Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Heavily funded by the European Union, the Science, Education, and Learning in Freedom (SELF) consortium launched the beta version of its site this week with the motto,"Be SELFish, share your knowledge!" By the end of the year, SELF hopes to develop into the Wikipedia of free learning materials, with a heavy emphasis on material about open standards and free and open source software (FOSS). All contributions, says David Megías, a Lecturer at the University of Catalonia and one of the SELF's organizers, will be"encouraged and accepted, unless they have to be removed for legal reasons." The twist here is that all contributions will be evaluated by the community, so that users can assess the quality of the materials that they are using.

The KDE Community proudly presents the second Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the feature freeze and the stabilization of the current codebase. Simultaneously the KOffice developers have announced their third Alpha release, marking significant improvements in this innovative office suite. Both KDE and KOffice have benefited from the Google Summer of Code, as most resulting code has now been merged.

If you're a Linux user who's just been issued an Apple computer, you might want to look into a virtualization solution for Mac OS X. VMware's Fusion, which was officially released from beta at the beginning of the month, works well for running Linux (or other x86/AMD64 OSes) on the Mac desktop, and provides a great solution for multi-OS users who need simultaneous access to all their operating systems on the same machine.

AMD briefed Linux.com this morning on a pending announcement regarding the open sourcing of drivers for ATI graphics cards. It's official -- AMD will make code and specifications for ATI graphics cards available on the Internet on September 10.

Innotek rolled out a significant update to its VirtualBox open source virtualization software this week. According to Achim Hasenmueller, managing director of innotek, the release of VirtualBox 1.5.0 for Windows and Linux marks the first time seamless windowing -- the ability to display a single Windows application on a Linux desktop -- is available for Linux systems.

The French Ministry for Education has migrated 2,500 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a growing trend for Europe's public sector.

[Check out the last sentence, interesting way to end it don't you think? - Scott]

If you want the old-time GNU/Linux experience, try configuring a Web camera. Unlike most peripherals, webcams are generally not configured during installation. Moreover, where printers have the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) and its interfaces, with webcams you are generally thrown back on whatever resources you can find on the Internet and your own knowledge of kernel modules and drivers. These obstacles means that configuring webcams can be a challenge -- but with determination and thoroughness, and maybe a little luck, you can get your webcam running in less than an afternoon.

KDE 4.0 continues to edge closer to completion with today's announcement of the Beta 2 release. Improvements have been made to Bluetooth support and blogging functions, and a freeze is in place so developers can begin working on bug fixes. Beta 2 also includes KOffice 2.0 Alpha 2 and a complete overhaul of remote desktop client KRDC.

Get a chance to meet the man in charge of managing government's free and open source software (FOSS) migration at this month's Open Tuesday event in Joburg. Arno Webb will talk on the opportunities that this migration will open up for those involved in open source.

MEPIS has released Beta3 of SimplyMEPIS 7.0, its full-featured Debian-based Linux, and Beta 2 of MEPIS AntiX (pronounced "Antics"), which is designed to run on very old 32-bit PC hardware. MEPIS 7, unlike Ubuntu-based MEPIS 6.5, is built on Debian 4.0. This beta boasts kernel version 2.6.22.5 which contains minor patches from the Kernel Development Team as its heart.

Microsoft has extended its controversial partnership with Novell to make the Silverlight cross-platform, cross-browser media player run on Linux desktops.

The Southern California Linux Expo is proud to announce the second annual Demonstrating Open-Source Health Care Solutions (DOHCS). The event will be held on February 8, 2008 in Los Angeles, California in conjunction with the Sixth Annual Southern California Linux Expo.

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering Team, it is my pleasure to announce that the first release candidate for NetBSD 4.0 has been released," Liam Foy posted to the NetBSD -announce mailing list. The release has been a long time coming, first announced in August of 2006 by Jeff Rizzo,"NetBSD 4.0_BETA was branched on August 8, 2006 (UTC), and the beta-testing process has officially begun."

Microsoft today released version 1.0 of Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform multimedia plugin, to the Web. The company also confirmed that it is working to make Silverlight available for Linux users.

New release of connectivity security standard-bearer includes host of bugfixes and a long list of new features.

PhpGedView is an open source application that lets you post your genealogy records on your Web site. It has a lot of interesting features, and makes viewing and editing all aspects of your genealogy easy and fun.

Those who have been paying close attention may have noticed a number of changes to the LWN site over the last few weeks. Most of those changes are not visible; our quaint early-90's table-oriented HTML is slowly giving away to a more contemporary design which makes use of the features of cascading style sheets. This sort of work involves a lot of change-and-reload cycles in an effort to figure out why something is not rendering as your editor intended. CSS is a powerful but sometimes obscure technology. One tool your editor wishes he had stumbled across earlier is Firebug, a Firefox extension designed to help with just this sort of work.

The countdown is on to Ontario Linux Fest and we couldn't be more excited. Here's some news from inside the organizing committee. Since our last note we've added some speakers and topics, and a couple of prominent sponsors. And a bunch more of you have registered in advance from our registration page at http://onlinux.ca/olfreg

Wireless operator says its telecommuter services package won't be confused with OpenOffice.org's open source suite.

"Slab defragmentation is mainly an issue if Linux is used as a fileserver and large amounts of dentries, inodes and buffer heads accumulate," Christoph Lameter explained when posting the fifth version of his patchset. He continued,"in some load situations the slabs become very sparsely populated so that a lot of memory is wasted by slabs that only contain one or a few objects. In extreme cases the performance of a machine will become sluggish since we are continually running reclaim. Slab defragmentation adds the capability to recover wasted memory."