Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Sonos has added support for Windows Media formats to its Linux-based whole-house audio distribution system, via a "one-button" firmware upgrade. The new "Sonos System Software 2.1" for the Sonos Digital Music System brings better interoperability with Windows Media Player 11 for Vista and XP users.

I'm a developer. I spend my time sitting at a computer, working on our IT infrastructure. Contrary to stereotype, I have just a cheapo computer and no fancy gizmos. I take pride in the Apache hat I wear to write this column. But sometimes we need to take a step back, and look at the why of it. As we enter a new year, let's share a glimpse into that question.

Beset by customer defections to Microsoft Corp. and open-source vendors such as MySQL AB, Oracle Corp. is making a bid to win back users by enhancing its free tools for migrating data and applications from non-Oracle to Oracle systems. The software maker today announced the release of SQL Developer 1.1. This latest version of the free database development tool allows users to browse and manage three non-Oracle databases: Microsoft Access, MySQL and SQL Server.

The recent release of Windows Vista poses the question of whether it's time to buy a new computer.

A survey of 133 IT executives by Saugatuck Research found that while only 18% were using Linux in critical server deployments presently, almost half these executive said they’ll have their top apps migrating to, or running full steam on, the open source platform in the next four years.

You can leverage your existing programming skills to build .NET applications using a number of alternative languages (besides C#, VB.NET, or J#) for the .NET Framework.

[I am learning .NET on the fly at my work, as soon as I get 'some skills' I will see if I can try some of these others. - Scott]

More and more hot new hardware runs on cool and stable Linux, plus a growing abundance of open source building materials. Since relatively few open source components are graced with publicity ambitions (much less departments), they tend not to make themselves obvious. Meaning that reporters like yours truly need to go hunting for them.So I'd like your help. I'm here at the Consumer Electronics Show—CES— in Las Vegas, getting ready to launch out onto the trade show floors to see What's Up with Linux amongst the 2,700 exhibitors spread across 1.7 million square feet of exhibit space.

OpenMFG, founded in 2001, provides enterprise resource planning software to small and mid-sized manufacturing companies. It's one of those businesses whose proprietary product is "built on" open source. But OpenMFG is beginning to put its money where its mouth is: recently the company released one of its modules, OpenRPT, under the GPL.

QuickVision 6 for Linux Will Address Customers' Broader Rangeof SOAand J2EE Portal Applications Needs

One of my favorite open source applications is Amarok, a music player with an intuitive interface that makes boring tasks such as organizing large music collections less troublesome. The only problem with Amarok is that it's a KDE application and I'm a GNOME user. Although there's nothing wrong with running KDE programs on GNOME, they take a long time to start, since they need to load the KDE libraries and components they depend on first. I've found a good alternative in Exaile, my new favorite media player for Linux.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Sonnet, the natural language checker, continues to develop and can now discriminate between more than 70 different languages. More work on the "konsole-split-view" branch to add split/merge functionality to the KDE 4 console. Support for filesystem labels in the "mountconfig" Guidance configuration module. Large developments in the "mailtransport" KDE-PIM work to enable code sharing between users of the common "emailing" action. Support for background text colours in Konversation. Further work in the "Papillon" MSN Messenger connection library, with support for Xtraz status and notifications in Kopete. Gradient editing tool introduced across KOffice. Better support for PDF presentation files in Okular. Improved AI in the recently-imported game KSquares. "Sublime", the new user interface library for KDevelop 4 is imported into KDE SVN...

Marcel Gagne's book for Windows users entitled: Moving to Free Software is an introduction to useful Free and Open Source (FOSS) licensed software that runs on the proprietary Windows operating system. Each chapter covers a major application with an introduction of what the application does, how to use it and helpful configuration tips. Each chapter ends with a number of useful links to resources. Applications include Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gimp and more. Included is an Ubuntu live DVD that contains all the applications listed in the book. While a good introduction containing much useful information, the book has some misnomers and missing parts.

The Andhra Pradesh government is forging ties with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, for collaboration in the areas of e-governance, data standards and service-oriented architecture. "MIT will provide funding and technological assistance for developing and promoting different software components including an open source platform," said state IT secretary K Ratnaprabha.

FOSDEM is yet another one of those catchy acronyms that stands for nothing less than "Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting". KDE will again be hosting a room dedicated to talks and chat about the free desktop. These annual meetings are organised by volunteers, free of charge and generally recognised as one of the most productive gatherings available on the European stage. This year it will be held on the weekend of 24/25th February 2007 on the ULB Campus Solbosh in Brussels, Belgium.

Microcross has released GNU X-Tools v4.0 professional embedded development tools for six microprocessor families, including ARM.

Many times in life, when you are on road to one place, you find things to help you on other roads you have crossed, or will in the future. Such is the case for me just today. I presently working on a project where I am reviewing several different Linux distributions. The fruits of this labor are to be seen here in some form or fashion in the near future. That project isn't as important as the small bit of information I happened upon in the midst of working on that project.

Part two of article from Ian Murdock about the packaging in Linux.

"In part 1, I described the problem of software installation on Linux; in part 2, I’ll describe the solution we came up with at the recent LSB Packaging Summit."

A new feature that will first be availble in the upcoming 2.6.20 kernel is KVM, a Kernel-based Virtual Machine. The project's webpage describes KVM as, "a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware. It consists of a loadable kernel module (kvm.ko) and a userspace component. Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc." The project's FAQ explains that the functionality requires "an x86 machine running a recent Linux kernel on an Intel processor with VT (virtualization technology) extensions, or an AMD processor with SVM extensions (also called AMD-V)." The userland aspect of KVM is a slighlty modified version of qemu, used to instantiate the virtual machine.

Spatial Integrators is a mapping services company in Spokane, Wash., that acts as a consultant for electric companies, public utilities, and other government entities that want to develop custom mapping solutions. Now that Autodesk has released its MapGuide software under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), Spatial is offering its clients a completely new solution: open source software.

Once upon a time there was a small, lightweight distribution based on Slackware. It wasn’t all that different from any of a number of small, lightweight distros designed to work on older hardware though it seemed to be well thought out. That was Vector Linux 1.8 six years ago. Since then VL has grown into a full featured distribution available in several different configurations. The latest release, Vector Linux 5.8, appeared on December 18th and it is clearly the most mature yet, in many ways equaling or even surpassing more popular distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. If the developers manage to smooth out the few remaining rough edges they may find themselves with a distro that is as popular as any of those.