Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The year is 1993, and I'm at the Spencer Katt party at Fall Comdex, back when Comdex was "the" technology show of technology shows. There, I, a freelance technology journalist, meet Jim Louderback, then the director of PC Weeks Labs. We end up talking about operating systems. He rather liked Windows for Workgroups for the desktop; I sang the praises of SCO Open Desktop 2.0. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even though we completely disagree about operating systems.

As a former course designer and academic, I used to be experienced in talking in front of people. However, one thing I hadn't done until now is appear on television. That, more than anything, is why I agreed to appear on the computer show Lab with Leo Laporte in a five-minute spot about the GNU/Linux desktop. The show is scheduled to appear October 11 on G4TechTV in Canada and the How-To Channel in Australia, with my spot being posted to Google Video on the same day. I won't know if I look savvy or imbecilic until I see how the segment is edited, but the experience taught me several points about appearing on TV in general, and evangelizing for GNU/Linux in the studio in particular.

Technalign, developers of both the community and commercial Pioneer Linux operating systems, recently announced the release of Pioneer Explorer 1.0 and the Programs folder. In the past, Technalign built its Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Debian and MEPIS codebases. While this new distribution still shows its Ubuntu/Debian roots, it's now going in its own direction.

Not too long ago I treated myself to a HP 3050 multi-function laser printer with fax, scanner, and copier. I almost went with Samsung because it makes good machines, and all of its monochrome printers have Linux drivers. But they are closed, proprietary binary drivers which are bad enough on their own: big fat pains to install and upgrade. And then the news broke about the ingenious security holes and inexplicable permissions changes on key directories introduced by the amusingly awful installer for the Samsung drivers, and that was all she wrote. HP, on the other hand, supports good-quality, well-supported genuine FOSS drivers, HPLIP, which we introduced ourselves to last week.

In my last blog post, I mentioned the work on rubinius (then at a 0.7 release and now at 0.8) and JRuby. I also promised I’d follow up on them. Here’s what’s been going on so far.

Open Source Tools provide an extremely powerful and affordable foundation for CCHIT certified ambulatory electronic medical record and practice management system development. Combining these tools with the Sofware as a Service (SaaS) delivery model makes now allows for advanced EMR and Practice Management tools to be delivered to the physician's desktop through thte Internet at extremely affordable prices. Waiting Room Solutions is built on the LAMP stack architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). With service prices starting as low as $149/physician/month, it is hard to find a more cost-effective, affordable solution.

Interclue is a Firefox extension that lets you preview whatever a hyperlink on a page is pointing to. Unlike other link previewers, Interclue doesn't just display a tiny replica of what's hiding under the link. It uses algorithms to intelligently construct a summary of the target page and displays it in a window with lots of other information and statistics about the page.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Summer of Code for 2007 nears its end. Implementation of more features in the Step physics simulation package. More graphical game themes in KMahjongg, KWin4 KShisen, KGoldRunner and KJumpingCube. The start of a new game, KDiplomacy. More development in the Blitz graphics library. Lyrics Plasma applet and other interface work for Amarok 2. The start of the implementation of panels, and a clipboard engine in Plasma. More features in the ODBC Data Sources KControl module. Animation support in the Raptor menu. KCacheGrind is ported to QGraphicsView. MusicXML import function in KOffice.

This just keeps getting worse. Please tell me how anyone could think this is a good idea..

A new update to the latest stable version of Debian 4.0 includes security updates and other important problem fixes. Historically, Debian is an extremely popular community-based Linux distribution. It's also known, however, for arriving later than expected. This time, though, the Debian Foundation has relatively quickly released a set of security and other patches to the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 4.0.

The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval. Jon Rosenberg, source program director for Microsoft, posted,"Microsoft believes that this license provides unique value to the open source community by delivering simplicity, brevity, and permissive terms combined with intellectual property protection."

