Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

TimeSys will offer a series of educational webinars on Linux board bring-up and Linux real-time requirements and options, this fall. Additionally, the company will also offer several webinars aimed at documenting the LinuxLink sevices it offers to embedded Linux developers.

Distro maintainer Andrea Jaeger on Sept. 7 announced the availability of the fourth alpha release of openSUSE 10.2, which uses an updated Linux kernel and offers a choice between the GNOME 2.16 Beta (2.15.92), KDE 3.5.4 or Xfce 4.2.3 desktop environments. "We've made a number of significant changes [including] switching to kernel 2.6.18rc5 -- and we use only the SMP kernel," Jaeger wrote in the release announcement.

A forthcoming portable media player (PMP) from Archos will be based on embedded Linux, confirms Opera Software, which will supply its Opera Web browser for the device. The Archos 604 WiFi will probably resemble Archos's currently available 604 model, but with added wireless networking and possibly a higher-resolution screen.

Open source software vendor Red Hat has announced a new initiative, implemented by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), that enables members of the software industry to officially and publicly comment on vulnerabilities that may affect their software.

This EDC whitepaper was commissioned by PalmSource. It overviews the progress and prospects of Linux in the mobile phone market, looking at major stack vendors, geographic trends, drivers, and inhibitors. It also includes research data from EDC's surveys of mobile application developers.

The GNOME project released version 2.16 of its popular Linux desktop on Sept. 6. In many ways, this is just a minor release. In others, however, it's a significant step forward for the Linux desktop. The first change old GNOME hands will notice is that, most, but not all of the default icon theme has been changed. It's now based on Tango. The Tango Desktop Project is an effort to create a consistent graphical user interface across all Linux desktops.

Many people collect things as a hobby. I collect computers. Over the years, as my collection grew, my living room began to look like a data center. As soon as VMware Server became freely (as in beer) available I knew I had to migrate my servers and development boxes to virtual machines (VM). The problem is that most of my servers run OpenBSD, which is not officially supported by VMware. Out of the box, VMware can't properly shut down OpenBSD VMs; it just powers VMs off, causing data corruption. With a little bit of hacking, I managed to eliminate this issue. Here's how you can install OpenBSD as a guest OS under VMware Server, and possibly other VMware products.

Many observers expect that, although often well entrenched, traditional management tools with license costs could be displaced by open source competitors like GroundWorks. "There are parts of systems management, such as event monitoring and change management, that are mature and ripe to be commoditized," said Jon Collins of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton.

Encryption products supplier Pointsec Mobile Technologies AB has added single sign-on and remote support features to its endpoint full-disk encryption software for Linux desktops and laptops.

According to the corporate cartels, so-called p2p 'pirates' are the scourge of the Net, "devastating" honest, hard-pressed the entertainment and software companies and forcing helpless support workers into hard times. However, David Choi and Arturo Perez have a somewhat different view, suggesting the phenonmenon of online piracy is a valuable source of innovation to the industries, as well as to entrepreneurs.

The diction and style tools put a GNU face on an old Unix feature. These tools read text input, either from a file or the standard input. diction checks the input at the sentence level, and marks wordy and trite phrases, cliches, and the like, while style works on the overall document, giving a summary of the writing style with a number of readability tests.

Live Linux CDs are popping up all over the place. Mainstream distributions like SimplyMepis let you try before you install, as does Ubuntu and Linspire. There are also specialized distributions like Knoppix and Dynebolic. One Gentoo Linux-based distribution, called Sectoo, might also warrant a "live" look.

MySQL is a significant atom of a LAMP server. This amazingly fast database system is synonymous with PHP applications. Understanding the potentially complex details of views, stored procedures, merge tables, clustering, to name a few, can give your organization a competitive advantage. Pro Mysql, written by Micheal Kruckenberg and Jay Pipes and published by Apress, is a highly detailed account of the more advanced features of MySQL 5.0.

Print-on-demand sites like Lulu allow you to create and publish your own book. If you're primarily a writer, you might be tempted to hire a professional designer to create a cover for your book. Before you do that, consider creating a simple yet elegant book cover using the open source Kooka scanning software and the Inkspace vector drawing application

One the face of it, it should be a simple thing to own what you create and to exchange it. In practice, it doesn’t work out so well. The game industry has been plagued by rising costs, missed deadlines. Some of the blame can be laid to competitive pressures drives developers to add more. Some of it, honestly, has been the result of a lack of discipline.

Alioth, another server of the Debian Project, has been broken into. Script kiddies made use of a hole in PmWiki, which has been known since the beginning of this week, to insert PHP code, thereby installing an IRC proxy.

Ever since the birth of the free software movement, its defenders have struggled to explain just what "free software" is. If it is free, how do coders eat? And how do businesses that support the software – IBM, Hewlett-Packard – make any money from it?

[Like I was saying in a thread about MS, what is the really imporant issue?, corporations making money. Even Lessig knows that. - Scott]

In July 2005, news emerged of Sun Microsystems' first foray into open source identity management with the Open Web Single Sign-On (OpenSSO) project. Now, more than a year later, the project has been formally launched. Sun has kept to its word with OpenSSO and is releasing source code for the significant chunks of its Java System Access Manager required for web-based single sign-on, including session management, policy and federation as well as administration capabilities.

Geotagging is the association of geographic location information with an object. A geotag comprises three pieces of information: a name and longitude and latitude values. Once files are geotagged, they can be indexed and searched based on the geographic information they contain. Here's how you can tag your photos, documents and other files so you can search for place-related information on your PC using Google Earth.

It's those dratted legal expenses again, I think, although they are down a bit, but still in the millions this quarter. "Because of the unique and unpredictable nature of this litigation, the occurrence and timing of litigation-related expenses is difficult to predict, and will be difficult to predict in the future," they say in their press release.