this new CentOS 5 server. I wasn't about to add thousands of users and their passwords one by one to the new Samba primary domain controller (PDC) system. With a little help from OpenOffice.org Calc, a utility called Expect, and shell scripts, I automated the process.

Linux software maker Red Hat yesterday announced that the latest version of its operating system would be delayed for another 30 to 60 days. The latest version of Red Hat was originally expected in August.