Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Chipmaker Infineon Technologies has enhanced the Linux-based software suite it provides with half-a-dozen broadband customer premises equipment (CPE) reference designs. The "Spinacer" suite adds an IMS-based (IP multimedia subsystem) device framework for FMC (fixed-mobile convergence), an optional TR-69 auto-provisioning extension, and support for Infineon VoIP chips with HD (high-definition) sound, the company said.

Thin Multimedia Inc. (TMI) will demonstrate its PAL-format MobileTV software stack for Linux on a digital TV receiver chipset from Siano, at the CTIA Wireless 2007 show next week in Orlando, Fla. Additionally, the company says it will collaborate with Siano on a "multi-standard, integrated mobile TV" product.

What is the key innovation of Spring? The breakthrough technology presented last January during the Solutions Linux event in Paris: Metisse, an innovative window management technology. Unlike the widely known 3D-accelerated desktops with the "cube" effect and other visual enhancements, Metisse offers an innovative way to manage windows: only the windows move, making the possible variations endless! Metisse is not a 3D-accelerated desktop but a Human-Computer Interface (HCI) technology that revolutionizes the user experience.

The news: The annual Linux Audio Conference is now underway at the Technischen Universität Berlin. Alas, I won't be there, but I can still enjoy the presentations through IRC, audio, and video feeds. Check the conference wiki's LAC2007 Live Streaming page for access details. For more information regarding the conference see the LAC2007 general information page. This is the Linux audio community's event of the season, so feel free to visit, whether or not you're actually in Berlin.

I've come to the conclusion that software should be free. And I mean really free--as in free beer. Or free advice. I know there's a free software movement, one that advocates the unencumbered use of software code, but the folks behind it pull their punches. On its Web site, the Free Software Foundation defines free software this way: "'Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer.'" See what I mean?

Researchers at Oxford have built an x86 emulator that runs purely on Java, making it ideal for security researchers who want to analyze and archive viruses, host honeypots and defend themselves against buggy or malicious software without hosing their machines. TheJPC also emulates a host of other environments, giving technophiles the ability to play Asteroids and other software that's sat on shelves for years collecting dust.

The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a hybrid of two philosophical trends in technology: the well-known free and open source software movement, and the open access movement, whose goal is to provide free online access to scholarly research. By combining advocacy with the software tools needed to accomplish its aims, in nine years the project has grown to become a significant force in academic online publishing.

Open-source rivals Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc. are each highlighting initiatives to bring Linux-based functionality to the desktop. At its BrainShare 2007 convention this week in Salt Lake City, Novell detailed improvements to its SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 product, introduced in July 2006, while Red Hat provided more details about the desktop capability of its new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 operating system.

The Ubuntu project today released the first betas of Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME-based) and Kubuntu 7.04 (KDE-based) -- aka "Feisty Fawn." Among other enhancements, the eagerly awaited distro-duo boasts a "ground-breaking" Windows migration assistant, new wireless networking content- and services-sharing capabilities, and a 2.6.20 Linux kernel.

While there are a couple good Solaris volunteer packaging efforts out there, it'll take a software management system overhaul to bring Solaris' software tools up to the level to which Linux users, administrators and developers have become accustomed.

At the Decibel Hackathon sponsored by NL.net and basysKom GmbH in Darmstadt, Germany last weekend, hackers from the KDE community met to discuss the handling of contact data in KDE 4. Read on for a summary of the event.

Meshcom Technologies of Finland is readying a mesh networking driver aimed at Linux- and Windows-based device vendors. MeshDriver 1.0 will be commercially available to vendors wishing to build products that form self-healing mesh networks optimized for throughput and performance in fixed and mobile network environments, the company said.

[I will be installing one of these at Sky Harbour in the next month. - Scott]

The biggest video problem open source developers need to solve isn't with video editing software, but with Internet video delivery, which is currently dominated by Adobe Flash. There are several good reasons why Flash is the most popular method of putting video on the Internet, but Macromedia (since purchased by Adobe) made a horrible decision when it released Flash 8. Its choice of a proprietary video compression codec makes a free replacement for Flash not only desirable, but necessary -- and I mean for business reasons, not just because of software ideology.

Turns out Oracle CEO Larry Ellison does have a few friends and one of them is HP. Earlier this week Ellison claimed that Oracle had displaced Red Hat at search engine giant Yahoo. But neither Yahoo nor Red Hat completely agree with Ellison's claim. Ellison also said Oracle had signed HP, CDW and Dell as resellers for Oracle's Enterprise Linux. Oracle entered the Linux support business last fall when Ellison announced he would be undercutting Red Hat by offering direct Oracle support.

The Mirth project is announcing the release of Mirth 1.4, with HL7 v3, X12, EDI and XML message support. Mirth 1.4 includes over 60 bug fixes, improvements and features, as well as a new, powerful development and mapping environment. Other new features include HTTP, SMTP and RTF support, application routing functionality and medical imaging support (binary image data encoding). Also stay tuned for the upcoming Mirth webinar which will be officially announced in the coming weeks.

Opera Software reports that Linux and the Opera browser are being used by a non-government organization combatting HIV AIDs in Malawi. The Baobab Health Partnership runs Opera in fullscreen"kiosk" mode on low-powered, Linux-based network terminals used to register new patients and track patient treatments Read more onLinux Devices

It's a universal frustration. You just know that the piece of information you're looking for is somewhere on a site. You click one link, then another, and another. You go back to the home page and try a different branch of the site. After dozens of clicks, you still can't find the information you need. Then it's back to Google and on to another site. At last you find one with an internal search engine. You enter your search term, and voilá!--the information you need pops up in less than a second.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the beta release of Ubuntu 7.04.

The virtual world phenomenon of Second Life will transform the Internet within the next 10 years, and the browser will have to change just as fast to keep up, said Mozilla's Window Snyder. According to Window Snyder, security chief at Mozilla, business travel, telecommuting, and even the basic things people expect in day-to-day business will be affected. Instead of flying from office to office, meetings will held virtually.

SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Release Candidate 3 (RC3) today was uploaded to the MEPIS subscribers' pool and propagated to the public mirrors -- only nine days after RC2 was released. It features a 2.6.15 kernel, a KDE default desktop, and Beryl 0.2.0 Final.