Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week, we have announcements on Fedora 8 Test 1, Virtual FudCon and our new column called AskFedora. Speaking of AskFedora, we received several good questions including License Issue, Backups and Problem with Pup. In Developments, we have continuing discussions on CodecBuddy, Yum, Kmods, RPM Roadmap, KDE4 Status and more.

Your Linux distribution probably arrived with a "kitchen sink" kernel. It doesn't take much to build a better one that's tuned to your hardware's needs.

aKademy 2007 hosted two mini-summits, one for Schools and Education and one for Text Layout. The Text Layout Summit was a true cross platform event, and followed from the one last year at the Gnome Summit. Text layout is a complex area requiring advanced knowledge of dozens of different writing methods. With funding from The Linux Foundation they brought together people from Pango, Qt, IBM ICU (Intl. Components for Unicode), SIL Graphite, Unifont.org, m17n, W3C and DejaVu. Getting the various widget sets to have the same high quality support for all scripts is a problem the summit hoped to solve. Read on for details of what they discussed.

August 7th, 2007 – ALLENDALE, NJ - Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.16 (Version 3.0, Release 16). This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes, some feature enhancements to Guardian Digital WebTool and the SELinux policy, and a few new features. They include completely new support for virtual machines (KVM), a new, quick download process, improvements to the navigation interface and more. In distribution since 2001, the Community version of Guardian Digital’s commercial portfolio has been a staple for security enthusiasts, administrators and organizations for almost a decade. As one of the very first security-centered platforms based completely on Open Source, EnGarde has been engineered explicitly for protection and security, while providing the ability to build a complete Internet presence. Utilizing robust SELinux policies, intrusion detection, Web & email content filtering, DNS and more, EnGarde has become an integral component in some of the world's largest organizations.

Terminal and network computing giant Wyse has announced plans to support Novell's thin client Linux OS in "next generation" products. Wyse said the deal will offer greater flexibility and choice to its customers, especially those wishing to standardize on SUSE Linux throughout the enterprise. The announcement appears timed to counter competitor HP's recent investment in Linux-based thin client computing. HP last month revealed plans to acquire Neoware, an early leader in Linux-based network computing. If approved, the deal would bring HP close to Neoware's claimed 39 percent of the global thin client market, HP officials said.

Matthew Dillon created DragonFly BSD in June of 2003 as a fork of the FreeBSD 4.8 codebase. KernelTrap first spoke with Matthew back in January of 2002 while he was still a FreeBSD core developer and a year before his current project was started. He explains that the DragonFly project's primary goal is to design a "fully cross-machine coherent and transparent cluster OS capable of migrating processes (and thus the work load) on the fly."

Dell and Ubuntu broke the barrier for major vendors to preload consumer desktop Linux, and now Lenovo and Novell have shattered the wall for Linux-powered business desktops. On Aug. 6 at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, the companies announced an agreement to provide preloaded SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 1 on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops with Lenovo also providing Linux support.

Dana Blankenhorn has started a newZDNet healthcare blog with a strong emphasis on open source in healthcare software. So far he has four articles of note. First he commented on the new Misys open source move. He has commented on thePossiblityForge Java OpenEMR, an article on What open source can teach medical computing. Most recently he has asked the great question: What is stalling open source in healthcare?Trotter

Defcon 15 followed hard on the heels of the Black Hat Briefings last week. Black Hat closed at Caesar's Palace on Thursday evening, and Defcon started at the Riviera Friday morning. Both shows are the creation of Jeff Moss, but while Black Hat is aimed directly at the professional side of network security, Defcon is all about community, mad fun, hacking, and games.

Mind mapping, the practice of visually representing linked ideas in diagrams, is a controversial technique. Some people find mind mapping's branching trees and multiple colors to be a distraction from the main task of organizing ideas. Proponents counter that the resulting diagrams are concise, quick, and reveal patterns you might otherwise miss. Either way, GNU/Linux offers a number of such programs from which to choose. The most useful ones I've encountered are kdissect and VYM (View Your Mind). Both offer a powerful graphical interface, and both extend the concept of mind mapping by allowing you to attach text and graphics to a diagram and by supporting filters to export results into forms usable with other programs.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work in Plasma, with extra sources for the Weather data engine, work on the applet browser, and the start of SystemTray and RSIBreak plasmoids and a "next generation" application launcher, named Lancelot. Cut-down versions of Korundum and Smoke libraries for writing scripted Plasma applets. More interface work for Amarok 2. More work on XESAM (a shared metadata specification) integration in Strigi. An Akonadi resource for Facebook information.

Microsoft's patent indemnity agreements with several Linux vendors are unsettling the marketplace, Ubuntu leader says.

Full Circle issue #3 has come out. An independent magazine for the Ubuntu community, it features handy how tos, a preview of Compiz Fusion and a review of Ubuntu on a Macbook and more.

OutKafe, a cybercafe management suite distributed under the free GNU/GPL licence, has just had version 5.2.0 released. Largely a feature oriented release, the release is recommended for all current users.

No one would have believed me if I had said five years ago that Microsoft would have a page on its Web site called “Open Source at Microsoft” with the following remarkably sane and reasonable statement on the subject:

Grafpup 2.0 is a compact Linux distribution based on Puppy Linux and aimed at graphics professionals. It offers a variety of options for installation, a custom set of configuration utilities, and a niche suite of applications for digital artists. The graphics are soothing, and the Openbox desktop runs smoothly even on older hardware. Despite a few problems, Grafpup is a good choice for graphic designers and writers on the go.

Some entertaining lguest documentation discussed in an earlier story was merged into the mainline kernel with the commit message, "the netfilter code had very good documentation: the Netfilter Hacking HOWTO. Noone ever read it. So this time I'm trying something different, using a bit of Knuthiness." Both Netfliter and lguest, as well as the documentation for both, were written by Rusty Russell. He describes the lguest driver as, "a simple hypervisor for Linux on Linux. Unlike kvm it doesn't need VT/SVM hardware. Unlike Xen it's simply 'modprobe and go'. Unlike both, it's 5000 lines and self-contained."

In an interview today with Linux-Watch, controversial Linux leader Kevin Carmony confirmed rumors that he had resigned as CEO of desktop Linux vendor Linspire on July 31. Carmony said he plans to work on several of his own business projects, and on Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Once upon a time there was a prosperous and entrepreneurial port city namedEMR. EMR had many ships and many ship owners who ferried lots of people to the healing spas that existed in nearby mountains. Unfortunately for the ships and passengers, the harbor was quite rocky and treacherous. Shipwrecks were common with large and grievous losses of life. Many of the entrepreneurs in the city thought that EMR could benefit from a modern marvel called alighthouse.

The Oxygen team has announced a wallpaper contest. Send in your wallpaper and it might become part of the default set of wallpapers for KDE 4.0. The Oxygen team is solliciting contributions from the community. The jury is nobody less than Icon GodFather David Vignoni, The Mad Scientist Nuno Pinheiro, The Loud American Ken Wimer and Oxygen Swiss Army Knife Riccardo Iaconelli.