Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Fully-functional video drivers -- ones capable of handling 3-D acceleration -- remain one of the weak points of free software. The Free Software Foundation has declared them a high-priority project. Meanwhile, some distributions and even more users have resorted to using the proprietary drivers offered as free downloads by card manufacturers. One of the main projects attempting to provide complete, free drivers is focusing on developing the Avivo driver for the R500 and R600 cards from AMD/ATI, so-called after a specification first introduced in this line of cards. According to Jerome Glisse, who coordinates the development of the driver, progress is being made in the project, and"maybe by the end of this year, we might have some 3-D acceleration."

I was looking at what my friendStephen Lewis wrote in HakPakSak a few days ago— specifically newspapers’ roles as public trusts and cornerstones of our informational infrastructure— i.e. sources of solid information and independent commentary essential to informed citizenry, democratic government, effective public policy, and well-functioning economies. What this brought up for me is the notion that human beings are themselves infrastructural; especially when they are constuctive contributors to the structure we call civilization.

Spreadsheets are labor-intensive documents. Usually, their contents is entered carefully, one sheet at a time, at an input rate far below a text document. However, like most spreadsheets, OpenOffice.org has several tools for removing some of the drudgery from input.

FileZilla is one great open source FTP client that -- up until now -- was available only for Windows. Version 3 is a ground-up rewrite that makes the application available for the first time on Linux, too.

Do-it-yourself distributions have made great strides since Linux from Scratch, or even rPath's rBuilder Online. In the last few months, users have even been able to produce custom disk images with such tools as Fedora's Revisor and Ubuntu's Reconstructor. However, one of the most elegant tools to emerge recently is Custom NimbleX, a PHP program that allows you to construct an ISO image in your browser and then download it. Custom NimbleX lacks some polish in the interface, but is so simply and well-designed functionally that it should lead many users to NimbleX itself, the distribution on which it is based.

An easy, inexpensive way to double up Ethernet interfaces to get more more bandwidth and reliability is called Ethernet bonding. While Gigabit Ethernet is all exciting and the hot new fad, you can get a lot of mileage out of using Ethernet bonding to give your existing gear a nice boost without spending much extra money. Just stuff two ordinary 10/100 Ethernet interfaces into a machine, tweak a few configuration files, and you're in business. If one fails you won't lose connectivity. It is a good cheap upgrade for your servers--you'll have several options for configuring load balancing and failover, and with the right gear you'll get an instant bandwidth boost by combining the bandwidth of the two interfaces.

The day is fast approaching when the comment and voting period for ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the draft ISO specification based upon Microsoft's Office Open XML formats, will either be approved or not. As Sept. 2 comes closer, Microsoft appears to be stuffing the ballot boxes of some countries' ISO organizations while open-source and standard organizations are firing back with furious words.

For most of us, file formats are right up there with printer drivers in terms of fun. Certainly, they're important, but not something you'd look to for excitement. And yet that is precisely what thebattle between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft's OOXML is providing. And I'm not just talking about the dry, intellectual excitement derived from comparing well-formed XML tags: this is a no holds barred, down-and-dirtymano a manofight over the soul of document standards.

In this final section I'll present some MIDI-specific troubleshooting tips, along with a brief description of the setup here at StudioDave, a few closing remarks, and of course some links to the Linux music-maker du jour.

When I first started learning to read, my primary motivation was to gain the ability to read the comics in my local paper. I had no idea at that time that there were so many comics in the world. Now I know that there are comics all over the Web, but who has time to go to each site each day and read the latest strip? Thanks to the world of open source software, you can gather all your favorite comics on one page automatically, ready for you to read each morning.

Mozilla, responsible for Thunderbird and Firefox, this week released a campus edition of Firefox, specifically geared towards students' needs.

Thanks to a note from its creator, DesktopLinux.com learned about a new "release candidate" of Custom NimbleX 2 this week. This lesser known Slackware-derived project offers a Web-based tool that lets users concoct, and then download, their own customized live CD Linux images -- in minutes!

The Free Software Foundation released a statement on Tuesday saying that Microsoft is not exempt from the requirements of the latest version of the Gnu General Public Licence, version 3.

The Society for Sustainable Mobility, formerly known as the Open Source Green Vehicle project, is one of the official teams registered for the Automotive X-Prize competition. The X-Prize Foundation got a lot of press in 2004 when it awarded $10 million to the first private team that built and launched a vehicle carrying three people 100 km above the earth. This year, the foundation has been working to get the funding for the Automotive X-Prize: another $10 million to the team that can build a marketable 100 MPG vehicle. Will open source win the prize?

Mandriva Benelux NV (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg) was launched on August 16th 2007 as the sole Benelux partner for Mandriva S.A, offering Mandriva Linux operating systems. Our target areas are corporate applications and solutions to individuals, educational institutions, public and private organizations, ISVs and OEMs all over the Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg region.

Roelof Temmingh has written a cool new application which provides individuals with the ability to do data mining of publicly available information. It's a cross-platform Java application called Evolution, currently in its second beta, and available as a free download.

ITerating, the wiki-based software guide for open source and commercial software, has announced the availability of a free service providing up-to-date information about more than 17 000 software products.

Open-source software and the licenses that govern it suffered a serious setback in a San Francisco District Court earlier this month, following a preliminary decision that could effectively deprive open source licensors from being able to get a court injunction to stop the violation of the terms of their license going forward.

The popular open source RAW converter UFRaw recently gained new functionality when it was bumped up to revision 0.12. The new release integrates new core image-processing functions and new user interface features to simplify photo editing.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.