Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's entry we'll look at two more"live" CDs of Linux systems optimized for multimedia creation and performance. I've been having a great time with these systems, and I hope that my mini-profiles inspire you to try them all. They're a great way to introduce someone to Linux, they show off the system optimized for multimedia performance and they provide a wealth of high-quality sound and music software to exploit that system. They all include the standard cornucopia of applications for the mundane tasks, word processing, text editing, graphics, networking, and so on. All that, for the cost of a download and a disc.

One of the key developers for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Dave Neary has walked off the project. Writing in his bog, Neary said he has had a gutsful of the abusive behaviour in the GIMP community.

Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several'shortcuts' fromO'Reilly andAddison-Weseley. I love this format. For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page"book". The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome. The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value. October marks the beginning ofApress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Apress also hasPractical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer. Now, on to interview news!

O'Reilly held EuroOSCON, the European Open-Source Convention, on 18-21 September in central Brussels. El Reg's technical department had the opportunity to turn up and see what the fuss was about.

About 200 seasoned and budding programmers from all over India gathered at the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi earlier this month for FreeDel 2006, a two-day event on FOSS in education organized by the Delhi chapter of the Indian Linux Users Group.

The software industry has succeeded in gaining a reputation for rushing buggy products to market. Deserved or undeserved, this label is sticking like glue, and that’s where specialised software testing companies come into the picture. As usual, some Indian companies have latched on to this opportunity.

The popular distribution formerly known as Mandrake, and with no Purple Rain to be seen, will include in its next 2007 release Transgaming’s Cedega engine to play mainstream Windows gaming titles out of the box.

There was a time when the only storage a small business required was a filing cabinet and the odd cardboard box or two. But increasing reliance on electronic data processing has seen demand for fast, reliable and secure storage – mostly magnetic disk – grow exponentially in recent years.

European Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has acknowledged that there are "legitimate concerns" about proposals to create a pan-European patent litigation system. Addressing the European Parliament's plenary session on Thursday, McCreevy said industry is not happy with either the proposed Community Patent system or the EPLA (European Patent Litigation Agreement).

Alfresco Software is readying the final piece of its open-source enterprise content management (ECM) software suite with the unveiling of a preview of its Web content management product.

Trademarks, licensing agreements, branding, and other fundamental product issues remains unchanged

This week the People Behind KDE series is featuring Philip Rodrigues. He mostly is active as a documentation contributor, but he also does user support and some coding.

Konversation developer Eike Hein noticed KDE appearing on new US drama Heroes. This follows previous outings on 24, Alias and the making of Lord of the Rings. Kopete is the star of the episode, but you don't have to be a hero to make use of KDE's multi-protocol instant messenger.

Macraigor Systems is shipping a tiny, low-cost USB-interfaced JTAG debug tool with support for Freescale processors. The usb2Sprite connects via USB 2.0 to the development system, and provides access to the on-chip debugging features of Freescale's ColdFire processors and DSP 56300 digital signal processor, according to Macraigor.

Sabayon Linux, a live DVD that is claimed to transform a computer into a Gentoo system in less than five minutes, now has a smaller cousin: Sabayon MiniEdition, available for download as of Sept. 27.

Continuing its push to facilitate more collaborative product development across the manufacturing enterprise, SolidWorks Corp. this week unveiled an updated version of its eDrawings e-mail-based tool that enables users of Microsoft Office, Autodesk AutoCAD, and Google SketchUp software to view, mark up, and measure design data without having CAD software installed on their systems.

Intelligence agencies’ concern about secrecy is an obstacle to good intelligence, which is broadly required to counter any type of asymmetric threat.

Taiwanese integrator E-Way Technology Systems is shipping a tiny, 200MHz x86-compatible mini PC for $99, in single quantities. The TU-40 is passively cooled, comes with 128MB of RAM, and can run lightweight versions of Linux, such as Puppy, the company says.

With business intelligence (BI) heading more widely into Linux these days, vendors are adding more open source componentry in a variety of places, much to the glee of users ranging from financial services firm Tradewinds to health care IT specialist Nequalsone. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

The issues of patents, indemnification and the potential risk of using open-source software took center stage at the keynote panel of industry leaders at the Gartner Open Source Summit.