Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mozilla's chief operating officer, John Lilly, revealed in a recent blog posting that the company estimated the number of Firefox users as at least 125 million, double from a year ago. This figure appears to be very conservative, however, and it does not seem to account for Linux users. But the good news is that it is growing rapidly.

Looking for a lightweight Linux alternative? Damn Small Linux 4.1 is now available and clocks in at under 49MB in size. Get a copy and run it from CD, hard disk or even boot from a USB stick.

No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are you'll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories, but if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Of course, you can always use the good old ftp command, but lftp takes the task of managing files and directories using the FTP protocol to a new level. To see what I mean, let's use lftp to write a script that creates a local backup copy of a Web site.

The new Asus Eee PC has been released to many positive reviews and great consumer interest. A streamlined and customized Xandros and KDE interface combines with other free software applications, a slim form factor and an attractive price point. HotHardware.com was one of the very first sites to review the Asus Eee and report back on this new device. Read on for an interview with Editor-in-Chief Dave Altavilla and his thoughts on the Asus Eee PC and its value proposition.

While there are some Linux users who still insist on running free software exclusively, a growing number are more than happy to mix and match open-source and proprietary software. For these latter users, Ubuntu 7.10-based Mint 4.0 is a distribution made in heaven.

The open source model has taken its toll on a number of EnterpiseDB staff. The company recently laid off some sales workers and under performers, as it realigns its business. According to CEO Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB has enjoyed a strong recent run. “We are in the middle of our best quarter ever,” Astor said. “We are in extremely good shape right now.”

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.

A handful of Red Hat engineers are excited about a new tool they've developed called Func, short for Fedora Unified Network Controller. They're pretty sure that once the rest of the community catches on to just how useful Func is, they'll be singing its praises too. Red Hat Community Development Manager Greg DeKoenigsberg says, "This is the kind of idea where everyone kind of nods and says, 'I meant to write that.'"

If you're looking to understand Microsoft's position on open standards and open source then the Cape Information Technology Initiative's Foss Forum is where you will want to be on Wednesday.

Zenoss is a new open source, company-backed network management system. It manages applications as well as servers and network devices--we'll explain what that means shortly. We decided it was time to give it an honest run for its money. Wait, it is free, but still we wanted to give it a real review. This article will be a light how-to focused on our experiences and first impressions with Zenoss. Next, we'll attempt to convert a real production environment's monitoring system from Nagios to Zenoss.

When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 brings several significant improvements to the open-source office productivity suite, including easier upgrade paths for existing Microsoft Office users, improved measures to prevent security breaches, and an array of snazzy new features introduced in the suite's word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.

KDE will be participating at FOSS.IN/2007, India's premier FOSS event in Bangalore. KDE Project Day is this Wednesday 5th December. Project Day will have a complete starter course for eager contributors to jump into KDE. Speakers would showcase various avenues of contribution to KDE - artwork, documentation, translation, development, marketing et al, basics of Qt/KDE programming and the various frameworks as well as the state and future of KDE 4 and more. This is the biggest ever representation and splash by KDE on Indian soil. Read on for details including the new KDE India website.

Linux.com ran an article headlined GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement on November 23. Jeff Waugh, the press officer on the GNOME Foundation Board, was prominently mentioned in that article and in several others to which it links. So was Roy Schestowitz, who wrote a post titled Anti-symbiosis: ODF, OOXML, Mono, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org on the Boycott Novell site, where he is a regular contributor. We thought getting them together might be illuminating.

It's finally official. The long-awaited release date of KDE 4.0 will now be January 11. Originally planned for a December release the development team held the release back to "solve a couple of essential issues".

Only for the brave: The Ubuntu Linux team announced the release of Hardy Heron Alpha-1 over the weekend for testing purposes.

The Washington Post reported that global measles fatalities have been drastically reduced, with the number of African deaths dropping by 91 percent since 2000. The initiative, said to be the first to use hand-held computers in collecting data, uses open source software for data collection.

Two recently released text-to-speech extensions can transform Firefox into a talking Web browser suitable for users with visual impairments -- and anyone else who can use a speech interface to the Web. Fire Vox is designed to be a full-fledged "screen reader in a browser," usable for daily browsing even for unsighted users. CLiCk, Speak provides point-and-click screen reading, which can be helpful for partially-sighted users or sighted users who have written language difficulties (such as dyslexia).

The airline is looking to explore Web 2.0 technology and open source solutions to expand its online capabilities and business applications, according to its CIO.

LXer Feature: 02-Dec-2007

This week we have the beginnings of a book for Andy Upgrove, a couple articles about Firefox, Richard Stallman's guide to writing, South Africa, Netherlands and Korea move towards ODF support, Ten things you can do to help open source and Microsoft spreads the FUD with a Windows to Linux Security comparison.