Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

KDE has a number of sub-projects that have blossomed into enormous projects of their own. A number of them, such as KOffice, or KDE-Edu get a lot of press in the open source world, while the KDE PIM project has been quietly gaining corporate acceptance as a suitable enterprise suite. Today's feature are the libraries that power the KDE PIM project, and specifically, what changes have taken place since KDE 3.5.x, wherein the KDE PIM project is one of the most successful and stable components of KDE.

Twice a week, Dr. Alain Empain drives his car away from his solar-paneled home in the Belgian countryside, then parks and boards a train that an hour and 10 minutes later will take him to a bus, which half an hour later will take him a small village called Meise and to his job as a botanist with Belgium's National Botanic Garden, where since the early 1990s he has been a persistent pioneer of open source software.

Hewlett-Packard released version 4 of its Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) software this month. LinuxCOE is a front end to a set of Perl scripts that helps administrators by building customized install images for various Linux distributions. The idea is to simplify the process of installing and maintaining several Linux systems irrespective of the distribution on any one particular system. The new version streamlines the process of maintaining Linux installations created using LinuxCOE.

WordNet is one of the best English language references available, but its command-line and rather primitive graphical interfaces don't really do it justice. WordNet would greatly benefit from a graphical front-end similar to Visual Thesaurus that allows you to view and explore the connections between different words. Fortunately, there is a tool that does exactly that.

The Linux Foundation has launched an initiative to make Linux "green" by improving the system's power management.

Recently Sebastian Trüg held a presentation about Nepokumk-KDE and kindly provided me the slides. In this regard this post is an extension to the post 'State and Plans of Nepomuk-KDE'.

The Linux Foundation last week announced the free availability of the Linux Standard Base Driver Development Kit for print drivers. The DDK provides the tools and resources for printing manufacturers to easily support all Linux distributions with one driver package, greatly reducing the time and effort needed to support Linux, a foundation spokesperson said.

Votes have been stacking up on Dell's user forum calling for PCs pre-loaded with Linux to be made available outside of the United States.

Novell claims it will become the first vendor to offer a supported solution for Xen virtual machine guests.

Novell Inc. on June 18 released its first service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. This service pack, also known as SP1, features significant enhancements in virtualization, high-performance computing, security, interoperability, and system management.

Several months have passed since I wrote my original review of 10 WebOS-type applications. Although Google hasn’t really made an (expected) move in this field yet, the topic still spurs a lot of interest, and many new applications have been launched. It’s time to review another 10 web operating systems.

Support for YouTube and Lulu.tv streaming video is a key feature of Gnash 0.8.0, the third alpha release of the open source Flash movie player. Gnash is available as a standalone application, or as a plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera.

Mozilla's chief operating officer John Lilly has hit out at Apple's Steve Jobs, calling his plans for building Safari's market share "out of date" and "duopolistic".

Users of VideoLAN's VLC cross-platform media player are strongly advised to upgrade to the just-released version 0.8.6c, which fixes "a security vulnerability in the CDDA, Vorbis, Theora and SAP plugins."

Fedora Weekly News Issue 92

The ninth issue of the Amarok Weekly Newsletter is out. In this issue, we interview an Amarok developer (Ian Monroe), take a look at the future of Amarok - Version 2.0 - and continue to provide nice usage tips.

Mote Marine Lab in Sarasota, Fla., has enjoyed great success with its Google Maps-based beach conditions reporting system. Covering the six public beaches of Sarasota county and operational for eight months, the system receives 1,200 hits per day and is regularly mentioned by local media. Pleased with the publicity, Mote scientists made plans to expand the coverage to Manatee and Collier counties. What they didn't realize was that the original design didn't provide easy access for a small but significant portion of the public: people who don't own computers.

Linux was selected for a NASA experiment aimed at proving the feasibility of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) hardware and software for scientific space missions. A key requirement was for application development and runtime environments familiar to scientists, to facilitate porting applications from the lab to the spacecraft.

I have written a short guide to software licensing in medicine: Sharing medical software: FOSS licensing in medicine. This covers the problems of license proliferation, the issue of proprietarization and several other key licensing related issues. This is a work in progress. Please help me make this a valuable resource, by providing your comments and feedback. -Trotter

Computers can make your life easier, but you may not think so if you use more than one and like to keep your workspace the same across them. For instance, if you browse the Web, switching to another computer is a hassle. Where are your bookmarks? What was your password again? What was that URL you were looking at yesterday? Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that can help.