Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the 2.6.20-rc6 release candidate kernel,"it's been more than a week since -rc5, but I blame everybody (including me) being away for Linux.conf.au and then me waiting for a few days afterwards to let everybody sync up." He asked that people test the regressions reported against earlier release candidates [story],"so that we can confirm whether they are still active and relevant." Linus noted that he hoped this would be the final release candidate before 2.6.20 is released, then went on to discuss what's new:"As to -rc6 itself: the bulk of it are the MTD updates (including a few new drivers), and the POWER update (and the bulk of _that_ in terms of patch size being defconfig updates ;)"But there's various random fixes in infiniband, DVB, network drivers, scsi, usb, some filesystems (cifs, jffs2, nfs, ntfs, ocfs2) as well as core networking too.

Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony says his company is opening up its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software download and management service to other Linux distributions because "Linux really needs an easier way to find and install software, regardless of which flavor of Linux you're using."

For more than 20 years, Unix played the role of the 800 pound gorilla in the server space, especially in enterprise, scientific, government and academic environments. But traditional Unix vendors have faced increasing competition on two fronts. Microsoft Windows Server products have made significant inroads, particularly in the business back-end. To a lesser extent, but cutting closer to the bone, is competition from Linux.

Signs that things are changing: The California Healthcare Foundationreport'Open Source Software: A Primer for Health Care Leaders was its 3rd most popular report for 2006. Linux Medical News readers wherealerted to this report at its inception. The complete top ten list is:The Guide to Medi-Cal ProgramsSnapshot: Health Care Costs 101Open Source Software: A Primer for Health Care LeadersHealth Care in the Express Lane: The Emergence of Retail ClinicsIT Tools for Chronic Disease Management: How Do They Measure Up?Medi-Cal Facts and Figures: A Look at California's Medicaid ProgramConsumers in Health Care: Creating Decision-Support Tools That WorkGuide to Health Programs in EnglishThe Medicare Drug Benefit: How Good Are the Options?Snapshot: Employer-Based Insurance: Coverage and Cost

According to the international media, Brazil is a leader in free and open source software (FOSS) adoption. The New York Times describes the country as "a tropical outpost of the free software movement," while BBC News claims that "Increasingly, Brazil's government ministries and state-run enterprises are abandoning Windows in favour of 'open-source' or 'free' software." However, FOSS advocates familiar with Brazil describe a less hopeful situation.

What happened to the guts in mainstream publications? I recall back in the 80s InfoWorld pressured Lotus into ditching its copy protection scheme by docking Lotus 1-2-3 several points in reviews because of the inconvenience. I believe Lotus was the first to buckle, but other vendors jumped on the bandwagon and abandoned copy protection. Fast forward to today. Not only has copy protection come back from the grave, it has risen like a juggernaut zombie bent on eating everyone's brains. Worse, many consumers and writers alike seem to be unscrewing their scalps and willingly offering up the meal."I want the latest iThing, it's so cool!" Sure, you'll find appropriate outrage in Linux Journal and a handful of renegade publications like the Register. But what happened to themainstream journals with the guts of yesteryear?

Mini-ITX system integrator Mini-box.com has updated its Linux-compatible car PC, adding room for a slim ATAPI drive, and a pudgier, more futuristic faceplate. The revised VoomPC-2 also comes standard with a more powerful mini-ITX motherboard, based on a 1.5GHz Via C7 processor.

As a former ASP.Net coder, I've missed the convenience of Microsoft's built-in Calendar Control since I switched to doing Web site development in PHP. On a recent project I needed the ability to display a calendar with dates serving as hyperlinks to selected database items. I decided to use the opportunity to write some portable PHP code that I could use in other projects.

There are multiple ways of doing this, but the basic answer is that you can do this very easily. MySQL ships with a set of utilities that ColdFusion can run via CFEXECUTE to perform various tasks. So for example, to backup a database you can use the MySQL dump command:...

In the face of a big vertical marketing blitz by Microsoft, keenly evident at last week's National Retail Federation (NRF) show, several retailers in the "household name" category keep forging ahead with Linux implementations of their internal computer systems anyway. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

I run LDAP + Kerberos on my network for information and authentication. After setting everything up initially, I later acquired a spare machine and decided to run it as a slave LDAP server, using slurpd.

So we're a school, dedicated to Open Source and Linux and we have new courses which start next week. Interested? Our school has always maintained high standards and is proud to present itself as the only school in Belgium where beginners and experts can learn Linux.

Three years ago, the travel industry was still struggling in the wake of the 9-11 disaster and Spirit Cruise Lines had to be particularly cost conscious when it went about replacing its CRM system. "We were in a situation where we had a real dog of a CRM application and we needed change and we needed something that could be quickly adapted to our environment," said Steve Baskerville, director of IT at the Norfolk, Va.-based business. "But we didn't have a lot of money. We couldn't consider Onyx or Pivotal. They were way out of our price range."

What comes after television? That's a question I've been asking at every Consumer Electronics Show. The answer, of course, is not just"more TV" but bigger and better TV, with better sound and higher resolutions, made possible by digital sources, processing and displays. In other words, computing and networking.So does TV become just become a suburb of computing, or does the reverse happen? The TV folks imagine the latter. But the former is inevitable. Our job is to make the inevitable happen sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, we get to watch Big TV metasticize— and to enjoy what we can of it.

In any conference, there comes a time when one has to wonder what the people who do the talk scheduling were thinking. For lca2007, that moment came when your editor realized that the talks on OLPC (Jim Gettys), real [Dave Airlie] time (Ted Ts'o), and Nouveau were all scheduled together. Nouveau won out, but it was not an easy decision.

Before Vim 7.0 was released last May, I usually had six or seven xterms or Konsole windows open, each with a single Vim session in which I was editing a single file. This takes up a lot of screen space, and isn't very efficient. With Vim 7.0, users now have the option of using tabs within Vim. With Vim's tab features you can consolidate all your sessions into one window and move between files more easily.

One longstanding Unix tradition is best summed up thus: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together." On a Linux machine, this philosophy is most clearly visible from the command line, where Unix hackers continue to provide simple, flexible tools that talk to one another and don't have the huge overhead of a graphical user interface.

I was intrigued when I heard about SuperGamer, a beta live DVD based on PCLinuxOS. The DVD includes, in demo version for the most part, 3-D shooters America's Army, Doom 3, Postal 2, Cube, Enemy Territory, Nexuiz, Quake 4, Soldier of Fortune, UFO: Alien Invasion, and Wesnoth. Unfortunately, my SuperGamer/PCLinuxOS experience was as bad a Linux experience as I can remember having.

A free presentation about writing Linux drivers for USB devices is available for download from Free Electrons, a French embedded Linux training and consulting firm. The 92-page presentation is available in English and French, in several document formats, under a Copyleft license.

There is a distinct sub-culture in the Unix-type operating universe made up of gnarly old geekbeards who were raised up in the green-screen command-prompt era. They think X Window is for amateurs and any executable over 100K is bloatware. These are the wizened gurus who can touch-type 100 words per minute, remember every option for hundreds of commands, and who take pride at keeping antique hardware in service. Throw away an old 386 or 486? Never. Not when it makes a perfectly good firewall, printer server, Ethernet bridge, or network router.