Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

After almost a year since Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing, it's time to re-evaluate it and decide if it's finally the equal of the best of the desktop Linuxes. That's not a facetious question. Yes, in terms of market share, desktop Linux hovers just over 1 percent of all users, while Microsoft claims that Vista by this summer had already sold more than 60 million copies. I'm not impressed, and you shouldn't be either.

Can SCO escape Novell's wrath? Will SCO CEO Darl McBride emerge rejuvenated and ready to continue the Linux legal wars by selling SCO's Unix business? These and many more questions will be answered in the next episode of "As SCO Turns." In our last chapter, SCO appeared in front of a bankruptcy court on Nov. 6, 2007, in Delaware. When the news that SCO was applying for Chapter 11 bankruptcy first appeared, most assumed that was the end of SCO and its seemingly endless lawsuits against IBM, Novell and other Linux-related companies.

Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer, which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations. Although LaTeX Beamer is capable of considerable complexity, you need to know surprisingly little in order to produce a slide show.

Red Hat has delivered an early Christmas present to ISVs. At a press conference Nov. 7, the leading Linux company announced that in 2008 it will release a new appliance version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1: Red Hat Appliance Operating System.

In order to navigate and jump between dozens of websites with sanity intact, James Archibald tries out another Firefox add-on, Tab Mix Plus, and finds himself very, very impressed.

Last week we got our backup hardware in order, so today we're going into detail on backing up our data to a locally-attached backup device. We'll learn how to configure which files to backup, and create an easy one-word-command backup.

Red Hat announced Nov. 7 the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, with integrated virtualization. In claims that Red Hat representatives were well aware are extremely broad reaching, they said the new release will provides the most compelling platform for customers and software developers ever, with its industry-leading virtualization capabilities complementing Red Hat's newly announced Linux Automation strategy. It offers the industry's broadest deployment ecosystem, covering stand-alone systems, virtualized systems, appliances and Web-scale "cloud" computing environments.

A word of advice: Never use Babel Fish to communicate with the Dutch Foreign Minister. Last weekend, a group of Israeli journalists used the popular online translation site in sending an email message to the Dutch Consulate in Tel Aviv. They wanted to discuss an upcoming visit to The Netherlands for a seminar on Dutch politics, but they ended up asking the minister several nonsensical questions about his mother.

Red Had has answered the virtualization bandwagon's call in a major way by ushering in a new era that could be described as "Linux on the move." A cavalcade of company officials held a press conference today to detail various plans for letting customers run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system in a more fluid way. Buzzwords? Grand promises? Talk of things in clouds? Yes, they were all present during the conference call, but they are some concrete plans afoot to complement the marketing speak.

The OpenDocument Foundation, founded five years ago by Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul "Buck" Martin (marbux) with the express purpose of representing the OpenDocument format in the "open standards process," has reversed course. It now supports the W3C's Compound Document Format instead of its namesake ODF. Yet why this change of course has occurred is something of a mystery.

I am writing this article on a Windows laptop borrowed from a friend. But fear not, dear reader, for I have not abandoned my free software principles. For while the hard disk of this laptop contains the Windows operating system, I have used a USB key as the boot device, and the laptop is currently running Fedora 8, codenamed “Werewolf.”

Document design is all about space -- the space allotted to an element, and the space between and around elements. This concern is especially obvious when you are setting up paragraphs and page spacing.read more

Open source is moving beyond the real worlds of business and consumer systems into the more experimental sphere of personal gadgetry. Start-up Bugs Labs has said it plans to base the software element of its forthcoming range of "plug-together" hardware modules on Linux with Java and OSGi used further up the software stack.

The OOXML document standard being pushed by Microsoft has caused a certain amount of stress within both the development and commercial sides of the free software community. In some quarters it is seen as the latest attempt by a monopolistic firm to co-opt free software and the move to more free file formats; they would like to limit our involvement to opposition to the adoption of OOXML as a standard. Others see it as an attempt by Microsoft to come to terms with the demand for more open formats and to promote, in its own special way, interoperability.

In an unprecedented announcement, the VA has signed a 9 year deal with Cerner to replace laboratory information system at 150 hospitals and 800 clinics.

Want to start an internet cafe but not willing to fork out handfuls of cash to get going? We've written about OutKafe before and now a new version of the cafe management suite has been released.

Many people are giving up blogging to try their hand at podcasting -- creating a downloadable audio file that will play on any standard MP3 player. Recording, editing, and packaging a session isn't very difficult but, until recently not very many tools existed to help you get the job done. Now Linux-friendly applications are starting to pop up everywhere. The basic tools you'll need haven't changed much since podcasting began. At the very least, you'll need a good microphone and headset, and a sound card equipped with a line-in port. There are several high-end hardware products on the market, but for general podcasting needs, some basic equipment paired with good editing software will meet most people's needs.

As more and more traditional publishers accept digital images, artists are turning to free and open source software (FOSS) tools to create cartoons and illustrations.

Struggling to monitor global weather patterns or stars in the galaxy on your home machine? Perhaps the Cray XT5, the world's most scalable Linux-based supercomputer, is what you need? Well, probably not, but its fun to dream.

Best known for enterprise-focused Windows Mobile handsets, HTC's phone using Google's Linux-based platform will extend its consumer portfolio.