Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Andrew Morton sent out the latest lguest patches for review, noting that he intends to merge the code into the mainline kernel, "some concern was expressed over the lguest review status, so I shall send the patches out again for people to review, to test, to make observations about the author's personal appearance, etc. I'll plan on sending these patches off to Linus in a week's time, assuming all goes well." The project's FAQ notes, "lguest is designed to be simple to use and modify, with the aim of keeping the codebase small. Currently it's around 5000 lines including userspace utility, whereas kvm is over 10 times that size, and Xen is around 10 times bigger again (of course, both have far more features)."

One of the less well-known features of OpenOffice.org is its ability to run as a service. You can put that ability to some clever use. For example, you can turn OpenOffice.og into a conversion engine and use it to convert documents from one format to another via a Web-based interface or a command-line tool. JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org's file conversion capabilities.

Ubuntu 7.04, aka "Feisty Fawn," has been out for several weeks now and it's already very popular. Heck, Michael Dell was running it even before he chose it to become Dell's Linux of choice. But, how good is it?

Fluendo's Elisa is a free software media center application that can play your DVDs, video files, music, and pictures. Since it is designed for extensibility, Elisa has the potential to do much more. It does not handle television or video recording functions, but it is a slick and promising project.

Scientific Linux, a project based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 source packages enhanced with a variety of additional applications, released its v5.0 i386 live DVD on May 7. The SL5 live DVD features a 2.6.18 kernel, includes all client/workstation RPMs, and uses GNOME as its default desktop.

We are here today to talk about the Strigi project - the indexing and search technology of KDE 4 - and to interview Flavio Castelli, a key developer of Strigi.

Snap Links is a great Firefox extension that makes it possible to open multiple links on a web page by simply dragging around them. Excellent for opening multiple search results.

The Gentoo Linux project team today announced its first release of the year: Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code-named "Secret Sauce." GL 2007.0 comes as an installable/live CD, features a 2.6.19 Linux kernel, and offers a choice among KDE, GNOME, and Xfce desktop environments.

Mandriva recently released its first distro of the year, dubbed Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring. Like previous releases, Spring is available in five editions, two of which can be freely downloaded. I installed and worked with the $76 Powerpack edition, which includes support and several gigabytes of packages. Not only does Powerpack score over other multiple CD/DVD free-of-cost distros, it also makes competing non-free distros eat dust.

Although OpenOffice.org doesn't allow you to create self-running Impress presentations, there is a tool that can help you with that. Using IndeView, you can convert your Impress presentations into a self-contained package that can run off a CD or DVD on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Jörn Engel announced LogFS, "a scalable flash filesystem." The project's home page notes that LogFS aims to be the successor of JFFS2, "the two main problems of JFFS2 are memory consumption and mount time. Unlike most filesystems, there is no tree structure of any sorts on the medium, so the complete medium needs to be scanned at mount time and a tree structure kept in-memory while the filesystem is mounted. With bigger devices, both mount time and memory consumption increase linearly. JFFS2 has recently gained summary support, which helps reduce mount time by a constant factor. Linear scalability remains. YAFFS also appears to be better by a constant factor, yet still scales linearly."

Document company Xerox South Africa switches its electronic resource planning systems to Red Hat Linux running on Dell's PowerEdge servers.

Remember the paperless office? By now we were supposed to be handling all of our documents digitally, and saving trees by using computers to handle everything electronically. If you'd like to make backup copies of ephemeral content without printing it out, turn your Linux box into a PDF generation device for your entire network.

Starting May 8, Mozilla will host twice-weekly conference calls to discuss the future of customer support for Mozilla products, the company announced today. Several support mediums will be discussed in the conferences, including knowledge bases, forums, and real-time chat, a company spokesperson said.

With one stroke, Microsoft has reasserted its number one position as deal maker and decision maker in the computer industry, reminding all wannabes that they are just that - wannabes.

LXer Feature: 08-May-2007

The idea to have the Open Source community sponsor a car in the Indianapolis 500 put forth recently has more than just the Open Source Press taking notice. Here is my take on it.

Jitterbit has released version 1.2 of their open source integration software that allows users to connect customer data from a variety of sources and formats, such as local and hosted ERP and CRM applications, legacy systems, data warehouses and online marketplaces.

Every now and then something comes along that makes you say "whatever for?". The latest news from Microsoft's Indian research arm is one of those.

South Africa-developed Impi Linux, a local version of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, today announced its latest release. With this release Impi Linux, is hoping to extends its existing public sector foothold and grab a little more of the enterprise sector.

One of the great features of the current version of OpenOffice.org is the support for extensions, which allow you to add to the office suite's functionality. Every day this week we'll look some of the most useful OOo extensions available. Today, we'll look at ways you can improve the way the office suite handles templates and AutoText.