Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In spite of a bitter battle between Novell and Sun developers, OpenOffice won’t fork – at least for now. That’s the consensus among several OpenOffice developers who are locked in a bitter dispute with Sun over how the open source project is governed but who nevertheless agree that a fork would be the worst outcome for a project that has enough difficulty competing against Microsoft Office let alone Google Apps and other online services in the future.

Can't wait for Gutsy Gibbon, the next release of Ubuntu Linux? Then get downloading the next best thing. The Ubuntu team last night released Gutsy Gibbon release candidate, the closest thing to the real release due out next week.

CEO Michael Dell says Microsoft's patent-infringement claims have not affected sales of its Linux servers. Speaking to CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK at a conference Thursday, Dell's chief executive said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft's claims.

Steve Ballmer, the Sopranos and the protection racket. I was walking down the street when a limo pulled up beside me and Big Steve Ballmer emerged. "I need to talk to you Vaughan-Nichols," he said, as two large men in expensive, but badly fitting suits, followed him out. "Hey, anything the Redmond Mafia wants to say to me, they can call me about. You know the number."

Company reduces AppArmor work, relying instead on the open-source community, but project leaders launch a new company for the open-source Linux security project.

Apprehension on the part of Red Hat could force it into a license agreement with Microsoft. Microsoft's scare tactics in what could be considered an attempt to coerce Red Hat into a patent agreement similar to one Novell penned last November are not unusual for this early stage in the process, according to a patent attorney.

The GPL says that you must provide source code to the recepients of any application you distribute under that license. This is really meeting the legal requirements of that license. However, is that"all" that is needed? If you say that you have an open source application (especially in healthcare) but you do not attempt to engage the wider community to get feedback on your application or allow other developers to review the data structures and application code. Is it really an open source application? As I stated above. It is clear that all you"have" to do (legally) is give the source code to the recipients of the application.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project in the process of building a free, Web-accessible, user-editable map of the world. So far, most of its map data has come through user-contributed GPS traces, but OSM has recently undertaken the bulk import of government-collected data covering the entire United States. The massive import will jump-start OSM's US map coverage, but its sheer size poses an interesting challenge to the project's resources.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2007

It has been over four months since Dell started shipping computers preloaded with Ubuntu GNU/Linux to home consumers in the United States. Lets take a moment to look at the progress that has been made so far. John Hull, manager of the Linux Engineering team in Austin was kind enough to let me interview him by e-mail. Besides commenting on the current state of affairs with Ubuntu on Dell machines, he also offers some insight in how the Linux team at Dell works and opens a small window into the future of Linux at Dell.

Open source has changed operating systems, application servers and databases. Now, the benefits of open source are being realized in content management systems (CMS), traditionally a vendor-controlled world of expensive licensing and closed APIs. Open source is putting CMS into the hands of developers and organizations previously unable, or unwilling, to use CMS. Early adopters include national and local governments and media companies.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the largest independent Linux skills certification institute,, has announced several new affiliates in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria.

IP Innovation LLC has just filed a patent infringement claim against Red Hat and Novell. It was filed October 9, case no. 2:2007cv00447, IP Innovation, LLC et al v. Red Hat Inc. et al, in Texas. Where else? The patent troll magnet state. The first ever patent infringement litigation involving Linux.

Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has commented on Microsofts renewed IP sabre rattling, saying that the company should "back off on its claims".

Mozilla is prepping a mobile version of Firefox, the world's most popular open-source web browser. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web," reads a blog post from VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, "and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it."

By and large, most Red Hat Linux systems will have Bash as the default shell. Bash is a darn great shell, but this article is about another equally great shell, called Z-Shell, that has most of the attributes of Bash, but in some cases goes the extra mile to give you the flexibility to customize your shell more than Bash allows. This article is somewhat advanced, but if you’re very patient, with some effort, you will do just fine. Remember to make small changes, test them, and then make more small changes, test, and repeat.

In earlier articles, I compared OpenOffice.org 2.3's and MS Office 2007's word processors and slide show programs. It seems appropriate to round off the comparison with a look at spreadsheets, the third of the core programs in any office application. I spent a couple of days testing OOo Calc and Microsoft Excel features for formatting, list-making, formulas, and formula tools. Since the range of user expertise in spreadsheets tends to be much wider than in slide shows or even word processors, I considered the programs largely from the perspective of an average user who might require a spreadsheet for home or business use.

We have k3b installed locally for users to burn CDs/DVDs/etc. This only gets used very infrequently, and it seems that something else has broken every time it does get used. This time it was a “Cannot find writer” error. I checked for the presence of cdrecord and dvd-rw-tools; all fine. Eventually it turned out to be a permissions error - that /dev/cdrom was set to be only user- and group-writable; and the user was not in the relevant group. Added them, log in & out, all well.

OpenSUSE 10.3 was released last week, and I quickly downloaded the new version to update my two openSUSE boxes. Here's a chronicle of the updates and some problems that surfaced during the process.

Last week we learned how to sanely organize our vast digital photo archives with Digikam. Today we'll look at Digikam's built-in editing tools. You'll be able to do a surprising amount of your editing work without ever leaving Digikam.

CPUs are today much more sophisticated than they were only 25 years ago. In those days, the frequency of the CPU core was at a level equivalent to that of the memory bus. Memory access was only a bit slower than register access. But this changed dramatically in the early 90s, when CPU designers increased the frequency of the CPU core but the frequency of the memory bus and the performance of RAM chips did not increase proportionally. This is not due to the fact that faster RAM could not be built, as explained in the previous section. It is possible but it is not economical. RAM as fast as current CPU cores is orders of magnitude more expensive than any dynamic RAM.