Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Longtime acquisition suspect PolyServe has been eaten by HP. HP today picked up the Oregon-based software maker for an undisclosed sum. Should the deal close as expected in the next months, PolyServe's products and staff will be tucked into HP's StorageWorks division. This acquisition builds on a long-term partnership between the two companies.

You never forget your first. Whether it's your first car, or your first significant other, or your first day of college, they say you never forget your first. That's not always true, of course, but I do remember my first: Softlanding Linux Systems, one of the earliest GNU/Linux distributions, and progenitor of the Slackware distribution. It came on a few dozen floppy images, and took forever to install. Jump into the Astonishing GNU/Linux Time Machine, and via the magic of qemu and iBiblio, you too can experience the earliest days of GNU/Linux. It'll only take an hour. I'll have you back by supper.

A Linux-powered humanoid robot has been interviewed on 8-Fi, a French television magazine devoted to new technology. The hour-long show features Aldebaran Robotics's Nao robot conversing with company president Bruno Maisonnier, followed by a panel discussion on the state of robotics by several French robotics experts.

The second day of FOSDEM 2007 was as busy, if not more, as the first day. Many face-to-face interactions, of great benefit to cooperation between developers and projects, and time spend on hacking on and promoting KDE. The KDE developer room was well used, first by an Educational workshop, well led by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, followed by some more talks. Topics included Krita's present and future by Bart Coppens, a KDE 4 talk by Jos Poortvliet and a KDE e.V. talk by Sebastian Kügler. Read on for a report on day two.

Folding@Home is a project at Stanford University, based on the distributed computing model. When installed, it runs in the background, using idle CPU cycles to compute protein folding. The project aims to find cure for diseases related to mis-folding of proteins.

Carnegie Mellon West has just launched a "Software Management" Masters degree that integrates open source technology throughout the program and includes a more detailed "Introduction to Open Source" elective.

They managed to get seven noteworthy websites to agree to share some details about their infrastructure. None of them seemed willing to part with an administrator password, oddly enough.

Mirth is shaping up as an 'Open Source HL7 Integration Engine'. After recently downloading the product I was extremely pleased to successfully read an HL7 message from disk, manipulate it and send the output XML to a file. I then repeated the process inserting selected fields into a database table.

With the rise in popularity of open source software, developers don't need to start from scratch when coding new software. Instead, they can use specialized search engines that crawl repositories to find the perfect code snippet. Now, one entrepreneurial open source developer has built a business that expands on the basic code search engine, and in true hacker recursive style, finds his company relying on the very tool it exists to create.

On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed "Kludge," the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library.

The 2007 road map for the Ubuntu Linux operating system includes continuing its focus on the desktop, paying more attention to the server and garnering additional corporate support. Speaking at Ubuntu user conference UbuCon here at Google's New York complex on Feb. 16, Steve George, director of support and services at Canonical, said, "The view from the Ubuntu side is that Microsoft has too much of the market. We're going to continue rolling out and making Ubuntu easy to use on the desktop and we'll add increased focus on the server this year." Canonical is the sponsor of the Ubuntu project and maintainer of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

The public spoke and said, "We want a Linux desktop," and Dell listened. On Feb. 23, the company announced that, as a result of "the community's interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice..., we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux..."

Antonio Cangiano posted aRuby Implementation Shootout on his blog last week. While it's an interesting piece (and will likely be more interesting over time), it's still very premature.

Last week, I had the privilege to address the North Texas Linux Users Group. Ralph Green asked me to present information on my upcoming book called"Linux System Administration" by O'Reilly. I only had the cover and the gallies, since production goes to press in early March. So, I showed those.

Database heavyweight Solid has contributed a new database benchmark suite to the open source community, providing an effective means to evaluate real-world database performance for nix.

HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat.

Overview A rootkit is a group of software tools which an attacker can use to hide their tracks. A rootkit can also contain software which allows the attacker to get root access and steal or remove files on a system. Another goal for a rootki...

TI will bundle VirtualLogix's Linux distribution and platform virtualization layer with a DSP development kit that targets multimedia applications. TI's TMS320DM6437 Digital Video Development Platform (DVDP) for DaVinci technology will include a trial version of VLX-DM (digital multimedia) v2.0, along with a no-cost, royalty free Linux BSP (board support package).

Pierre Alain Joye, in a new post over his blog talks about which Zip suits your PHP versions. He tries to clarify incessant queries by users about which zip version to use whether the bundled version of PHP4 or in 5.2+ or always rely on PECL.

Turbolinux last week began shipping its new, portable Wizpy device, which allows users to plug into nearly any USB 2.0-enabled PC and boot up using the Linux operating system. The device is sold in 2 GB and 4 GB versions and comes preloaded with Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, OpenOffice 2.1 and the Fuji OS.