Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Tired of bloated operating systems but still need a good looking desktop? Ubuntu derivative Xubuntu offers the best of the modern desktop with very little of the desktop-slowing excess.

Ubuntu has an interesting project called Upstart, which is a replacement for the traditional Unix init system. The goals of Upstart are ambitious: to modernize and streamline the boot process, control user tasks, and manage services. Currently these things are managed with a multitude of different utilities: cron, atd, anacron, init, telinit, udev, acpid, apmd, ifupdown, module-init-tools, inetd, xinetd, update-rc.d, etc.init.d, /etc/rc*d, and gosh knows what-all. So Upstart intends to replace sysvinit and initscripts, and to replace all the service and task managers- cron, atd, inetd, and so forth- with a single daemon. To make it even more fun, they are preserving backwards-compatibility for a period of time to make the transition easier for users. If you're running *buntu Edgy, you're already seeing Upstart in action.

A group of open-source software companies has banded together to try to ensure their products work well with one another, an effort aimed at matching the tight integration of competing products from proprietary software companies such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Kolkata: Jadavpur University’s department of Computer Science & Engineering under ‘Computer Literacy’ activity programme organised a ‘Convention on Free Software – Concepts & Applications’ on 10 February. Bengal IT minister Prof Debesh Das inaugurated the programme in the presence of representatives from the industry, educationists and students across the state.

MEPIS founder and chief maintainer Warren Woodford announced today that Beta 5 of SimplyMEPIS 6.5, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, default KDE 3.5.3 desktop, and 3D support, is ready for download. Additionally, "Xorg 7.1 and lots of new drivers make this release Beryl-ready," according to Woodford.

You've heard of LAMP, the popular open-source infrastructure stack featuring the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, MySQL's database, and the Perl, Python or PHP scripting languages. Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to spotlight a variation on that mixture, replacing Linux with its own Solaris Unix operating system as part of its Solaris + AMP, or SAMP, stack for building Web applications. Featured in Sun's rollout today are versions of the open-source AMP components optimized for Solaris 10 plus Sun developer tools.

Elliote Rusty Harold, acclaimed Java and XML author, recently described Java as the lingua franca of the programming world. According to Harold he can write basic Java and have it understood by non-Java programmers more often than not.

IBM's appetite for acquiring software companies shows no signs of diminishing. Last year, the company conservatively spent $3.6bn, adding 12 companies or just their assets to its $18bn middleware business during 2006.

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit takes place this week, Feb. 14-15, in New York City at the New York Marriott Marquis on Time Square. This is a regional and vertically focused business conference that addresses the needs and interests of IT professionals involved in the deployment of Linux and open source solutions.

Welcome to this year's 3rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. In light of recent attacks on SHA-1, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is preparing for a competition to augment and revise the current Secure Hash Standard. Rick Lehrbaum reported that the installation of Debian etch on an old ThinkPad notebook went pretty well and added a number of screenshots.

About a week ago id Software released updates to their latest games Doom 3 and Quake 4. Here are the details for all you gamers out there.

The organisers of Akademy 2007 have put out a Call for Sponsorship. Akademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Glasgow at the end of June. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference. It will also provide a marketing avenue for your company to the thousands who read our website and publications. Most importantly, it gives vital support which ensures that hundreds of KDE contributors can meet together to plan the future of the free desktop. If your company would like to sponsor Akademy contact us at akademy-sponsoring@kde.org. If you know any companies in your local area who could also be potential Akademy sponsors please let us know too.

Identity management is the bane of IT administrators' existence if they're presiding over heterogeneous Windows and Linux environments. The hang up arrives when they attempt to synch Linux boxes with Active Directory, or try to manage those servers from a central point.

The One Laptop Per Child project will ship nearly 2,500 of its $150 laptops to eight nations this month, Reuters reported today. The experiment is a prelude to mass production of the kid-friendly, lime-green-and-white laptops scheduled to begin in July, when 5 million will be built.

Ubuntu CTO Matt Zimmerman has announced two Ubuntu Technical Board decisions that will affect the upcoming Feisty Fawn release, due out in April of this year. For the Feisty release, proprietary video drivers are out of the default install, and the PowerPC port of Ubuntu is being downgraded to an unofficial release.

And here we go with the last release candidate before we explode with the final of 3.0.5. With special requests we have added something newer and more:..

You suck on electric guitar. If you are not aware of that now, you will be after playing Frets on Fire -- a cross-platform, GPLed music game from Unreal Voodoo, where your PC's keyboard is the instrument and you play lead.

IT management software specialist GroundWork Open Source will today begin shipping the latest version of its systems and network management suite GroundWork Monitor in the UK. Tony Barbagallo, vice president of product management at the company, said version five of GroundWork Monitor featured new service level availability reporting capabilities and a dashboard designer that allows users to tailor the suite's monitoring dashboard for different users

The Linux appliance market for the most part has been more about building appliances than managing them. Today, rPath is taking care of both. The Linux appliance vendor is making announcements on both the building and maintenance of Linux appliance fronts. The rPath Appliance Platform extends the manageability of the Linux appliance for a more complete lifecycle, though rPath's founder and CEO admits there is still much to be done.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2007

Here are the pictures I took while at SCaLE 5x with some brief descriptions.