Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The countdown is on to Ontario Linux Fest and we couldn't be more excited. Here's some news from inside the organizing committee. Since our last note we've added some speakers and topics, and a couple of prominent sponsors. And a bunch more of you have registered in advance from our registration page at http://onlinux.ca/olfreg

Wireless operator says its telecommuter services package won't be confused with OpenOffice.org's open source suite.

"Slab defragmentation is mainly an issue if Linux is used as a fileserver and large amounts of dentries, inodes and buffer heads accumulate," Christoph Lameter explained when posting the fifth version of his patchset. He continued,"in some load situations the slabs become very sparsely populated so that a lot of memory is wasted by slabs that only contain one or a few objects. In extreme cases the performance of a machine will become sluggish since we are continually running reclaim. Slab defragmentation adds the capability to recover wasted memory."

Sit on the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) task force committee, write editorials, participate in government. These activities are of supreme importance for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in medicine to succeed. If FOSS advocates are not present or do not speak up at the table when decisions are being made, guess what direction the decisions will go? The power of advocacy works only when exercised.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced the cancellation of the company's Foleo mobile companion today in a post on the company's official blog. Colligan cites the need to focus effort on Palm's next-generation smartphone operating system as the reason behind the decision.

I usually carry my laptop everywhere and do work on it, but I do also need to work at my desktop PC, so I need to synchronize the files on the two machines. I have used several sync tools in the past, ranging from simple commands like scp and rsync to utilities like Krusader, which includes a way to synchronize directories on different machines. Recently I started using Unison.

Discussion continues on the Linux Kernel mailing list about the legality and morality of re-licensing BSD/GPL dual-licensed code under only the GPL. Alan Cox replied to Theo de Raadt's comments suggesting he was encouraging people to break the law, "re-read my email and then apologize. I do question the .h files where they are BSD licence and no changes were made to the work. I also point out that the dual licence on that code appears to give permission to distribute under one of those licences by choice." In response to Theo's request that code be shared both ways rather than converted to a sole GPL, "that's about the first thing I would agree on - its somewhat rude and not something I personally would usually choose todo."

The multi-billion-dollar market for CRM software is hotly contested by closed source vendors like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com among others, all of whom spend tens of millions of dollars marketing their wares. Can open source compete?

What springs to your mind upon hearing the words"Tahiti" of"Fiji"? White sandy beaches? Spectacular sunsets? Blue lagoons with colorful marine life? While natural beauty is indeed one of the most attractive aspects of the South Pacific, you might be surprised to learn that on some of these paradise islands there are active Linux user communities and even officially registered Linux user groups (LUG). New Caledonia, which I had the pleasure to visit last month, is one such place.

While the ISO hasn't made its official announcement, Microsoft conceded that it had been unsuccessful in its attempt to make Open XML an ISO standard.

Amid intense lobbying and politics Microsoft has moved closer to achieving its goal of having Office Open XML (OOXML) ratified as an International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standard. But, it now seems, the company may have to wait until next year before getting the official thumbs up.

KnowledgeTree, the Cape Town-based open source document management company, has partnered with Novell to offer their system to SUSE Linux Enterprise customers.

Here's what we know beyond doubt. First, the Linux desktop is gaining in popularity. Second, it's doing so at the expense of the Windows desktop. After that, things get muddy. For example, our recent DesktopLinux survey results, clearly show that there is simply more interest in Linux desktop. After all, more than twice as many people filled out our survey this year when compared to the 2006 survey.

Standards expert and attorney Andrew Updegrove has predicted that on Sept. 4 the International Organization for Standards will announce that the draft ISO specification based on Microsoft's Office Open XML formats failed to make the standardization grade.

Currently, GNU/Linux users with Nvidia graphics cards have two choices: Either use the proprietary drivers and violate their free software principles, or use the free nv driver and do without 3-D acceleration. The Nouveau project is working to overcome this dilemma by producing its own set of fully functional free Nvidia drivers. We talked to Stephane Marchesin and Ben Skeggs, two of the active developers in Nouveau, about the history of the project and the current status of its work.

Ingo Molnar reviewed Roman Zippel's Really Fair Scheduler code, suggesting that much of the work was similar to that which was being done by Peter Zijlstra, "all in one, we don't disagree, this is an incremental improvement we are thinking about for 2.6.24. We do disagree with this being positioned as something fundamentally different though - it's just the same thing mathematically, expressed without a "/weight" divisor, resulting in no change in scheduling behavior. (except for a small shift of CPU utilization for a synthetic corner-case)"

As with Firefox, you can extend Thunderbird's functionality by installing extensions. Mozilla's official extension repository has quite a few nifty tools on offer, and which ones you choose to install depends entirely on your needs. There are, however, a few extensions that you might find indispensable no matter how you use Thunderbird.

With his older notebook starting to show its age, Alastair Otter decides to upgrade to a ThinkPad X60 running Ubuntu and learns how far Ubuntu has come in the past two releases.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to take shape. Continued improvements in KGPG and KDevelop. More KVTML format conversion work across KDE-Edu applications. Theme improvements in KDE Games. A new game, KSimili, is imported into playground/games. Initial work on a Kalzium KPart for 3d molecular viewing. A redesigned configuration module for colours in KDE. Support for autodetection of gphoto2 cameras using Solid in Digikam. Annotation DRM support in okular. Work on threading in Mailody. Orca screenreader support through Kross scripting in KSpread. Continued development on KChart 2. Initial work on a Sonnet-based spellchecker for KOffice. Development on Eigen 2 is restarted to follow a different implementation strategy. Blitz is renamed QImageBlitz. The release schedule for KDE 4.0. is officially pushed back two months. KDE 4.0 Beta 2 tagged for release.

The open source instant messaging (IM) program Pidgin is now available in Afrikaans, thanks to the efforts of Translate.org.za.