Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This howto will show you howto store your users in LDAP and authenticate some of the services against it. I will not show howto install particular packages, as it is distribution/system dependant. I will focus on "pure" configuration of all componenets needed to have LDAP authentication/storage of users.

I’ve been hearing about BitTorrent for at least a year. It’s an exciting technology in principle, because it solves traditional central repository file distribution problems, uses peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology, and is written in my favorite programming language, Python.

Patrick Volkerding has announced that "current" branch of Slackware Linux has reached release candidate 4 status: "I wasn't planning a Slackware 11.0 release candidate 4, but here we go."

In the continuation of a long-running arms race, both Apple Computer and Microsoft have seen their music protection technologies come under fire in recent days.

Nstein Technologies, provider of text mining and multilingual information access solutions, announced the launch of 12 annotators, compliant with the open-source Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) standard developed by IBM.

The BSP will take place on Saturday, 9 Sept. 2006 in the cluster room of my former research lab, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Zurich-Oerlikon. A separate announcement for the second event will follow.

This article introduces Struts, a Model-View-Controller implementation that uses servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technology. Struts can help you control change in your Web project and promote specialization. Even if you never implement a system with Struts, you may get some ideas for your future servlets and JSP page implementation.

The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1. This update mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems. Those who frequently update from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

According to a report released last week by The 451 Group, enterprise users aren't as concerned with a stack provider's ability to provide exclusive support for their products as previously thought. The report, "Stack and Deliver," suggests that stack providers -- companies that offer pre-assembled sets (stacks) of commonly used open source software components and services -- should focus more on the quality of support, not just its delivery method.

Rockbox is a replacement firmware for various audio players, that opens up new features and fixes devices shortcomings. We don't think of these devices as personal computers, but they are; and Rockbox is an alternative operating system. This review focuses on Rockbox as a replacement "OS" for the iRiver player.

[There is a big M$ ad right in the middle of the page but it is a decent article about Rockbox. - Scott]

OSNews has published a detailed review of the Linux-powered Motorola Rokr E2 music phone. The review, by Eugenia Loli-Queru, takes a balanced look at both the hardware and the software, and identifies a number of the device's strengths and weaknesses.

This IDC study explores the issues raised by the open source software phenomenon and comes to some surprisingly different conclusions. We first look at the evidence of the growing role of open source among global software developers and find that the phenomenon has spread way beyond Linux, the poster child of the open source movement, and is gaining momentum. We then provide the first estimate of the economic impact of open source on the industry — how much is open source "taxing" the industry anyway?

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

While huge progress has been made toward"user-centric" identity, I still have problems with"user-centric" anything. The point-of-view is still outside the user. It's still organizational, corporate. If you're"centric" about users, where are you? Right, outside the user. And inside something that's, well, not quite human. Or worse, that's super-human. Not a peer, but a superior.Think about it: Areyou"user-centric"?

The resignation of Matthew Garrett, one of the most active developers in Debian, has drawn attention to some ongoing issues about how the project operates. Specifically, Garrett's announcement on his blog cites a lack of civility and a slowness in decision-making, and compares Debian unfavorably to Ubuntu, the Debian-derived distribution which is increasingly attracting the efforts of many Debian maintainers.

Have you ever been in a situation where you had to run multiple instances of the same application, with different input data each time, in sequence, because the job was too computation-intensive and your machine not powerful enough to run all the instances simultaneously? The solution to that problem could be to harness the machines that are already connected to your local network and apply their unused CPU cycles to your projects. Condor, a specialized batch system for managing compute-intensive jobs, may be your answer.

Sony Ericsson announced that it is joining the Eclipse community as Add-in Provider Member. By becoming an Add-in Provider, Sony Ericsson aims to contribute to the Eclipse ecosystem through creating Eclipse plug-ins of benefit to the global mobile application developer community.

Bergen City Council in Norway has hit back at reports that it has abandoned its flagship Linux migration project, branding them "exaggerated" and insisting it has completed plans to move many of its servers over to Linux. However, the council did admit that it was postponing plans to migrate 12,000 desktops to Linux claiming it had other investment priorities.

Software is ultimately composed of congealed ideas, so ideas are very important in the minds of software developers. The key to market power in the software industry lies in the minds of developers. Fashion plays a role too; some ideas are fashionable and some are not. The idea, or philosophy, of open source is powerful, frictionless, and seductive.