Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Officially released Monday, Scientific Linux 4.5 can now be installed as a Xen paravirtual guest which, according to the developers"gives a significant speed increase over fully virtualized guests."

Can a commercial graphics program find a market for professionals in GNU/Linux? A company called e frontier is experimenting to see if one can with Anime Studio Pro 5, an editor not only for anime, but also Flash animations, webtoons, and other forms of 2-D graphics. Compiled from much the same code as the Windows and Mac versions, the GNU/Linux version includes the same functionality, with a complex but highly organized interface and three different forms of animation.

On Friday, June 29, at 12 noon (EDT), the Free Software Foundation will officially release the GNU GPL version 3. Please join us in celebration as we bring to a close eighteen months of public outreach and comment, in revision of the world's most popular free software license.

[I received this information just a little while ago. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems has announced new functionality for Solaris Express Developer Edition. The OpenSolaris-based distribution targets developers for the Solaris OS, Java, and Web 2.0 with a set of products that are optimized for multi-core processor architectures and includes new compilers and development tools designed to assist developers in creating better applications more rapidly.

While podcasting and video blogging are all the rage, many people still prefer the simplicity of the typed word for expressing themselves online -- that is, a blog. However, popular blogging platforms like WordPress and Movable Type can be tough to configure and maintain. On the other hand, you might not want to use an online service like Blogger or TypePad because you want complete control over your blog. If you're not afraid of the command line, take a peek at Bash Blogger. As its name implies, this application is a bash script that automates all of your blogging tasks (aside from writing, of course).

Sends its SUSE Linux developers on a seven-day busman's holiday. Open source developers at Novell are spending this week on a 'working holiday' that the company calls Hackweek.

In an effort to promote more communication between open source users and vendors, the nonprofit Open Solutions Alliance, Inc. (OSA) is opening up its membership to customers.

Jack Dorsey wants to change the way people communicate on the Internet. Are you used to updating your blog once every 24 hours? If Dorsey has his way, you'll soon be thinking about lots of tiny blog posts from wherever you are, whenever you want. Dorsey, a former software developer for a courier and dispatch service, is the founder and CEO of Twitter.com, a social networking Web site with a twist: in the clipped style of a taxi drivers radioing a status report to the dispatcher, Twitter users post mini-updates throughout the day and night to let friends (and the world) know the minute details of what they're doing.

A huge problem in most digital households is a growing collection of data without an easy way to share it and store it in one spot. Music. Movies. Pictures. Documents, backups, operating system images. Wow! Where do you put all of this stuff?

Dell isn't resting on its recent consumer Linux PC laurels. The computing giant has added a new laptop -- the Inspiron 1420 Notebook -- to its Ubuntu Linux 7.04 offering. It is also replacing the Dimension E520 desktop with the new, low-priced Inspiron 530.

Apache Maven 1.1 was released yesterday as the final release with new features to the 1.x branch of Maven. Maven is an open source project management tool for Java developers.

There's a problem with Solaris and Sun knows it. The installation experience of Solaris (along with other areas) could be greatly improved. The installer doesn't "suck" as it's easy and known to Solaris administrators, but for a Linux or Windows user it could prove to be a bit challenging. In the Linux world it's no longer a challenge to install a Linux distribution on your hard drive, especially with the excellent work that the Ubuntu team has done in improving the user experience for a desktop installation. However, in this time while Linux has become just as easy to install as Microsoft Windows (if not easier), Solaris has not really evolved to make the experience easier and attractive to potential customers.

Would you like to buy a mailing list and start a Broadcast Campaign? Then just put some kind of message at the bottom of the email that says unsubscribe or opt-out and a physical address like 201 Mullview Place, Bigfoot, Montana 59106. Make sure you have a subject line and a header.

Wow! There have been big events in the Ruby universe recently. I’ll be writing about several of them over the next couple of weeks, but today I want to touch on one that gets pretty deeply into Ruby.

If you want feedback on the contents of your Web site, let your visitors rate your pages. Some content management systems include this functionality by default, but if yours doesn't, you can add rating capabilities with AJAX Star Rater, a PHP/MySQL application that allows you to display AJAX-ified star rating bars on any Web page.

The open source community risks leaving Asian users and developers behind, thanks to cultural differences and western business's tendency to treat programmers there as code monkeys rather than software designers, a senior Novell staffer has warned.

A 21 day hack-a-thon has resulted in the initial stages of Moonlight, a Linux version of Microsoft's upcoming Silverlight, which aims to rival Adobe's Flash Player.

I started using Debian in late 2002, today I am a Debian package maintainer and use it full time every day at my job as a Debian Sysadmin. On the flip side I’m also an Ubuntu enthusiast and now an official Member of the project, I use Xubuntu (XFCE version of Ubuntu) on my desktop, work extensively with the Ubuntu community, and attend and help organized events with the Ubuntu team here in Pennsylvania. My work with Debian trickles down into Ubuntu, as almost all of the work in Debian does, the packages I maintain end up in Ubuntu repositories, the tools developed for Debian are adopted by Ubuntu.

The Linux Professional Institute has named its new aproved training partners including trainers in Tanzania, Tunisia and the Ivory Coast.

I've been a fan of SimplyMEPIS for years. The distribution was one of the early pioneers in the field of user-friendly Linux development, and to this day offers a system that usually "just works." Earlier this month the MEPIS site announced a community variation for older computers based on SimplyMEPIS. AntiX is an installable live CD that features a modern kernel, recent X server, and lighter applications for use on computers with as little as 64MB RAM. I tried it, and liked what I found.