Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux has come a long way in a lot of areas, but if my experience is an indicator, we're not much further along in the use of personal webcams today than we were five years ago. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to use Ekiga (formerly GnomeMeeting) as a video phone, I finally prevailed and got Ekiga working with both sound and video. The problem -- as always seems the case with computer peripherals under Linux -- begins with drivers, or rather, the lack of drivers.

Oxford Semiconductor is shipping a Linux-based development kit for its recently-launched ARM9-based SoC (system-on-chip) for machine-to-machine (M2M) messaging applications, including factory automation, POS (point-of-sales), and building management. The DS-OXETHx954 kit comes with Wind River Platform Linux, and trial versions of Wind River and CodeSourcery tools.

The three newest members are expected to help deepen the foundation's understanding of the issues and opportunities for Linux in multiple environments.

OpenOffice.org has released version 2.2 of it office suite. OpenOffice.org is an office suite similar to Microsoft Office, but written by the OpenOffice.org Community and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). When OpenOffice.org first came out, there where many claims that it would act as an Microsoft Office replacement with pundits citing the increased cost of Microsoft's product along with a large feature set that most users never touched.

At a high level, a cluster is an aggregation of multiple standalone computers (nodes) linked together through a high-speed connection to create a single shared computing resource. A key benefit of this distributed processing architecture is that complex computations can be broken down and run serial or parallel among the individual nodes, resulting in a dramatic improvement in the time required to process large problems and complex tasks. For that reason, clusters are used for CPU-intensive jobs where massive processing power is required, such as when running simulations, computer-aided design, and rendering.

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. The SCO Group has asked a US court to reel in the reclusive legal blogger Pamela Jones ofGroklaw fame in its arcane Linux intellectual property prosecutions of Novell and IBM.

Firefox is getting a social life. Mozilla Labs, Mozilla's research group, today detailed "The Coop," an experimental set of content sharing tools for Web browsers.

Microsoft is calling on the Great British public to join its campaign to get the XML Office format adopted as an international standard.

The first thing that naturally comes to mind is Linux and then maybe the Apache Web server project. But all across the landscape, there are a number of less-ambitious, open-source efforts under way that hold a lot of promise for solution providers looking to shore up their profitability. One class that is beginning to get plenty of attention is all the work being done around the Asterik voice over IP telephony project that is now being packaged for commercial use by companies such as Digium. The Digium offering is an appliance based on a Linux distribution created by rPath that has already received a number of positive reviews in terms of its ability to compete with proprietary offerings from Avaya and Cisco.

We’ve written about portable apps quite a number of times in the past, but why bother with just apps when there’s a whole OS that’ll fit on a 50MB USB stick? Damn Small Linux, sometimes abbreviated DSL, is a 50MB mini desktop Linux distribution.

This review takes a quick look at the just-released, Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Linux distribution. DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols finds it easy to install and configure, and a solid desktop platform to use, but notes that Beryl 3D graphics support can be challenging to get working.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has fixed several critical Kerberos 5 flaws attackers could exploit to cause a denial of service, bypass security restrictions and hijack targeted machines.

TIBCO's GITAK (General Interface Test Automation Kit) has now been open sourced by the company. This gives developers a free tool for building automatic quality assurance testing routines for enterprise applications components.

An open source initiative to reverse gains for Microsoft web server software appears to be using edited server headers to try and improve the showing of the Apache web server. Sites using the Open Source Parking service report that they are running on Apache, but appear to actually be hosted on lighttpd. Both Apache and lighttpd are open source web servers, but Apache leads in the Netcraft survey with a 59 percent market share, while lighttpd is a newcomer with just 1.2% share.

A hackergotchi is a picture of a person's head that's used as an avatar for identification on a blog. Any region below the neck is cut out, as are any portions of the picture that don't include the head. You can create a hackergotchi easily with a digital camera and the GIMP.

The Minitel, a French government-sponsored minicomputer that was wired into 14 million French homes at its peak in the mid-1990s, had a limited service offering, a black-and-white screen and slow connection speeds that doomed it to near-extinction in the face of the Internet. Now, a French Internet service provider, Neuf Cegetel, has taken inspiration from the Minitel to develop a computer based on a similar low-cost model, aimed at people who are unable or unwilling to buy a computer. In a gesture to high-technology enthusiasts, however, the system uses the open-source software beloved by many engineers and programmers.

The Free Software Foundation has released the second draft of version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). In addition to general editing, the new draft ties the LGPL more closely to the GNU General Public License (GPL), introduces the concept of a "linked version," and adds a new option for distributing combined works.

A fairly detailed article entitled"VistA Electronic Health Record (EHR) System: The Market Today and Tomorrow" was recently published in Virtual Medical Worlds. See the articlehere.

South African state power utility Eskom backs open software as it sponsors a new open source centre under the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering.