Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has announced completion of the LiPS Release 1.0 specifications, fulfilling the commitment announced in earlier of this year. With this release, LiPS enables mobile industry players to achieve basic interoperability for applications and services deployed on Linux-based phones, benefiting Linux-based software stack suppliers, mobile device OEMs and regional and global telecom operators.

New Enea Linux Competence Center Established to Address Growing Demand for Reliable Linux Systems and Services.

The Mozilla-based, single-site "Web app" browser Webrunner, which we covered in July, was rebranded Mozilla Prism in October and moved to the Mozilla Labs site. Initially, Prism was only available for Windows, but Mac and Linux builds are now available.

For Navicron, a wireless technology company launched in Oulu, Finland, in 2004, open source development means it can move products to market quicker and cheaper. Navicron is just beginning to reach out to the United States in search of a larger market. The company, which creates hardware and software for cell phones, recently opened an office in Texas so company representatives could be closer to potential vendor partners and venture capital in the States.

Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

GWT Conference Just as Microsoft wasbrushing aside claims that Volta, its latest .NET programming toolkit, is a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) clone, Google has disclosed how it plans to open the gap on rivals with the next release of its popular AJAX toolkit.

A Win/Mac developer recently asked me what I thought about his plan to create a binary of his application and sell it to interested Linux sound and music people. He asked with some trepidation, having already received a rather critical chorus of objection from some overly enthusiastic Linux users. This man's work is excellent and his software already runs nicely under Wine.

The BusyBox developers, with the SFLC, are suing Verizon on the grounds that it is illegally distributing open-source software to its FiOS customers. The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) announced on Dec. 7 that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon Communications on behalf of its clients, the two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging that Verizon has violated the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License version 2) in its fiber-optic Internet and television service, aka FiOS.

When I hear "mail merge," I usually think of personalizing letters and printing envelopes. However, many other projects can make use of mail merge. This year I tackled a new Christmas gift project by using mail merge in OpenOffice.org (OOo) to create a tear-off daily calendar, personalized with holidays and family events. Here's how.

Knowledge Tree is an open source document management system (DMS) that helps enterprise users categorize, store, index, and share documents. It offers features like metadata editing, versioning, and WebDAV access, which make it a better choice than a simple file server for sharing documents. The open source edition of the PHP-based Knowledge Tree ships under GPLv3; a commercial version with some additional features and support bundled is also available. You can run Knowledge Tree on Linux, Windows, or any platform that can run Apache, MySQL and PHP. The commercial application also has a Windows client for non-Web access to the repository.

Novell unexpectedly delays its fourth quarter and end of year financial earnings report. Novell stockholders were unpleasantly surprised on Dec. 5, when instead of hearing from Novell on how the Linux distributor had done over the last quarter and the full 2007 fiscal year, they were presented with an earnings announcement postponement instead.

Has the television writers' strike left you with hours of spare time and no way to fill it? Well, put down that book and put the running shoes back in the closet, because TED is here to help. TED is the torrent episode downloader, an open source, cross-platform tool that simplifies the tedious process of searching for torrent files. TED is not a BitTorrent client itself; rather it is a search tool for torrents that can pass along its results to your preferred BitTorrent downloader. TED is geared toward retrieving episodic television shows; it lets you search for specific episodes by season and episode number. The app ships with a database of predefined shows and a manually selected set of feeds from torrent sites that frequently carry such content.

It’s been almost seven years since I stopped buying desktops for personal computing, and since then, I am always under the impression that buying a new laptop to run Linux on is a bigger challenge that it needs to be. Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours on linux-laptop.net (and others) trying to get the most out of my hardware working under Linux. Things like proprietary drivers for video cards, network adapters and wireless, sound and modem support were virtually always making the life of the Linux geek a bit harder.

Firefox 3 should be welcome both for its many small usability improvements and for its under-the-covers Web rendering engine and security enhancements. When you first install and launch the beta of Firefox 3, the initial impression (especially for those who remember some of the earlier promises of a revamped user interface and increased Web 2.0 integration) can be a little disappointing, since it doesn't look much different from the current version of Firefox.

Despite technical difficulties with the phone lines, Linux.com's live podcast with Jeff Waugh of the GNOME Foundation and Roy Schestowitz, cofounder of the Boycott Novell site, attracted a large audience eager to discuss GNOME's involvement with the efforts to make the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) document format an ECMA standard. Hosted by Rod Amis on his Lightning Strikes show at BlogTalkRadio, and with questions from Linux.com's Editor in Chief Robin Miller and me, the discussion revealed that the two sides of the issue are closer than they have appeared in the past.

If you need to type a diacritical mark such as an acute "e" (é) -- let alone a character not found in a Western European language -- the standard English keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux users are barely ahead of those of typewriters. However, adding support for both extended characters and multiple keyboards has become much easier in the last few years. These days, you can quickly add extended character support from both GNOME and KDE, and, should either desktop fail you for any reason, you can fall back on other methods to improve your input.

It's early December 1995 and it has been a heady few days for Java. IBM and Adobe Systems have agreed to license this strange and embryonic new software that Sun Microsystems keeps telling us can be "written once and run anywhere". Two days before, Sun and Netscape had announced JavaScript that - according to the press release - was: "Analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications."

According to the The Washington Post, on Friday it reported that global measles fatalities had been reduced by two-thirds following stepped-up vaccination campaigns since 2000. Furthermore, this phenomenal success had a helping hand from open source software.

OpenOffice is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

Full-featured traffic analyzers for Linux systems such as ntop and vnstat are widely available, but sometimes you just want a simple program that gives you fast, basic information about the amount of traffic going in and out of the hosts on your network. Darkstat, a packet sniffer that runs as a background process, fills that role. It gathers statistics about network usage and displays them over HTTP.