Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 has been released and is currently being distributed to Thunderbird 2 users via the application's built-in software update system. The upgrade fixes security bugs, which are detailed in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 section of the Mozilla Foundation Security Advisories page.

Wal-Mart will sell a sub-$300 "back-to-school" PC this fall pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows Vista and OpenOffice.org productivity software. The Everex GC3502 PC is based on a 1.7GHz Via C7-D processor, and will be available later this year preloaded with Ubuntu Linux.

For many users, the xorg.conf file, which configures the system resources, graphics card, keyboard, pointing device, and monitor for a computer running the X Window System, is an exception to GNU/Linux's do-it-yourself credo. Users who think nothing of editing /etc/fstab or /etc/hosts.allow will shy away from xorg.conf for fear of breaking their systems, relying instead on tools such as the KDE Control Center or Debian's dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg instead. But learning your way around xorg.conf not only teaches you a lot about how your system operates -- it can also come in handy when the graphical display fails and you either can't remember the handy command that does the work for you, or you're working with a distribution that isn't blessed with it.

A series of encodings on printouts from color laser printers to discourage counterfeiting? At first, the idea sounds like the urban legend from a couple of decades ago that claimed you could hear Satanic messages when you play vinyl records backwards. Yet the evidence from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is that the encodings are embedded in color printers from all major manufacturers. Moreover, the issues raised by the practice have caused Free Software Foundation director Benjamin Mako Hill and other members of theComputing Culture group at the MIT Media Lab to begin theSeeing Yellow campaign to stop the practice.

In early June, Asustek Computer and Intel announced at Computex Taipei that they would soon be releasing a low-end $199 subnotebook PC, the Asus Eee PC 701. It appears to be on schedule, and when it arrives in customers' hands in late August or early September it will be running a variation of Xandros Desktop Linux. The Eee PC 701 comes with two interfaces. The first desktop is meant for users who may have never used a computer before. The other interface is KDE-based. Both Windows XP and KDE users will find it familiar-looking.

When Microsoft's Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux? When XP first appeared, Microsoft Office had won the productivity suite wars, Internet Explorer had driven Netscape out of the Web browser market it had pioneered, and Linux, while beginning to gain steam as a server platform, was a desktop platform that only a true geek could love.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the Free Software Foundation finally ratified and released the new version of the GPL at the end of June. This marks the newest chapter in the history of one of open source (and free) software’s oldest and most venerated licenses.

Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring application lives perpetually in the shadow of its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, garnering just a fraction of the developer effort and publicity lavished on the browser and email client. Nevertheless, it is slowing maturing into a reliable tool worthy of the Mozilla brand.

Reader-submitted nominations were at the heart of the annual "Linux and Enterprise Open Source Readers' Choice awards," revealed at the recent Enterprise Open Source Conference & Expo 2007 in New York. Notable winners include Ubuntu (Linux distribution), Sendmail (email server), and Evolution (productivity tool), conference organizer SYS-CON Media announced this week.

We bring the advice of experts straight from San Diego to your desktop. 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 Richard Ray. Look for more in the coming weeks.

No, it’s not the “Top 100,” nor does this list contain the “only” 100 open source downloads you should consider – there’s a big ocean out there, so please keep swimming.

The Software Freedom Law Center's first Annual Legal Summit for Software Freedom October 12 includes a closed private meeting in the morning for key open source attorneys and a series of educational lectures in the afternoon that will be open to other interested lawyers as well as the general public.

The single biggest argument against a smooth migration to one of the popular desktop Linux distributions is the belief that key applications are not available on the Linux platform. However there are a multitude of fantastic open source alternatives that are easy to install and free to use.

Microsoft's plans of having its OOXML document format accepted as a national standard were thwarted by a conclusive vote against the move in a meeting yesterday.

KDE's new technical documentation library, TechBase, hit an important milestone today when it served up its one millionth page. In step with the KDE 4.0 development cycle, TechBase is rapidly maturing into a central hub for high-level technical information related to KDE and the Free software desktop.

Two new documentation directories were merged into the upcoming 2.6.23 mainline kernel, containing translations of the HOWTO and stable_api_nonsense.txt documents in Japanese and Chinese. Greg KH explained, "here are some patches that add some translations of some procedural documentation files to the Documentation/ tree." Regarding some of the concerns that were expressed with merging translated documentation into the mainline kernel tarball, Greg noted, "these files change _very_ slowly over time, and are quite easy to keep up to date by the translators."

Playing around with radio-frequency transmission and reception used to be restricted to those of us with hardware skills. That has been changing for some years, though, as processors get faster and software techniques advance; now, many radio transmitters and receivers are built with simple (but flexible) hardware. The hard work of generating the signal to be transmitted is done in software. Some wireless network adapters work that way now, as do a number of other devices. There is a well-advanced project - GNU Radio - which enables experimenters to do amazing things with software defined radio (SDR) systems.

The alpha 1 development release of Damn Small Linux (DSL) 4.0, which hit the Net on Tuesday, is "a very different version" that includes a number of features requested by users on the DSL forums.

A few years ago, the idea that savvy developers and IT professionals would need to know anything about intellectual property law would have been dismissed as a bad joke. Oh, certainly, there were arguments from time to time over fine points in the GPL Version 2, but for the most part, it didn't matter.

In response to another merge request, Andrew Morton retorted, "argh. I have a backlog of maybe 300 patches here which I am cheerfully ignoring while concentrating on preventing 2.6.23 from being less of a disaster than it has already been." He noted that he was not planning to merge any new code into his -mm tree for 2.6.23 inclusion, "the door for new 2.6.23 material shut two weeks ago. Here, at least."