Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Until now, there hasn't been a really good Linux distribution for digital content creation. Debian-based 64 Studio, which has just achieved its 1.0 release, is described by some as "the best distribution ever created for multimedia workstations, such as digital audio recording and video editing."

A standard Java scripting engine API to play withOver the years there have been several times where I've had to implement a mini-language and language processor for some specific requirement or another.

Memory is a precious commodity in computers. Generally the more you have, the better. Yet your application has to run alongside other applications, and each wants its own area of memory. What happens when there's not enough to go around? Mulyadi Santosa explores the memory management principles in the Linux kernel to explain how the Out of Memory killer works--and how to avoid it.

3DLabs is sampling a unique mobile applications processor supported initially under Linux 2.6. The DMS-02 combines a pair of ARM9-EJ cores with 24 FPUs (floating-point units). It targets portable digital entertainment, portable navigation, video conferencing, automotive infotainment, video surveillance, and high-end mobile handsets.

You may have noticed that I don't cover news about the never-ending SCO vs. IBM, Linux, Novell, et al much anymore. There's a reason for that: SCO doesn't matter anymore.

Adobe skipped a version of Flash for Linux and released stable versions of the Flash 9 player for Windows and Mac OS X long before the beta of Flash 9 to Linux users. Paul Betlem, senior director of engineering for Adobe, explained why the process is taking so long.

Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.19 Linux kernel, following the previous stable kernel release by two months [story]. "It's one of those rare 'perfect' kernels," Linus joked, "so if it doesn't happen to compile with your config (or it does compile, but then does unspeakable acts of perversion with your pet dachshund), you can rest easy knowing that it's all your own d*mn fault, and you should just fix your evil ways."

UK-based Canonical Ltd, parent of the popular Ubuntu Linux family, is currently hosting Ubuntu Open Week, which began Monday and continues through Saturday. Open Week consists of a series of free workshops and discussions being held via Internet relay chat (IRC) with Ubuntu developers and managers.

Alfresco Software Inc., the first and leading provider of an open source enterprise content management solution, today announced results for the first open source JSR-170 benchmark. The results were based on a 10 million document repository and validated by 3rd party open source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) experts Optaros to assure compliance with pre-determined benchmark rules.

Novell has abandoned an open source project hyped as challenging Microsoft Outlook and Exchange by becoming the "Apache" of email and collaboration software. The company has pulled full-time engineers off project Hula following lacklustre demand. Engineers are "moving to other roles", according to the Hula mailing list.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a general-purpose text markup language often used for data storage or passing messages between applications. There are a number of libraries available for processing arbitrary XML within programs, but fewer options to translate XML it into professional printed documents. Here is one way to get from XML to PDF.

Corel announces that it will start supporting ODF in WordPerfect as well as Microsoft's Open XML document format in 2007.

The Optical Disk labeling tech called Lightscribe just came out with a new twist, a Linux SDK. Now you can slowly burn pretty, low-contrast pictures on the flip side of your latest distro ISOs on your Linux box instead of your Windows box.

In a development that has the potential to shake and crack censorship measures such as “the Great Firewall of China”, Canadian researchers have created software that enables web surfers to circumvent internet roadblocks and have open access to the web.

The Linux Professional Institute invites all Linux professionals to participate in the creation of LPI's enterprise level LPIC-3 certification. The Linux Professional Institute (http://www.lpi.org) invites all Linux professionals to participate in the creation of LPI's enterprise level LPIC-3 certification. The contest asks for IT professionals to complete a Job Task Analysis survey which will assist in the creation of a psychometrically-valid certification program.

Open source business process management vendor Intalio Inc announced it has donated its BPMN process modeler to the Eclipse Foundation, a move likely to accelerate commoditization of the business process modeler category. Intalio's news follows hot on the heels of Tibco's announcement earlier this month that it has made the latest version of its Eclipse-based Business Studio business process modeling tool available free of charge.

The KOffice team today released the first bug-fix release in their 1.6 series. Many bugs in Kexi and Krita as well as in most other components were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs. You can read more about it in the announcement, and the release notes. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE.

The "niceness" of a process is a numeric hint to the kernel about how the process should be treated in relation to other processes contending for the CPU. The strange name is derived from the fact that it determines how nice you are going to be to other users of the system. A high nice value means a low priority for your process: you are going to be nice. A low or negative value means high priority: you are not very nice. The range of allowable niceness values is -20 to +19.

I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.

It's not that you can't run WoW (World of Warcraft) on Linux. With the latest CrossOver Office beta, you can do exactly that. Indeed, Lynch found that running World of Warcraft "ran so well that I began to get distracted from writing this review and started to get sucked into the world of Azeroth. I kept playing and didn't even realize that I was running WoW in a window on my KDE desktop in PCLinuxOS."