Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The folks at Slashgear recently posted an interview with Benjami Zores, one of the core developers of the embedded Linux distribution knows as GeeXboX. In summary, GeeXboX, which incidentally has no affiliation or tie in with the Microsoft console, is a fully operational Media Center solution available on what's known as a LiveCD. It works on both x86 and PowerPC based computers and is as easy to use as dropping a CD in a PC since no installation is required.

German software vendor SoftMaker announced earlier this week that it has ported its office suite to Linux and FreeBSD. SoftMaker Office 2006 includes updates to both TextMaker and PlanMaker, two popular stand-alone applications that are combined into one office suite, according to the company.

Trolltech reports that its developer-friendly, Linux-based "Greenphone" was named "best embedded Linux product or initiative" at LinuxWorld, London. Additionally, the company's Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE) stack won a mobile phone tools award presented by a Chinese trade magazine devoted to mobile phone multimedia.

The first "dynamic coalition" resulting from the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has vowed to get governments interested in adopting open standards for both hardware and software. A panel, which included academics, business, and standards bodies argued its case in Athens, where one of the aims of open discussions between different groups has been to get like-minded people together.

With the release of Krita 1.6, it seems like a good time to compare the two big raster image editors for Linux. Coming as they do from the divergent GTK+ and KDE programming camps, it can be hard to assess the differences between the GIMP and Krita without being swayed by politics and emotion. Let's take a cold, hard look at the two, and compare the features side by side.

The powers that be at Free Software Magazine decided to be a media sponsor of LinuxWorld Expo UK at Olympia, London held on the 25th and 26th of October. As I make a habit of going to that expo, and I also write for the magazine when I remember to hand articles in, I was contacted and discovered I was to be handed a “press” badge for the event. So, on the day, I set off early from Cambridge to enjoy the privileges of my new super-status.

Red Hat users should carry out compatibility tests of Oracle’s Linux set-up because it offers a “more complete” support package, analyst firm Gartner has urged. The call follows Oracle’s launch of its Unbreakable Linux support package for the Red Hat Linux distribution, in direct competition with Red Hat’s own support.

Sun Microsystems is backing a "milestone" release of NetBeans by expanding a year-old partner program to drive uptake for its tools environment and IDE.

Siemens of Switzerland is shipping three hardware/software reference designs for Internet protocol set-top boxes (IP-STBs). The STB-7100-series designs run Linux 2.6 on a SuperH-based STMicroelectronics (ST) SoC, and support standard- and high-definition content, along with multiple access technologies, including DSL, cable, and DVB-T (digital video broadcast -- terrestrial).

Security-conscious BSD fans will be pleased to hear that the OpenBSD team this morning released OpenBSD 4.0 with a long list of hardware and feature improvements and a still-as-strong-as-ever security focus.

With sponsorship from MIPS Technologies, GNU tools specialist CodeSourcery has added support for the MIPS architecture to the GNU/Linux prelinker, with the goal of helping MIPS-based embedded designs enjoy faster application start-up times. Additionally, the consulting and services company has joined MIPS Technologies's MIPS Alliance Program.

Paul Shapiro likes PBS talk show host Charlie Rose. He also likes the level playing field of the Internet, and has a passion for giving a voice to the "community." Shapiro has come up with a way to emulate his favorite television interviewer using webcams, voice over IP, and "free as in beer" digital video editing software, and he has big plans for his invention.

You don't need a Ph.D. in scientific visualization to have some fun with three-dimensional data. Whether you're searching for an unused nook in a cramped disk partition, or trying to find the bloated temp/ folder that's crashing your system, sometimes the flat folder view of a traditional GUI file browser is little help. Luckily, Linux offers a variety of 3-D filesystem that can make your disk usage statistics come alive.

As it promised it would back in September, commercial Linux distributor Novell has begun shipping a real-time variant of its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, appropriately called SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, or SLERT for short.

"Rubinius is a project to watch", so says Charles Nutter in his postRite, Rubinius, and Everything— I think he's right.Evan is hard at work making things work better in rubinius. He's now got continuations working (I think this makes him the first alternative implementation of Ruby to do so), and says he should have serializable continuations soon (see hispost on it here). W00t!

Microsoft is now in a technical partnership with Zend Technologies, an open-source scripting language company it once viewed as a competitor. Microsoft has been working with Zend to get Zend's PHP open-source scripting language to run faster on its Web server. Windows Information Server has been Microsft's prime platform for its own high-performance language, Active Server Pages. But with Web sites frequently including non-Microsoft technologies, Windows Information Server was handicapped when developers were working with PHP.

[MS using others technology?..Preposterous ;-) Scott]

Debian Weekly News - October 31st, 2006

While Oracle's moves to provide enterprise-level support around Red Hat Linux are stirring up controversy, the vendor's decision to join the Free Standards Group (FSG), also unveiled last week, is capturing less attention. Yet is it possible that Oracle's newly minted membership in the standards group might actually help to dispel industry fragmentation?

Company Continues to Support Java Unification and Drive Extension of the Mobile Java Developer Ecosystem

Compiler optimization plays an important role in the performance of open-source applications. Default optimization settings are often used during compilation that, in effect, leave some application performance unrealized. Through the use of aggressive compiler optimization, many applications show appreciable increases in performance. In many cases, you can increase the performance of an application in situations where detailed performance analysis is impractical.