Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Motorola, Inc. today announced a significant step in its commitment to mobile Linux and rich experience creation by introducing MOTOMAGX, its next generation mobile Linux platform. Building on the global success of Motorola's earlier Linux-based platforms, MOTOMAGX lays the foundation to deliver new levels of openness, flexibility and support for third-party applications on Motorola mobile devices.

If you want to set up a “multimedia” PC or a “HTPC” (Home Theater PC), you might end up using MythTV, which can be found at Christian Marillats Debian-Multimedia repository. Once you add that repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list, installing MythTV is as easy as: aptitude install –with-recommends mythtv

When Judge Kimball ruled against SCO in favor of Novel and said that Novell owned Unix's IP (intellectual property), that was the end of SCO. So now, SCO's legal cases are dead -- but what about its friends and partners? I've said since the beginning that there was next to nothing to SCO's claims that Unix IP had illegally been transferred into Unix. After all, SCO itself had incorporated Linux code into Unix. I thought the APA (Asset Purchase Agreement), which gave SCO the right to sell Unix but didn't give the company the IP rights to Unix, would prove SCO's case's Achilles' heel.

Last year's winner in this category, the Nokia 770, has a younger sibling, and, as oft happens, the kid takes the cake. Nokia's N800, the follow-up to the 770, is smaller, lighter, better-looking, faster and has a larger brain.

Joseph Conn hasThis article on why the release of CCHIT-certified WorldVistA EHR has been delayed:"The delay can be attributed in large measure to unique legal and business considerations that arose by virtue of certification as an open-source software product, according to Joseph Dal Molin, interim president and vice president of business development for WorldVistA."The main thing that has been the stumbling block for us is translating the (24-page) CCHIT agreement into an end-user agreement," Dal Molin said in a telephone interview."We need to maintain certification in an open-source world. As bizarre as it may seem, we didn't anticipate that as part of the (development) effort."

The day Linux fans have been waiting for since SCO attacked Linux on May 12, 2003 has finally arrived. U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball has ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix's IP (intellectual property) rights. This, in turn, means the end of SCO's cases against IBM.

Linus Torvalds is often described as an open source champion, interested in licensing only insofar as it affects his ability to share code and improve software more quickly. However, his real position is more complicated -- and to some, perhaps surprising. Asked point-blank which is more important, sharing code or empowering users -- the declared goal of the free software champions whom Torvalds is routinely depicted as being in opposition with -- and his first response in what he calls "the usual Linus polite words" is "That's a really stupid question. Why do you put it as an 'either or' kind of concept?" He then goes on to explain that, because open source operates in the same manner as scientific query, and is a matter of enlightened self-interest, sharing code and empowering users "are not at odds at all" -- a view that, in the end, places him closer to the free software position than either free software or open source followers might care to admit.

Warren Woodford of MEPIS announced on Aug. 10 that his company has built KDE 4 Beta 1 Live DVDs to verify the compatibility of KDE 4 with SimplyMEPIS 7.x. SimplyMEPIS 7.x marks the return of this popular desktop Linux distribution to using Debian Linux as its base. Warren said, "I decided to share my KDE 4 Beta 1 ISOs, so others could take a first look at KDE 4 and also to demonstrate that I'm serious about the commitment that MEPIS 7.x will be incrementally upgradable."

The first question a company asks when presented with a Microsoft Office alternative is how well the software supports Microsoft's de facto standard file formats. Based on eWEEK Labs' testing experience with productivity applications based on the Open Document Format standard (the most prominent of which are Sun's StarOffice and its open-source sibling, OpenOffice), document fidelity consistently falls short of 100 percent, and that's not good enough for most companies and organizations.

To really take advantage of the best tools in computing requires that you become quite comfortable with using the command line interface (CLI). In general, nearly every task -- aside from graphical work itself -- can be accomplished from the CLI. Once the user becomes more adept at CLI work, these non-graphical tasks can be done more quickly, with more fine-grained control, and with less demand on computer resources.

If you’ve ever had to install a large number of Linux systems, you are probably aware how tedious the install process can be. While tools like kickstart can help automate an installation, there are other pieces to the puzzle. There really hasn’t been a tool to unify all the ways you can install Linux–until now.

Articles about Linux and mainstream Linux news tends to be dominated by the big Linux distributions, those with large corporate backing and/or large development teams. I’m primarily talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it’s free clone CentOS, Novell/SuSe, and Ubuntu on enterprise servers and Ubuntu, Fedora, Linspire, and Mandriva on the desktop. Throw in two venerable and widely respected distributions, Debian and Slackware, and you’ve got about 90% of the industry chatter covered, maybe more.

Trolltech's Qtopia is a commonly used mobile Linux. It's used in a large number of different devices– from Sony's mylo communicator, to Motorola and Panasonic's Linux phones. While you might not have come across it in the Carphone Warehouse, it's a common platform in one of the biggest mobile markets going – China.

According to its Web site, LyX is"the first WYSIWYM document processor," coupling a familiar word processing front end to the powerful LaTeX typesetting engine. Last month's new version 1.5 release includes a revamped interface, big improvements in multilanguage support, and enhanced tools for incorporating math, tables, and outlines.

I’m actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can’t run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home. Now that Dell and Lenovo are running the distribution on some of its machines, and Novell is promoting a desktop version of Suse, the stage is set for a serious change in expectations. It was one thing when companies were using Linux quietly, on back-end systems like Web servers to cut costs or improve scaleability. This week’s LinuxWorld Expo show in San Francisco has demonstrated that open source is moving much closer to the front end than ever before, and with that begins another quiet shift, which will probably happen among departmental lines.

You may be forgiven for thinking that a tumblelog is just a blog for lazybones. While there are a lot of similarities between these two kinds of content management systems, a tumblelog is more like an online basket, which you can use to collect your thoughts and discoveries and share them with others. Unlike with blogs, tumblelog readers don't expect you to provide any commentary in the published items, so you don't actually have to"blog about" the stuff that you publish. The idea is that the post item itself implicitly expresses your opinion on it, or, to put it in a slightly different way, you let the item speak for itself.

Editors' Blog If computer game development is your thing, save your pennies and get yourself over to the Los Angeles Convention Centre.

The arch directory in the kernel source tree contains all of the architecture-specific code. There is a lot of code there, despite years of work by the development community to make things generic whenever possible. There are currently 26 different top-level architectures supported by Linux, many of which contain a number of sub-architectures. Two of those top-level architectures are i386 (the original Linux architecture) and x86_64, which is the 64-bit big brother to i386. There is quite a bit of commonality between those two architectures, and some efforts have been made to share code between them whenever possible. Even so, the source trees for the two architectures remain distinct from each other.

KDE oldies may remember this interview with Stephan Kulow from back in 2000. Well the folks at openSUSE have clearly been watching us, not only have they started their own openSUSE news site, they have also started their own interview series with a brand new interview of Stephan Kulow. Stephan has been release dude for much of the KDE 3 series and now shares the same honoured title for openSUSE.

First it was called DTV, then Democracy Player, and now it is Miro. Whatever you call it, the Mozilla-based, cross-platform, open source video player is now in public release. Miro differs from playback front ends like VLC by offering integrated content-finding and content-management tools. If you think that's a meaningless distinction, think again.