Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Is this a joke? I only recently started paying attention to Windows Home Server, since I tend to focus more on desktop operating systems and enterprise server systems. So I didn't realize until now that WHS is really just a vanilla file server. There's nothing wrong with being an ordinary file server for the home. After all, with many home users having multiple computers and gigabytes of music, photos and movies, it's well past time for homes to start having simple-to-use file servers. But, why pay extra for it?

Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds. For example, you might want to provide alternative RSS item descriptions, or to manually select which RSS items to publish. While you can code an RSS feed by hand, you'd be better off using a dedicated tool like ListGarden. It can help you to not only create and manage RSS feeds, but also to do more advanced tasks like publish the feeds on a remote server, back up the feeds, generate an HTML page, and much more.

Who’s afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn’t be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system’s protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process. A lot of people think that building a new SELinux policy is magic, but magic tricks never seem quite as difficult once you know how they’re done. This article explains how I build a policy module and gives you the step-by-step process for using the tools to build your own.

Durban's official municipal website, which runs on Plone, recently underwent a facelift and has plans to integrate some interesting open source software features which will encourage greater citizen participation.

Jungseung Lee announced the first public release ofgitstat,"a GPL'd, web-based git statistics/monitoring system." He explains,"it retrieves a specified git tree, analyzes changesets, and shows graphical information like the number of changesets per day, the number of people who submitted changesets for a specific version(tag), etc." The link above offers a graphical view of Linus' mainline 2.6 kernel tree, with daily commit statistics, monthly commit statistics, kernel release frequency, and per-author statistics. Jungseung noted:"Gitstat was derived from kfm (kernel feature monitor) which was originally developed by Keun-Sik Lim and Sang-Bae Lee of Samsung Electronics and currently maintained and developed by Jeong-Seung Lee and Soon-Son Kwon(Shawn) of Samsung Electronics. Kfm was inspired from Jon Corbet of lwn.net when he analyzed the git tree and Greg KH when he presented similar status report at OLS2007. We thought it would be interesting information every day."read more |rsync.net - Secure Offsite Data

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.