Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Adobe Acrobat is expensive, but that doesn’t mean you have to live a life without portable documents. What many people don’t realize is that PDF is a Federal Information Processing Standard, which means the specifications behind the format are widely published. Numerous developers take advantage of this fact and create programs that offer effective alternatives to Acrobat. Check out our list of these programs and take advantage of these tools that are full of some of the best PDF features and functions.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for testing. The second beta of the next major Firefox version offers around 900 bug fixes over Beta 1, including several feature enhancements and fixes to improve speed, stability, security and memory usage.

Dell has caught up to the Ubuntu release machine, adding the latest version of the operating system as a standard option with Linux-friendly laptop and desktop.

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same. More recently, a widely linked story on ITWire used the same article to declare that KDE has taken a "principled stand" against OOXML. However, if you go the source, the story is more nuanced than these claims suggest.

QDisk bolsters the quorum of small count clusters. This article outlines when and how to use QDisk. Note: QDisk was added to RHCS and GFS starting with the updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.4 and 5.0.

If you're running a Linux-powered laptop and you want to switch off the screen, without waiting for the laptop to go into sleep mode, then this is a great tip from Tombuntu. Switch the monitor off instantaneously with the command: sleep 1 && xset dpms force off. Making this into a desktop shortcut is also easy.

Observation of the trends in many HIT OSS projects leads me to believe that our niche in the OSS world prefers the Cathedral model (Eric S. Raymond's definition) rather than the Baazar model.

Xterasys settles a suit filed by the Software Freedom Law Center regarding GPL violations involving the BusyBox tool set. During the last several months, the Software Freedom Law Center has gone on the warpath to defend the GPL. On Dec. 17, the SFLC announced its second win in its four lawsuits against companies it says have violated the General Public License, as Xterasys, a Wi-Fi OEM, has agreed to settle.

As the tenth anniversary of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice acquisition approaches it grows increasingly difficult to fathom what Sun intends for its suite. Sun this week released a minor upgrade based on the latest iteration of OpenOffice - version 2.3 and unveiled a bunch of plug-in extensions that appear useful enough. One enables StarOffice to be used to prepare blogs, one turns your PC into a fax machine and another compresses ludicrously large presentation files (including Microsoft's Powerpoint format).

When it comes to playing music in Linux, Amarok is one of the best audio players out there. It offers almost everything you need, from a clean, intuitive interface to a range of useful scripts. You can even put it on a server and give it a Web interface.

Linux has so many tools, settings, parameters, and configuration files to learn that administering your box can be a challenge. Webmin, a Web-based comprehensive administration tool for Linux, can help you get on your way. Webmin presents a Web-based interface that allows you to perform system administration tasks in Unix, Linux, and FreeBSD. If your particular distribution isn't included in the list of supported systems, some Webmin modules might not work. Distributions use different locations for their various configuration files, and if your particular choice doesn't keep its files in standard places, Webmin won't be able to function.

Getting an IT business off the ground is hard work for anyone. So here's an idea to give your business a power injection: The Cape IT Initiative (CITI) is looking for young IT companies to join its business acceleration campaign, called VeloCITI.

Dell has told DesktopLinux.com that it will be announcing later today, Dec. 19, that it will be releasing PCs with Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) as part of its Dell Consumer Linux lineup along with the ability to legally play DVDs.

The Open Source Consortium has welcomed the BBC's move to make its iPlayer online on-demand TV service available for streaming on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.

Choice is an important element of free software, so it's perhaps no surprise that even at the level of the desktop environment there is more than one offering. But the main alternatives – KDE and GNOME – represent more than just a way of placing icons on a screen. Nowhere is that more evident than in their respective views on Microsoft's OOXML document standard, which are very far apart – perhaps dangerously so.

As part of my year-end planning I look at what charities to donate to, since charitable contributions are tax-deductible. Here's a list of charities with ties to free software, open source, and information technology. Debian is my favorite Linux distribution. You can make donations to it through Software in the Public Interest -- make sure to explicitly set your donation to go to Debian. Debian uses donations to cover things like bandwidth and travel expenses for appearing at conferences.

Lighting up the AMIA os-wg and OpenHealth e-mail discussion lists comes news that the Proteus 'intelligent clinical guidelines' tools are going to be open sourced with an as yet to be announced Free/Open Source license: "...I am on the verge of making Proteus related tools available under an open source license. I need the advice of this community of open source champions on how to go about it and the choice of open source license. I know this has been discussed time and again on this list but I am still unclear about several things.

LinuxSecurity.com: There are already tons of written Snort rules, but there just might be a time where you need to write one yourself. You can think of writing Snort rules as writing a program. They can include variables, keywords and functions. Why do we need to write rules? The reason is, without rules Snort will never detect someone trying to hack your machine. This HOWTO will give you confidence to write your own rules.

If you run Linux networks, you need a copy of Linux Networking Cookbook. Even before I picked up Unix, I worked on networks. While networking has gotten simpler, it's almost all TCP/IP now instead of Arcnet, Token-Ring and a half dozen dusty wiring and protocol schemes. The services that use networking have gotten ever more powerful and more complicated. That's why a book like Carla Schroder's Linux Networking Cookbook is so valuable.

Even people who don't live and die by their mobile phones sometimes need to send SMS messages. Did you know you can do that from your computer? Likewise, it's easier to clean your mobile phone of all the numbers you've not been dialing in the last few years using a mouse, rather than navigating repeatedly through the phone's menu system. Here are some Linux tools that can help you manage your cell phone.