Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week, we have great announcements for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), 3000 Fedora 7 Installations as well as FESCo Election Results. Also we are launching a special section called 'Ask Fedora' where you can ask questions to Fedora Project.

In this Internet-connected world it is an essential skill to know how to troubleshoot network problems. High-quality software suites exist to do the job but can easily cost in excess of tens of thousands of dollars. With a handful of absolutely free open source tools you can do it yourself – on any computer anywhere in the world.

Taking a new stance to its approach to the open source community, Microsoft's Bill Helf announced that it was submitting its shared licences to the Open Source Initiative for certification as true open source licences.

Oracle is hiring too many people to simply be building Linux patches, says the Ubuntu founder, who speculates the database giant will begin offering their own version of Linux in the near future.

Building a business on open source software requires co-operation, business skills and decisions based on needs rather than politics, the Cape IT Initiative Free and Open Source Software Forum was told last week.

The Firefox browser stores not only a user's bookmarks, history, saved forms, and usernames and passwords, but frequently also several extensions and themes. When you're switching computers or distro-hopping, replicating the browser environment can be tricky and time-consuming. But with the Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE), you can back up and restore everything Firefox can hold, and then some.

64 Studio has released version 2.0 of the multimedia-focused GNU/Linux distribution built on Debian and available as both an install and a live CD version.

The Linux Expo of Southern California has opened theCall For Papers for the 6th AnnualSouthern California Linux Expo, to be held February 8th, 9th,& 10th, 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to mature, with improvements to the Twitter applet (and the creation of a complementary data engine), and the adoption of a common visual style for Plasmoids, and the integration of support for SuperKaramba applets through the creation of the SuperKaramba Plasmoid. More work on the re-implementation of the Magnatune interface within the new music store framework, and integration of the recent Plasma work for Amarok 2...

Some people seem to have a short circuit in their minds when they try to explain why Windows has such an enormous desktop market share. Some of them have the delusion that Windows is technically better than the competition. It never was. It isn't now. And, considering how Vista is staggering along, it never will be. No, Microsoft wins because it does whatever it needs to do to win. If that means strong-arming the PC companies, so be it. If that means breaking the law, that's fine too.

Neil Horman posted an enhancement to a /proc/sys/kernel interface for redirecting core dumps, "allowing the core_pattern to contain arguments to be passed as an argv array to the userspace helper application. It also adds a format specifier, %c, which allows the RLIM_CORE value of the crashing application to be passed on the command line, since RLIMIT_CORE is reduced to zero when execing the userspace helper". Andrew Morton was skeptical at first, "this all seems to be getting a bit nutty. Who needs this feature and what will they do with it, etc?"

We went to OSCON, hoping to uncover some fresh details on Sun Microsystems' "Project Indiana." We mostly failed in this endeavor. Sun's operating system chief and Debian author Ian Murdock was at the event, elaborating on Project Indiana. He covered, for the most part, ground we've already been over, which places Indiana as Sun's quasi copy of Red Hat's Fedora project. The core of the new project revolves around Sun's mission to release a fresh, supported version of OpenSolaris every six months.

LXer Feature: 29-Jul-2007

This week we have some details about the Linspire-MS deal, a great article by Danijel Orsolic, Open Source in Outer Space, my Interview with Dave Wreski, a short list of good command line tools and much more.

We are now nearing the end of the first (out of two) week of this vote. At the time of writing, 190 people have voted, out of a potential 1035.

Detailed stats are to be found at:
http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/gr_dm/

People who have voted should see their names at: http://master.debian.org/~srivasta/gr_dm/voters.txt

The question of what units you are working with is one that will at one time or other have plagued anyone who studied a science or a branch of physical engineering. Teachers go to great lengths to make sure students remember to specify their units. It is not enough to say that the answer is 42. Forty-two what? 42 metres? 42 electronvolts? 42 furlongs per fortnight? Without a clear understanding of what units are involved, certain results and claims can be meaningless, misleading or simply expensive.

Yasunori Goto posted some documentation for memory hotplugging which can be used to increase or decrease the amount of memory available to a live kernel. The documentation explains that this functionality is useful for virtualization and capacity on demand solutions, as well as for physically adding and removing RAM from NUMA-nodes. The document itself, "is about memory hotplug including how-to-use and current status. Because Memory Hotplug is still under development, contents of this text will be changed often."

How appropriate that we caught Chairman Tim O'Reilly ogling Portland's tram schedule just a few minutes before the Pirate Party's founder Rickard Falkvinge took the stage at O'Reilly's own conference. Chairman Tim plotted his escape from OSCON, as Falkvinge prepared to talk to the people about things that matter. O'Reilly seemed to miss the crucial issues of the day at every turn, during OSCON.

It’s been almost two weeks since Graduation Day. The kids produced great work. The parents and instructors were all terribly proud. Everybody went home and got plenty of sleep. Now that the buzz has just about worn off, it’s time to reflect on what we accomplished, and what exactly we should do next.

Thousands of open source advocates and enthusiasts from around the world are expected to take the message of free and open source software to the streets on September 15 for the fourth annual Software Freedom Day.

Those wanting to perform serious graphics tasks on their Linux desktops may benefit from a new book by Michael J. Hammel's, coming soon from No Starch Press. The Artist's Guide To GIMP Effects is a four-color tome said to "harness all of the GIMP's powerful features."