Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Yoggie's innovative Yoggie Pico may well be the first hardware firewall that is truly practical for mobile workers running Windows-based computers. The device appears to work well, except for a simplistic web-based user interface that may not satisfy technical users.

Firefox add-ons, or extensions, are small programs that run inside the browser in order to customize some behaviors. In theory, it is possible to develop and maintain a multilingual, multiversion and multiOS Firefox add-on. In practice, there are many obstacles to overcome in order to create and to maintain a working Firefox add-on in one language for one Firefox version and for one OS.

Back in January I wrote a review of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard. The fact that as I write this, over five months later, that review is still in the O’Reillynet Blogs Hot 25 says a lot about just how much interest there is in this up and coming Canadian distribution, a user friendly derivative of Slackware. Back when I wrote that review I talked about the three different flavors of Vector Linux. Standard, with a default Xfce desktop, can be compared to Xubuntu in some ways while SOHO, it’s big brother with a default KDE desktop, is more directly comparable to Kubuntu. The implication is that the same code base is used in both.

At last week's DebConf 7 Debian Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, nearly 400 attendees had a chance to meet and socialise after years of working together online. They attended more than 100 talks and events, ranging from an update by the current and former Debian Project Leaders to a group trip to the Isle of Bute, off the opposite coast of the country.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 93 for the week of June 17th through June 23rd, 2007.

This Friday will see KDE contributors and our friends arriving from around the world to take part in the KDE World Summit in Glasgow. It costs a lot of money to host a conference of this size, but as in previous years our industry partners have stepped up and made it possible through generous sponsorship.

Why bother using a dedicated FTP client when you can use FireFTP? This nifty extension turns Firefox into a full-fledged FTP tool, so you can transfer files back and forth without leaving the browser. FireFTP offers all the features you'd expect from a decent FTP client.

I came across this program that will install Ubuntu on a windows system just like any other application. I have not had the time try it out yet and it is still in beta so fair warning. It is licensed under the GPL though. - Scott

As Linux continues to move into the enterprise data center, its power and speed are often touted as being stronger and faster compared to other operating systems. But how much faster? And what numbers are used to determine its performance? One decades-old organization has already explored the paths of computer measurement, and is hoping to lend Linux the benefits of the trails it has already blazed.

Although Linux geeks are not often found on the sports field, this week Linux computers will help in a fund raiser to donate a million soccer balls to improve children's lives through sport. Canada-based Omni Technology Solutions, Novell South Africa, Userful, and Pinnacle Micro have teamed up to provide Linux desktop computers for the "Let's Play a Million" South African telethon on June 27.

An antidote to through-the-roof pricing. A tiny open source company is lining up to become the latest roadblock to database vendors happily charging enterprises fat software licenses.

Since its inception, the Xfce desktop environment has aimed to provide high functionality with only modest demands on system resources, with the overarching goal of leaving more facilities for the user to run applications. One of the significant changes in recent releases of Xfce 4 is the Thunar file manager, which replaces the original xffm. Thunar does a good deal to advance the goals of its parent project: it's fast and lean, especially by today's standards of hardware, yet it offers rich functionality. Like its namesake, Thunor, the Saxon god of thunder, Thunar is much smaller than "giants" like Konqueror and Nautilus, yet powerful in its own right. If you want some of the functionality afforded by the GUI file managers of the larger desktop environments, but with less overhead, Thunar may fit your needs.

South African Linux service provider Synaq says open source and Linux email messaging is a rapidly growing trend that businesses need to consider.

Programmers have begun serious work to cut consumption, extending PC Linux battery life and easing server costs.

Posting a series of three patches, Nick Piggin announced that he was working on a rewrite of the buffer layer which he calls fsblock, "the name is fsblock because it basically ties the fs layer to the block layer." As to just what the buffer layer is, Nick explained, "the buffer layer is a layer between the pagecache and the block device for block based filesystems. It keeps a translation between logical offset and physical block number, as well as meta information such as locks, dirtyness, and IO status of each block. This information is tracked via the buffer_head structure."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Introductions of a Dictionary, Photoframe, and Facebook Plasmoids, and a Weather and Solid DataEngine in Plasma. Usability improvements and optimisations in KListView, used for icon views in Konqueror and Dolphin. The start of a shared, common location for vocabulary files across KDE-Edu applications, with initial implementation in Kanagram...

The June edition of The GNOME Journal was released on the 24th of June. Articles: GStreamer audio effects, an interview with Ken VanDine, an introduction to Accerciser and a summary of GNOME.conf.au 2007.

The Amarok team released version 1.4.6 of their player. The newest release includes a new icon set, faster SQLite and many bugfixes. Release notes can be found at on the Amarok website and packages are available for download for Kubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Gentoo and others. Their website announces that "next week the annual KDE conference, Akademy, in Glasgow is starting, keep an eye on the developer blogs to follow the happenings there. Thanks to your continued donations and support from KDE e.V, 7 Amarok developers will be present They are looking forward to a very productive week hacking on exciting new Amarok features."

Following a recent patch that translated Documentation/HOWTO into Japanese, a new patch offered a translation of the same document into Chinese. Li Yang noted, "currently Chinese involvement in Linux kernel is very low, especially compared to China's large population base. Language could be the main obstacle. Hopefully this document will help more Chinese to contribute to Linux kernel."

LXer Feature: 24-Jun-2007

The big stories this week include Bolivarian Computers made in Venezuela, an illuminating comparison of ODF and OOXML, Mandriva's CEO says publicly that they will not sign a cross licensing deal with Microsoft, Miguel de Icaza shows off Microsoft's Flash replacement and an "expert" on Innovation vacillates on his own definition in reference to Open Source software. All these stories and more for your reading enlightenment.