Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Ireland-based Linux Mint team yesterday made available the first release candidate of its next version, Linux Mint 2.2 KDE Edition Beta 020. Code-named "Bianca," it uses the KDE 3.5.6 desktop for the first time, running on a 2.6.17-10 kernel, the team said.

GoblinX Premium 2007.1, a bootable live CD distribution based on Slackware Linux, was made available this week by its Brazil-based project team. It is the first release of an "new generation of the distribution, full of news, special features, and upgrades," according to the team.

Internet application testing vendor RadView plans to migrate its flagship product to an open source model using the General Public License (GPL), internetnews.com has learned. The announcement is expected to be made on Wednesday April 11. The move to open source its products could have implications for commercial vendors in the sector, such as Hewlett-Packard's Mercury Interactive and IBM's Rational Software division.

With Palm attempting to migrate its OS to Linux and Symbian working to begin a degree of interoperability with Unix, Linux-based phones are gaining ground, and a recent ABI report suggests they will make up 14 percent of the market by 2012. They face an uphill battle, however against an array of difficult obstacles.

The del.icio.us blog announced an upgrade to their Firefox extension that enables the easy bookmarking of pages.

The eighth annual Linuxfest Northwest takes place from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., April 28 and 29, 2007 at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. Exhibits, presentations, and parking are free. All ages are welcome. The Fest is an informative, low-key way for people to explore Linux and other open source products. LFNW features internationally recognized speakers from leading companies and well-known open source projects, as well as exhibits and demonstrations for a wide range of interests and technical abilities.

Nagios is a GPL-licensed framework that allows you to intelligently schedule little monitoring programs written in any language you choose. Nagios lets you monitor hosts, services, and networks. Here are a couple of examples of real-world monitoring scenarios.

No Starch Press has published a book about integrating embedded hardware, Linux-based operating systems, and custom applications to create Linux devices. "Linux Appliance Design," by four authors, is the first book to tackle both the hardware and software components of device design, the publisher claimed.

SysMaster used embedded Linux to build a set-top box with a dizzying array of audio, video, networking, communications, and data capabilities. The Tornado M10 Digital Media Center runs Linux 2.6.19, and targets phone and IP network operators wishing to offer a wide range of services.

Suppose you want to let a friend thousands of miles away listen to a song from your computer. Perhaps you just want to open up the music library on your computer to a select few while you're on another client on your local area network. Enabling file sharing might be overkill. Instead, you can use a streaming server such as GNUMP3d. Streaming servers are useful for more than Internet radio; they can let people choose individual songs from your music library and play them -- no need to configure NFS, SSH, or Samba.

Mandriva this week made available the third release candidate of its Mandriva Linux Spring 2007 distribution, nicknamed "Beijing." It features a 2.6.17.13 kernel, choice of KDE, GNOME 2.18, or Fluxbox desktops, and the distro's usual full feature set, the project team said.

It sounds unlikely, but Novell and Sun Microsystems have partnered to bring SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 to Sun's Ultra Workstations: the Sun Ultra 20, Ultra 20 M2, Ultra 40, and Ultra 40 M2.

System Reviews It's been quite a while since I've published a review of the workstation platforms from AMD and Intel, but, with all the changes in both platforms recently, it's high time. This brings us to this review of the Intel Xeon 5300 series processors and the AMD Opteron 2200 series processors. Intel's Xeon line has gone through some major changes that provide us with a new quad-core chip and a refined chipset, designed to maximize many different aspects of the systems' communications. AMD's line has stayed fairly steady, and the biggest change the end user will notice is a move to DDR2 memory and a refined processor core.

John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.) Next April, he and Harvard geneticist George Church will become the first humans to have their DNA sequenced and their full genetic makeup posted on the Web.

Linux may be the one to connect that call on your next cell phone. That’s because the open-source operating system is poised for strong mobile growth, analysts and a Linux startup said Wednesday. The number of Linux-enabled cell phones is expected to grow to more than 203.9 million in 2012, almost 96 times more than 2.5 million units in 2005, according to a report from ABI Research analyst Stuart Carlaw.

The latest draft of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has caused more ructions in the Linux community. Some have damned it for seemingly legitimising the controversial Novell/Microsoft agreement on intellectual property rights, while others say it has effectively closed the door on future collaboration between the open-source and proprietary software industries.

The project team of Damn Small Linux, one of the most lightweight Linux distributions available, released version 3.3 on April 4. The latest "DSL" features a 2.6.20.4 kernel, the Fluxbox window manager, and a rich set of applications, wrapped up tight in a 49.6 MB package.

[Fluxbox may not have all the bells and whistles but for an OS that's only 50megs in size, DSL can't be beat. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems is planning an announcement next week on a new strategy for open source network attached storage (NAS), according to industry insiders.

Linux for Clinics has released a Alpha testing release. Known issues... 1. Ubiquity icon is from Ubuntu 2. Initial boot screen on Livecd is still Ubuntu 3. Forgot to remove Gnome-Games 4. Forgot to install the medical dictionary for openoffice.org 5. No LFC upgrade path...Have not implemented our repository yet.

Yesterday we looked at spamd, a service designed to reduce the flow of spam to your email inbox. Now that we know some of its advantages, let's put it to work.