Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The rise of always-on, high speed Internet connections represents new teaching opportunities for high school and college instructors, many of whom daily face classrooms full of Web-savvy students. But with schools strapped for resources, it’s frequently difficult to scrape together funds to first buy the right hardware and software and then find teachers with the right skills to make the most of the technology.

Linksys makes some fine wireless broadband routers, but one of the best things about these devices is that their firmware is based on Linux and can be replaced with third-party software, allowing anyone to have the functionality of an expensive, professional-grade router for less than $100. The GPL-licensed DD-WRT package offers lots of enhancements over the stock Linksys firmware and supports a wide range of hardware, including models from Buffalo, Belkin, and other vendors.

For those who followed Jason's PHP tutorials earlier this year it is fairly obvious that he is a PHP fan at heart. But now he has started to learn Python and is fast becoming a fan as it opens up new an unimagined possibilities. Here he outlines why he finds Python so compelling.

South Africa-developed KnowledgeTree, an open source document management application, is now available in two additional versions catering to enterprise and small business users.

The Free Software Foundation has moved to clarify what it says is inaccurate information being presented about the second discussion draft of the next version of the GNU General Public License.

While the release of the new open source Scalix 11 Community Edition messaging server is still a few months away, the binaries have been brought out in a preview package that is, according to the license that comes with it, "pre-release software with known issues and is not suitable for production use." We tried it out, just to see where Scalix is heading. The good news -- it's heading in the right direction for small and medium-sized businesses.

Notes from the aKadamy 2006 Conference.

The Kurumin Linux project, which produces a Knoppix-based distribution, released a stripped-down, live CD edition of Kurumin Linux 6.1 on Sept. 24. It features a 2.6.17.6 kernel and the KDE desktop. Key features include excellent hardware auto-detection, support for Brazilian Portuguese, and small size, according to the team.

Uversa has recently opened a testing tool (with a very punny name)limtus test. The system is designed to help provide a way for ClearHealth community members to contribute to the testing of releases in a systematic way. This is really smart and should take the code quality of ClearHealth to another level. I think they are the first EHR project to do this. The tool seems to be integrated with theMantis bug tracking tool.Fred Trotter

The City of Munich has finally started to migrate to Linux on the desktop, a year later than planned. The local government in the German city has transferred 100 users in the Lord Mayor's department to a Debian configuration, and it intends to migrate 80 percent of its PCs by mid-2009.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds posted an email titled, "An Ode to GPLv2" examining why he feels the GPLv2 is such a great license as an alternative way to look at the GPLv3 debate [story]. "This post is kind of another way to look at the whole GPLv3 issues," Linus explains, "not caring so much about why the GPLv3 is worse, but a much more positive 'Why the GPLv2 is _better_'."

In this episode: my return from vacation; a discussion of various Linux web browsers, including Firefox, Seamonkey, Epiphany, Galeon, Konqueror, Opera, Dillo, Lynx, Links, ELinks, and w3m; two listener tips; listener feedback - yep, the order is reversed.

The company's new OpenQuick Suite offering comprises of best practice elements -- OpenPlan, OpenExplore, OpenDash, and Open Pilot -- that hand hold customers through the trickier aspects of data warehouse integration, analytics, and performance management services.

Zuken has announced that Linux will be supported as a new operating system in the next version of CR-5000 in addition to HP-UX, Solaris, and Windows, which are currently supported as standard operating platforms.

To cut down on the time it takes to implement a new server, openQRM Pro simplifies the process through a Web portal that accepts requests for hardware and software, and automates approval, provisioning and monitoring with detailed reporting throughout.

I was interested to read Ian Murphy's story about SQL Anywhere. Despite the availability of embedded databases, it seems to me that the database (in the DBMS sense) hasn't really come to mobile devices like phones yet. This is largely because of resource constraints - they're back in the 1970s mindset before enterprise databases really took off, using clever file systems for data storage (remember VSAM?).

Unix text utilities were designed primarily for programmers and admins, but here's a little secret: the utilities also work well for writers. Instead of using diff to see changes between programs, I often use diff utilities to see what has changed between one version of an article and another. A few weeks ago, I found dwdiff, and found it works even better.

Red Hat is leveraging its JBoss acquisition with its own middleware offering, putting it on par with commercial vendors BEA Systems, IBM, and Oracle. What's more, Red Hat is rapidly securing its already commanding lead as the largest enterprise Linux distributor, with 61% of the market for paid distributions last year.

MontaVista has upgraded its Linux-based software platform for mobile phones. Mobilinux 4.1 supports lower-cost hardware, the company says, thanks to footprint improvements aimed at lessening DRAM and flash memory requirements. The OS includes advanced real-time capabilities, and is suitable for use on single-chipset, mass market phones, according to the company.

Last month, thin-client software provider released its 2X TerminalServer for Linux, an open source terminal server that lets Linux desktop users run both Linux and Windows applications over dial-up and LAN (local area network) connections.