Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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."

Linux Mint, a community Linux distribution that includes some proprietary elements for a better "out of the box" user experience, is now available in an edition with KDE as its desktop environment. This 3.0 release is based on Bianca KDE Mint 2.2. Like that edition, Cassandra KDE Community Edition is compatible with all Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn repositories. Instead of the GNOME 2.18 interface that Linux Mint 3.0, Cassandra, the KDE version uses, the KDE 3.5.6 desktop. For those who want to live life on the 3D side of the Linux desktop, it also comes with Beryl 0.2.1 and the Beryl-Manager.

If you’ve been working with Linux very long, you’ve probably encountered dd, the deceptively simple utility for copying a stream of data from here to there. You may have used it to zero a disk before letting it leave the building, to benchmark io hardware by writing a certain number of bytes, to put a disk image on a floppy or usb drive, or even to back up an entire disk.

When Sun looks to highlight the strongest features of the Solaris operating system, DTrace always appears near the top of the list. Your editor recently had a conversation with an employee of a prominent analyst firm who was interested, above all else, in when Linux would have some sort of answer to DTrace. There is a common notion out there that tracing tools is one place where Linux is significantly behind the state of the art. So your editor decided to take a closer look.

The topic of information sharing among US intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other federal agencies has attracted attention since 9/11. At Defcon XV, I had the opportunity to ask Tony Sager, chief of the National Security Agency's Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, about information sharing within the agency.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2007

An interview with IBM's Vice President of Open Source and Standards about their Open Source Strategy, the recent pledge of its patents for more than 150 open software standards, his take on the ODF vs. XML issue, and much more in The LXer Interview of Bob Sutor.

We are excited to announce the release ofMirth 1.6! This is a significant upgrade which includes both critical bug fixes and new features. The functionality and stability of existing connectors has been improved to fully integrate with even more third-party systems. The user interface has also been enhanced to make channel development and maintenance even easier. Additionally, this release includes NCPDP support, real-time connection monitoring and plug-in functionality.

Maybe you've heard of VMware. You know, EMC's baby, huge IPO, Bloomberg called it the hottest tech stock since Google in 2004, drove a member of our staff mad? Virtualization has clearly become an industry darling, and VMware controls 55 per cent of that market. This kind of monster success tends to paint a big ol' target on a company — and a volley of the slings and arrows that accompany outrageous fortune are already on the way.

Amarok 1.4.7 was released with improved collection backend, new streams, altered icon and bugfixes. *** The annual Desktoplinux.org Survey is under way. *** MEPIS released a KDE 4 Beta 1 live DVD using packages from Kubuntu. *** The videos from Lugradio Live are up including Ben Lambs' Conquering the Desktop with KDE 4. *** Finally, following the 10th anniversary of the free desktop last year, congratulations to another project which has gained double figures in age, but whatever did happen to those Scheme applets?

San Diego -- Mainframe programmers and sysadmins get more than just sales pitches and informational talks at SHARE this week -- they also get real-world training. I sat in on a number of educational sessions and hands-on labs at the conference, taught by engineers from IBM, Novell, and independent software vendors.

After I wrote an article on optimizing disk performance, some readers commented that tweaking settings was just part of the job. They pointed out that you can get more speed if you also compile your kernel, adjusting it optimally for your specific hardware and needs. Compiling the kernel isn't the challenge it used to be; nowadays the process is streamlined, and you don't have to do much but pick your choices and key in some commands.

In a June of 1992 posting to the linux-activists mailing list, Linus Torvalds described the original Linux scheduler noting, "the scheduler in linux is pretty simple, but does a reasonably good job at giving good IO response while not being too unfair against cpu-bound processes." A year later, Linus posted a more detailed description of the scheduler noting, "the linux scheduling algorithm is one of the simplest ones possible". Comments in the original 254 line sched.c file read, "'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). The one thing you might take a look at is the signal-handler code here."

When picking a media center solution for your PC, it tends to be a matter of compromise. There are solutions that are visually attractive, solutions that are Free/open source software, solutions that are more complete than others and solutions that integrate well with a desktop environment. In the past there have been few, if any, that have been all of these things. After an extensive beta testing period a new version of LinuxMCE, release 0704, was recently made available to the public that shows how we can indeed have our media center cake and eat it too. Read on for details of this release and future plans for KDE integration.

One of the first things many decision-makers want for any given software product is a roadmap, so they can plan around releases. However, the Linux kernel is and always has been bereft of a roadmap. To counter this, the Linux Foundation announced today that it is offering a Linux Weather Forecast to help provide some guidance to developers and organizations that need to know where the kernel is going.

The Linux Foundation has set up of the Linux Weather Forecast to monitor progress on Linux kernel projects.

Traditionally, the Linux operating system (OS) has been viewed as being too big, too slow, and without the real-time capabilities needed for mobile devices. But as 20 million Linux-based mobile handsets have shipped over the last two years it's difficult to ignore the fact that the Linux OS has quickly taken its place among the top four OS's for high-end "Smartphone" devices.