Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Golden Penguin Bowl is a perennial LinuxWorld event frequented by inner-circle types and shunned by the humorless. The format is simple: two teams, the Geeks and the Nerds, answer a series of not-serious technical and movie/TV trivia questions and possibly engage in other feats of derring-do, such as a robot face-off. One team wins, the other team loses. The fans rarely riot, but you never know.

Last month, Fortune magazine ran an interesting article about how Microsoft got its groove on in the massive Chinese market by striking deals with China's government and how Microsoft's success in China appears to be coming at the expense of Linux and open-source software.

run-parts is used (on Debian systems, anyway) to run the scripts in /etc/cron.daily (hourly, weekly, etc) on the appropriate schedule. I had trouble this week with a Perl script I’d dropped into /etc/cron.daily failing to run. Ran fine from the command line, of course. Odd.

The company certified six hardware configurations to run Oracle Enterprise Linux. Certified products include those made by Compellent Technologies, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Pillar Data Systems and Unisys. The announcement was made in conjunction with the LinuxWorld conference this week in San Francisco.community.

Red Hat Summit 2007 collected hundreds of Linux users all in one place–many of them experienced Red Hat Certified Engineers® (RHCE). And somewhere between all those smart people walking around–and our video crew shooting footage–the idea for some video tips was born. This tip is from William Bradley.

I used to think of myself as something of a rare bird -- a philosopher and software developer with a keen interest in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements. But as I discovered at last month's North American Computers and Philosophy (NA-CAP) conference in Chicago, there are many with similar interests.

Fedora and Debian make building a custom kernel and packaging it for rollout a simple process. Part 2 of the Linux kernel compilation series examines the unique steps in getting these popular distros' set up with a custom kernel.

The free electronic program guide (EPG) data that Zap2it Labs currently provides to many MythTV users is scheduled to shut down on September 1. Today MythTV users learned how much a replacement service offered by Schedules Direct (SD) will cost.

Open Tuesday this month has Obsidian Systems founder, Anton de Wet, talking on how to build a business on open source software. The Joburg based networking event for OSS enthusiasts has also moved venues.

Some of the heaviest PR lead-up to this year's West Coast LinuxWorld Conference and Expo was about Linux on laptops, and specifically Novell's SUSE Linux on Lenovo laptops.

Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, "The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?" at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here. For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it."

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian explained rather than defended his company's deal with Microsoft in his keynote address at the annual LinuxWorld Conference here Aug. 8. "I know our deal with Microsoft is controversial, but it is necessary for our customers who have to deal with both Linux and Windows in their data centers. Virtualization is also going to have to deal with both of those operating systems," he told attendees.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) pushed out a prototype application at LinuxWorld yesterday to demonstrate interoperability between open source applications. The Common Customer View (CCV) prototype integrates data between open source products from JapserSoft, Centric CRM, Adaptive Planning, Talend, and other OSA members, and includes a new single sign-on (SSO) piece contributed by SpikeSource and released under the Open Source License (OSL).

MySQL quietly let slip that it would no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball, not quite a year after the company announced a split between its paid and free versions. While the Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), MySQL is making it harder for non-customers to access the source code.

For those who like living on the cutting edge, Mandriva Linux 2008 Beta 1 (code name Cassini) and Fedora 8 Test 1 ("for 'alpha' users") were both released this week.

The alpha version of Mozilla's community-driven Firefox support site offers how-to and troubleshooting documents directed toward new users -- a crucial audience if the browser is to capture and maintain additional market share.

Trolltech have announced the release of Qt 4.3.1. This release adds bug fixes and performance optimisations. More significant however is the new licence exceptions added to their Free Software edition. This means Qt software can be used along with a larger range of other Free Software libraries and dependencies. The Trolltech blog is celebrating the release with photos of the Trolltech support teams.

The OpenSUSE project celebrated its second birthday on Aug. 7 by making the first beta of OpenSUSE 10.3 available at the LinuxWorld trade show here. OpenSUSE 10.3 is a bleeding-edge Linux operating system based on Linux kernel 2.6.22.1 with a large variety of the latest open-source applications for desktops, servers and application development. Novell is OpenSUSE's corporate backer, and uses OpenSUSE as the foundation for its SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) line.

Lenovo announced that it will be preloading Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system on select ThinkPad notebooks. Although exact dates could not be confirmed for South Africa, these machines are due to be released worldwide in the last quarter of the year.

When Fedora 7 was released, one of its standout features was Smolt, an opt-in program for collecting data about users' hardware. Since then, Smolt has provided a publicly available snapshot of systems running Fedora, and is in the process of being ported to other distributions. With features being rapidly added, Smolt has the potential to offer an unprecedented wealth of information, and to aid in quality assurance, tech support, and advocacy, not only for Fedora, but for GNU/Linux in general.