Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

My first planel for South by Southwest was titled, "Open Source: Tell Me Why I Care." Four advocates discussed the reasons for using open source. Pleasantly, there was almost no Microsoft-bashing, and only a little discussion of using open source because it's socially the right thing to do. "One of the myths that keeps people away from open source is that it smells a little bit like patchouli," said one audience participant. Instead, the panel offiered hard-headed, practical reasons why using open source makes sense. The arguments will be pretty familiar to open source advocates, but they'll be compelling to anyone who's sitting on the fence, currently committed to proprietary software and worried about the risks of using open source.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Oxygen iconset is moved from playground to kdelibs, changes made throughout KDE to support the new icon names specification. The Crystal iconset is moved from kdelibs to its kdeartwork retirement home. More work on the Oxygen widget style. Security fixes in KTorrent. Initial work on "uninstall" functionality for the KDE Windows installation utility. New "Snowish" theme for the Kamion user information migration utility. Continued graphics improvements across kdegames. Improved wireless network encryption support in Solid. Further work on the Amarok 2.0 porting, with particular attention to the Music Store integration elements. KPilot is to make a surprise return for the KDE 4.0 release.

"One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. This milestone touts rewritten DVD video ripping and a refocused interface design. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors."

A branch of the Free Software Foundation known as DefectiveByDesign launched an online petition last week that calls on Apple CEO Steve Jobs to "set the ethical example" by eliminating DRM from iTunes. The petition, a response to an open letter on digital rights management Jobs wrote in February, reached its initial goal of one thousand signatures about five hours after going live.

To help protect against incorrect edits, another feature of a wiki is robust change control mechanics and auditing. This would not only include naming who changed, added or deleted what from a particular page, but often a means by which to get a change history of an article, or retrieve earlier versions of it for reviewing purposes.

About four months ago, Bernard Golden predicted that virtualization would play a big part in the open source world . The fact that the Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement centered on it is one more indication that virtualization is “it” for tomorrow’s data centers, he said.

Memory management has been a relatively quiet topic over much of the life of the 2.6.x kernels. Many of the worst problems have been solved and the MM hackers have gone on to other things. That does not mean that there is no more work to do, however; indeed, things might be about to heat up. A few recent discussions illustrate the sort of pressures which may lead to a renewed interest in memory management work in the near future.

I heard on the news this morning something about Google's founders getting close to being richer than Bill Gates. Is money the root or the root of all evil? I don't know.

The Switzerland-based Remote-Exploit.org project team earlier this week announced the release of BackTrack 2.0, a SLAX-based live CD with a comprehensive collection of security and forensics tools. The distribution features a 2.6.20 Linux kernel (with several patches) and the KDE desktop environment.

Organizers of OpenOffice.org's annual conference, "OOoCon," have voted to stage this year's event in Barcelona, Spain, in September. Exact dates are expected to be announced soon. Barcelona won out with 297 votes over Dehradun, India (224), and Beijing, China (82).

HTMLfixIT is a help and news site for anything Internet or web design related. We welcome and encourage you to check out the site and make use of the tools, tutorials, forum and chatroom.

An unofficial guide to installing the RISC OS Firefox 2 port has been published online. Paul Vigay uploaded his user-friendly tutorial to installing and running the mammoth web browser after punters complained they were unable to use the software

I've been using OpenOffice.org Calc for a while now, but I recently decided to give KSpread a try after getting frustrated with Calc's slow load times. It rarely bothered me on my desktop system because I have 4GB of RAM and usually leave the program open, but my work laptop runs Windows XP, forcing me to run Kubuntu in a virtual machine. Unfortunately disk access is significantly slower and memory capacity is much smaller so the Calc startup time is painfully slow. KSpread is very fast, but are its other features good enough for me to stick with it?

We just passed a quiet milestone at the beginning of the month. And while the milestone does not seem to affect Linux, it could be mark the beginning of the worst assault on desktop Linux to date.

After the recent switch to the Ubuntu code base, Freespire announced that it has restarted its development process with the first alpha release of Freespire 2.0, Alpha1U (1.2.42). The new revision sports a 2.6.20 kernel and the KDE 3.5.6 desktop environment, according to the project team.

Is a flaw in the Firefox browser fixed or not? A security research claims that it's not. Mozilla says it is. Last November security researcher Robert Chapin discovered a zero day flaw in Mozilla Firefox's password manager. The flaw could potentially allow a maliciously crafted page to auto-fill a form with credentials intended for another site. Mozilla claimed that it fixed the flaw in its most recent Firefox 2.0.0.2 update. Chapin doesn't quite agree.

Netherlands-based Acropolis Automation will debut four models in its Athena thin client series, at the CeBIT tradeshow in Hannover, Germany next week. The new T3000 clients are based on 1GHz Via Eden processors, and offered with a choice of Linux, Windows CE, or Windows XP Embedded.

Most computers are programmed to automatically change to daylight saving time the first Sunday in April, and only machines manufactured within the last year or so have been updated to reflect the new daylight saving time plan. Microsoft and Apple have issued automatic updates. However, users of other types of devices cannot necessarily rely on their machines to make the change on their own.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is targeting the fourth quarter of this year for the unveiling of an open-source search engine that he hopes could challenge the dominance of market-leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc..

Explore how to remotely debug a FreeBSD kernel that is running on a target machine without affecting system performance.