Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Asian Linux distributor TurboLinux is readying an iPod-like like device that doubles as a Linux boot drive. The "Wizpy" media player, set to ship in Japan in February, enables users to take their Linux with them, for added convenience, security, and privacy, the company says.

Linux was shot into space Dec. 16, as part of a second-phase Air Force Research Laboratory program aimed at making space more "operationally responsive." The TacSat-2 (tactical satellite) program aims to create "micro satellites" that can be launched quickly and cheaply, to support tactical military operations.

At the cost of great exertion and mental prowess, I have collected just for you an astounding assortment of useful commands and tools for performing amazing feats like network host discovery and mapping your network, mapping IP addresses to their physical locations, spying on everyone who is logged into a computer and even better, faster, securer remote file access.

A t'ai-chi instructor once told me that he considered ten years practice in the art a"good beginning". By year's end I'll have maintained the pages at http://linux-sound.org for more than ten years, so I feel justified claiming that the site is off to a decent start. However, I have a somewhat suprising 10-year celebration announcement: The next edition of the Linux Sound& Music Applications pages (a.k.a. the Linux soundapps site) will be the last under my control. I'll leave it online in a final condition with all addresses checked and repaired, but my tenure as the site's sole maintainer is over.

MontaVista and WLAN (wireless LAN) chipset maker Atheros have founded an open source project aimed at enabling Linux to more easily support a wide variety of SDIO peripherals, including WLAN cards, bluetooth radios, hard drives, modems, GPS recievers, DTV tuners, cameras, voice recorders, biometric fingerprint readers, and business card scanners.

I received word from my contact at Xandros that they are looking for Red Hat Server Sysadmins for beta testing of Xandros Cross-Platform Management Tools. Xandros recently released version 4.1 of their desktop OS and Xandros Desktop Management Server. OSNews readers make great candidates for this type of beta testing. If you're interested, read on for the details of the call for beta testers.

I couldn't have an easier time playing fortune-teller this year. While some segments of the IT market might see the future as a wide-open plain, for the open-source community, 2007 is shaping up to be a year for settling unfinished business.

The company has released an assortment of additions for HP-UX 11i V2 - including server-side encryption, a security chip and fortified data containers - that give customers some nice, high-end options. HP officials bragged that a number of the new tools arrive at no additional cost to customers. In addition, HP insisted that we remind you of its "commitment to the long-term success of the HP-UX roadmap."

Oregon's Portland Community College is one of the largest community colleges in the country, with 90,000 students, five campuses, and a huge network to manage. PCC's policy is to use open source software whenever possible because of its enhanced value. When Technology Solutions Services Customer Support Manager Michael Heuer wanted to find a way to streamline network management, he turned to KBOX, an appliance built on an open source foundation.

Linux file manager ontogeny encapsulates the history of GNU/Linux. File managers began as command-line and generic graphical tools and progressed to desktop-specific ones, gaining sophistication along the way, with mouse controls, for example, replacing buttons. Today, the more than a dozen options highlighted here will suit users with widely varied interests.

The move lets their mutual Linux customers move between their primary Outlook desktop email client, SugarCRM software and Scalix's Linux-based Mail Server.

In this paper, we examine the motivations of large information technology vendors, to invest in open source software. What drives companies with large, proprietary software portfolios to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in OSS? We approach this question by grouping a sample of OSS projects into clusters and examining vendors' motivations for each cluster. We find one cluster has received almost no investment. Contributions to projects in this cluster are confined to the voluntary effort of the vendors' employees, and vendors are likely altruistically motivated. By contrast, the other cluster has received over 99% of vendor investments.

Opera Software ASA has added a filter that blocks phishing sites to its Web browser software, following the example set by rivals Microsoft Corp. and Mozilla Corp. In Version 9.1 of the Opera Web browser, released Monday, the company introduced a phishing filter that uses information from PhishTank and GeoTrust to help protect users from being duped by phishers.

It seems like a great idea: making a computer that's somewhere between the size of a cell phone and a laptop, for people to carry around and surf the Web. It's such a great idea that about a dozen companies have tried it, but most of these gadgets have met with such complete apathy among consumers you'd think they were made of ignoranium.

A few weeks ago, Xandros released an update of its Business Desktop OS with a number of new features, including 3-D effects and desktop search. The 3-D effects fell flat in my tests, but I found the distro to be a pretty good OS if you're looking for a Windows replacement.

he open-source movement responsible for software like Linux and Mozilla's Web browser, Firefox, is proving contagious: A German entrepreneur is applying the same approach to automobile design.

The next version of the Linux distribution was due to be released by 4 December, meaning it is already over two weeks late at the time of writing. Now one of Debian's release managers has started pointing his finger at key individuals. In a blog posted on Monday, Andreas Barth wrote, "Some people who used to do good work reduced their involvement drastically. There was nothing I could do about that, and that happened way before I started full-time on release, but on the global picture that still counts."

The OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook was published this week, and author Solveig Haugland is sharing some of its contents. Haugland takes a matter-of-fact approach to all the tools within the OO.org application suite, as she explains how to create, amend, and save documents in various formats.

Mozilla, the developer of the free Thunderbird e-mail client, has taken a good program and made it better with the release of the version 2.0 beta 1. It's rare that a beta release isn't buggy, clunky, and generally a mess -- especially when, as word has it, the developers are changing the code base -- but I was pleasantly surprised by its stability and the dearth of issues.

Atmel is shipping a low-cost embedded processor claimed to offer more bandwidth than other ARM9 chips, thanks to parallel buses and distributed DMA. The AT91SAM9263 targets data- and graphics-intensive applications, and is available with an AT91SAM9263-EK evaluation board that supports Linux.