Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

ATI released their latest Linux drivers toward the end of February..

When you start learning the source code of an unfamiliar project, you don't have the knowledge of its structure or the meaning of specific functions, classes, and units in the project. You can use tags to browse for definitions, but it's hard to get an overall picture by just looking through every definition one by one. Cscope and SilentBob are two tools that can help you analyze unfamiliar source code. They help you find symbol definitions, determine where specific functions are used, determine which functions are called by other given functions, and search for strings and patterns throughout the code base. With them, you can save time by doing fast, targeted searches instead of grepping through source files by hand.

Red Hat Inc. plans to create a Web store to boost sales of its own open-source software and of compatible open-source products from other companies, a person familiar with the plan said on Thursday. The company plans to announce the strategy next week when it releases the first major upgrade in two years to its core Linux-based operating system, according to the source.

If, for whatever reason, you have done some digging on me you will have discovered a dark secret. Well, not quite a secret as I do not hide it, nor is it that dark, more of a information non publiée. I am involved in local politics, and my political party is the Tories. There, I have said it. I have come out of the closet. I have admitted it. I can now wander around the Free Software Magazine pages without hiding my true nature. I am free!

STMicroelectronics (ST) is sampling a pair of configurable SoCs (system-on-chip processors) powered by ARM9 cores and 600K-gate configurable logic blocks. The SPEAr (structured processor enhanced architecture) Head600 and dual-core SPEAr Plus600 run Linux, support DDR/DDR2 external memory, and target printer, fax, and POS (point-of-sales) devices.

A new report from the U.K. Office of Government Commerce about Open Source Software Trials in Government, has found that servers running Linux could combat the rising problem of e-waste because they last up to twice as long as machines running Windows.

In the battle to spread the use of GNU/Linux, it is often forgotten that education has to be the starting point. People need to be educated to the point where they come to demand decent behaviour from an operating system; companies need educated admins to keep GNU/Linux systems running.

If you've ever worked with MySQL databases, you are probably familiar with phpMyAdmin, a PHP-based tool that allows you to create and manage MySQL databases via a browser. It is an indispensable tool for anyone building a PHP/MySQL-based Web application. But while phpMyAdmin eases the task of creating and managing the back end of your Web application, it is of no help when it comes to designing a Web-based interface. To simplify creating PHP-based front ends, try phpMyEdit, an ingenious piece of software that can generate a functional Web interface in a matter of minutes -- no PHP programming skills required. Although phpMyEdit hides the complexity of generating a PHP-based interface, it still offers an easy-to-use yet powerful mechanism to customize virtually any aspect of the created front end.

On March 6, the 1001st Widget was announced by Opera Software. Widgets, which are created by Opera users, are small, powerful Web applications that add unique and useful functionality to Opera's eponymous browser.

Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards.

As of this morning, I found that ssh logins into my Debian etch boxes were monumentally slow. Using the -vvv switch it looked like the problem was down to a very long wait for gssapi-with-mic authentication. Trying with the -o GSSAPIAuthentication=no switch on the command line helped, although some boxes were also pausing for a very long time when dealing with public-key auth.

Tarus Balog and a small group of developers are determined to do for networking management systems what Linux has done for software in general. Open up the field, the OpenNMS crew says, just as the Linux devotees of Linus Torvalds said to the Windows world.

In urban San Francisco, the public works department and nonprofit organizations work together to preserve and expand tree life as part of that city's efforts to create sustainability. The city today unveiled a new Web portal and open source application that will help those agencies, and the general public, keep tabs on a growing urban forest.

In last month’s column, I said “I’m more secure on a Mac than I was on Windows XP.” Some of you asked how Linux fares in that comparison. To that, I’ll say I’m marginally more secure on Linux than on a Mac, but I prefer a Mac anyway. I can almost see my inbox filling with flames from you penguin lovers everywhere, but let me explain my opinion.

Who Creates Open Source? A consistent question regarding open source is, "Who writes open source software?" A second, often-unasked question is, "Why would anyone work on open source?" Many people don't understand why someone would program without financial compensation, because they view programming as unfulfilling drudgery. Alternatively, many people believe that open source developers must be students or unemployed, with an assumption that they work on open source in place of a real job.

The City and County of San Francisco today announced the development and launch of a city-wide, dynamic online map of the city's growing number of trees. Autodesk, Inc. , through the Mayor's Office of City Greening, worked together with the City's Bureau of Urban Forestry (BUF) and Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF), a local San Francisco non-profit organization, to develop this Urban Forest Mapping System, which will serve as a central dynamic resource where San Francisco residents, community groups and city employees can update and share information about new or existing street trees that form part of the city's urban forest.

The folks behind AllPeers are hoping to stir interest in the Firefox-only P2P application by announcing the move to an open-source licensing scheme for the client application. The source code has been released and is dual-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and GNU General Public License (GPL).

Ubuntu enjoys giving it releases funny animal names. There have been "warty warthog", "hoary hedgehog", "breezy badger", "dapper drake", "edgy eft", and the coming "feisty fawn." Well, with nothing better to blog about this week, I've decided to provide my suggestions for names. So for this week, and next, I will present my Top Ten Ubuntu Release Names, five this week, and the rest next. Read em and weep!

The time you come to realise just how dependent you have become on your computer is when things go terribly wrong. Your partitions won’t mount, your files seem corrupt or, worst of all, your entire hard drive seems to have become unreadable. The first and most obvious piece of advice, as anyone would tell you, is to make regular backups. It is surprising how many people who have years worth of valuable files have few or none of them backed up.

Progress in the virtualization world sometimes seems slow. Xen has been the hot topic in the paravirtualization area for some years now -- the first "stable" release was announced in 2003 -- but the code remains outside of the mainline Linux kernel. News from that project has been relatively scarce as of late, though the Xen hackers are certainly still out there working on the code.