At last we reach the final installment of this series, the question & answer stage in which we'll consider some of the common problems encountered with audio and MIDI on Linux, along with some common and perhaps not-so-common solutions to those problems. We've looked at some indispensable items for your Linux system troubleshooting toolkit, now let's see how they are applied. We start with a list of some of the most often-heard laments, then we'll proceed to some extra tips and general advice. I'll end the series with some notes regarding the system configuration here at Studio Dave.

LXer Feature: 19-Aug-2007

Another big week in Open Source news including, 50 reasons to dump Windows, MySQL defends paid tarball decision, Part 3 of Carla Schroder's "Adventures in Digital Photography With Linux", Debian turns 14, The LXer Interview: Bob Sutor of IBM and Rob Enderle can't decide where Open Source is headed in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Sometimes, a little reminiscing is called for. Think back to March 7, 2003, when the SCO Group, once a Linux distributor named Caldera, filed its initial complaint against IBM:

"Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car. To make Linux of necessary quality for use by enterprise customers, it must be re-designed so that Linux also becomes the software equivalent of a luxury car. This re-design is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment."

One of the reasons I love cookbooks, of all kinds, is because cookbooks have a clarity and simplicity of purpose. Whether it’s a cookbook for code geeks or for food geeks, its raison d’etre is the same: the “cook” has a job to do, and not a lot of time to do it. If a home chef wants to whip up a nice dinner for guests, he don’t want to have to understand the entire history of French cooking; he just wants a simple, well-written recipe for coq au vin. Similarly, if a sysadmin wants to receive an hourly email with a list of zombie processes on the new test server down the hall, she probably wants to hack together a quick bash script, and she doesn’t want to read the collected works of Grady Booch to do it.

eHealthNews.EU Portal made an attempt to underline the current Google Health Prototype speculations. In the recently published article you will be able to access the related web links to some official and non-official blogs. Google Health Product discussions have been again refreshed after several official and non-official Google Health Prototype related news articles.

Ever thought about how nice it would be if you could edit the files stored on your Web server directly without the cumbersome download-edit-upload routine? Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is the way to do it. A WebDAV server works like a file server that uses HTTP as the underlying protocol. It facilitates collaborative editing and versioning. If you manage a Web server or an enterprise document management system, where different authors need to edit resources, WebDAV is a useful way of providing write access to them. You can use the Apache modules mod_dav and mod_dav_fs for basic WebDAV functionality, while a Subversion module for Apache, mod_dav_svn, provides versioning support.

The KDE centric distribution Ark Linux has announced the 2007.1 release, which includes KDE 3.5.7, the newly released Amarok 1.4.7, much better support for encrypted wireless connections out of the box, in addition to a large number of updates to software and drivers. This will be the last release with KDE 3, from the announcement: "The Ark Linux team already has plans for KDE 4 and Ark Linux 2007.2, one of our goals is to integrate KDE 4 as deeply into the system as we can; for example by rewriting our hotplug system to integrate with KDE's 'Solid' and using KDE 4 to give the user immediate access to a newly plugged in device."

Desktop operating systems numbers, even when gathered by top research companies, such as IDG and Gartner, are often a bit fuzzy. When it comes to uncommon desktop operating systems, like Linux, the numbers often amount to little more than an educated guess. Now, a new open-source program, statix, promises to give accurate data on how many Linux desktops are actually in use.

Yes, a judge has confirmed that Novell owns the copyrights to the Unix operating system, but that doesn't mean the company plans to start suing people for using Linux. It will leave such behavior to companies that don't own the copyrights. Like SCO. "We have absolutely no intention of using our Unix copyright ownership to attack Linux," Novell spokesperson Bruce Lowry told The Reg. "We've had those copyrights for the past 14 or 15 years. The fact that the court has reaffirmed them doesn't mean we're now going to change the way we operate. We've never indicated we would use those copyrights against Linux - and we wouldn't. In fact, we want to defend Linux."