Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

A few weeks ago the APress title Foundations of Qt Development left the printing presses. The book introduces Qt in a step by step fashion, but also delves into most areas of the toolkit. The highlights include an in-depth look at the model/view classes, as well as introductions to all the tools and widgets needed to get started.

The petard filesystem is designed to produce only errors -- but you can stipulate what conditions generate the errors and what those errors should be. That makes petardfs useful for system and unit testing -- for example, making sure that an application gives a sane error message if it fails to open a file, or if there is a read error at byte 5000 of a file.

There has been growing talk of Linux's adoption on cellphone platforms. Yesterday Trolltech announced the release of its application platform under the GPL as well as a partnership with OpenMoko to do development on the Neo1973, the potential iPhone killer. A the same time Broadcom joined the Linux Mobile Foundation.

Computer giant IBM yesterday released a free office suite for Windows and Linux machines called Lotus Symphony. Symphony is available from the Symphony website which requires users to register and be logged on to download the software.

Nine hundred Swedish Pharmacies are switching to Redhat Linux on Intel according to this article: '...When you are dealing with people's health, you really do need an IT system that both the pharmacy and patients can rely on, said Anders Persson, IT manager at Apoteket. We put high demands on the quality of applications, availability and cost efficiency. The switch to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is part of a strategy to offer our customers the best possible access and service, while cutting costs and modernizing our IT infrastructure...'

The One Laptop per Child's XO, better known as the $100 laptop, gets most of the headlines but NComputing is showing in Macedonia, with its Ubuntu Linux based servers and virtual PC terminals, that there's more than one way to get inexpensive Linux desktops into students' hands.

LXer Feature: 19-Sept-2007

I interview one of the lead developers of the Xfce desktop environment, in The LXer Interview of Benedikt Meurer.

During the last weekend, the KDE on Windows developers conducted their second real life meeting in the Trolltech offices in Berlin Adlershof, incorporating new developers and improving infrastructure. On Friday evening, the participants were welcomed by the Berlin Trolls and introduced to the office. After a nice meal at a local restaurant, the the group evaluated the main working areas of the participants and created a meeting roadmap.

Mandriva Linux today announced the signature of a broad technical co-operation and training agreement with Angola.

A musical notation system for KOffice, a cross-platform kiosk browser, a help system editor for GNOME -- these are just a few of the projects completed in this year's Google Summer of Code (SOC) event, during which Google paid students to work on free and open source software projects. The innovations in this third year appear to have enriched the experience for participants, but not affected the project completion rate.

Enterprise distributions are an important part of the economic success story of Linux. The creation of highly stable, highly supported distributions has brought significant revenue streams to some distributors and enabled the deployment of Linux into many "mission critical" situations. Enterprise distributions encourage the commercial world to take Linux seriously. At LinuxConf Europe, however, your editor has stumbled into a few conversations which characterized enterprise distributions as one of the bigger problems the development community has now. Then a talk by Dirk Hohndel made that point again in a different context.

A frustrated sounding Andrew Morton released the 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 kernel as"a 29MB diff against 2.6.23-rc6." Many patches are merged first into Andrew's -mm tree for testing before being pushed to Linus' mainline tree during the merge window. Andrew suggested that the -mm process wasn't working as well as it could:"It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of. I have to say that this just isn't working any more."

In July, Mozilla executives admitted that they weren't quite sure what to do with Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client, since Firefox, the popular open-source Web browser, demanded most of the company's attention. On Sept. 17, Mozilla announced that it had decided to spin Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo.

Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances makes a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. If that sounds like you, try Buddi, probably the easiest to use personal finance manager out there. Written in Java, Buddi runs on most platforms that can run the Java Runtime Environment. If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can download and install it from a .deb package; otherwise you can opt for a plain .jar file that will run on pretty much any Linux distro.

A new website has been launched to offer information on free, libre and open source software with particular reference to the use of ICT in the NGO sector.

I recently read a blog entry on InfoWorld.com that urged the Linux community to fork the kernel into desktop and server versions because, according to the author, all Linus Torvalds cares about is big iron. Sorry, but that's both wrong and stupid.

The GPL-licensed Pivot blogging software stands out among blogging applications because it requires no database, no extra libraries, and minimal installation effort. While it's still in an early stage of development, its flexibilty and the ease with which it can be set up make it ideal for those new to maintaining their own blogging Web sites. To use Pivot, you need a server that's running PHP 4.1.0 or higher. Unlike WordPress or Movable Type, Pivot requires no MySQL database; it stores most of its data within XML files. Pivot also strives to use no extra libraries so as to be available and usable by as many people as possible.

Watch out, here comes IBM with its Microsoft Office killer. The company is expected to announce a free set of downloadable office applications later today. Slashdot speculates that the suite will be called Loutus Symphony and will be based on OpenOffice.org. IBM's Lotus Notes 8 runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so there is a good chance this suite will be available for Linux.

Cavium Networks has launched two families of Linux-friendly network accelerator cards. The lower-end Nitrox PX XL PCI-Express cards target security appliances, storage equipment, and service-provider infrastructure, while the higher-end Octeon XL NICPro2 PCI-X cards target L4-L7 switches, session border controllers, and ad-insertion appliances, among other applications.

Performance Technologies is sampling a Core 2 Duo-based processor module in the AdvancedMC (advanced mezzanine card, aka "AMC") form-factor. The AMC121 supports PT's own NexusWare Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) implementation, and targets packet processing and general computing applications, including IMS, wireless, softswitches, and shipboard communications.