Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

I will turn down free beer software in favor of freedom software when both exist. If you don't know the difference, that's OK. You cannot see the source code for the video drivers from ATI, for example. You can get them for free but they are not freed. The same with Adobe Acrobat Reader and plugins for the Firefox web browser.

When Carsten Niehaus began studying chemistry and biology in late 2000, the lack of Linux-compatible reference materials frustrated him. When his search for an interactive Periodic Table of Chemical Elements came up empty, he decided to write his own. Now Kalzium has become a part of the KDE edutainment package and is used by students, teachers, and researchers worldwide.

YouTube clips are everywhere these days, and I must admit I'm addicted to the site. Nevertheless, I've had a couple of small annoyances with YouTube videos. I wanted to be able to play my favorite ones on standalone DVD/DivX players. I also found I couldn't go backwards or forwards when playing the site's Flash videos with MPlayer. For those reasons, I decided to convert my favorite YouTube videos to DivX or XviD formats. Here's how you can do the same.

The Telecoms Action Group launched its national consumer advocacy campaign today, calling on South African businesses and private individuals to take out a full page advert in a national newspaper protesting the lack of alternatives in the SA telecommunications sector.

Nokia is to add the open source Sourcefire intrusion prevention system (IPS) to its range of IP security appliances. Sourcefire's IPS includes the widely used Snort system. Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system that uses a rule-driven language.

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income.

This article is from a new book published by No Starch Press:Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook by Rickford Grant. This excerpt covers using your iPod with Ubuntu and it is full of tips, tricks, and helpful pointers. Reprinted with permission from No Starch Press, all rights reserved. More information about the book and its author is at the end of the article.

Internet Initiative Japan, an internet access and network solutions provider in Japan, has begun free distribution of the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client with an XML-based policy control mechanism. The service is being made available to individual users of IIJ's internet access services IIJ4U and IIJmio.

You walk into the room. It’s cool and quiet. You see thirty new workstations giving great service. Your cost of hardware was CAD$350 for each workstation, CAD$10 to connect it to an existing 100Mbps LAN, and about CAD$60 for a share of a server in another room (CAD$1 = US$0.87). Your software costs were only some download and CD burn time and forty minutes for installation. Your operating costs are virtually nil. The server runs for months without a reboot. The workstations have nothing but network boot loaders. You back up only one machine, the server. The workstations use twenty watts each and have no fans. Magical? Yes. Magic?

Fedora Project Infrastructure is scheduled for maintenance during Wednesday, August 30th for co-location facility upgrades. The servers will be back online by no later than 08:00PM MST (UTC-7).

Asa Dotzler writes: "Mike Schroepfer is bringing back the wonderful developer chat series started by Chris Nelson of MozillaZine so many years ago, and inviting you all to join him for a Q&A and chat at 11am PDT Friday September 1, 2006 on irc.mozilla.org, channel #mozillazine.

RFID specialist TagMaster used embedded Linux to build a new generation of "long-range and high-performance" 2.45 GHz RFID systems. The LR-xx readers operate in the license-free 2.45 GHz frequency band, and target applications in commercial and corporate parking areas, gated communities, university parking, airports, and hospitals, according to the company.

So you want a Linux that's set up with just the applications you want -- no more, no less. What do you do? Well, an expert Linux user does it himself. But, not everyone's a Linux legend. For the rest of us, there are two good choices.

Plattsalat is an organic and fair trade food cooperative in Stuttgart, Germany. Its members run the co-op, paying a monthly fee for the privilege of purchasing goods, making decisions, and participating in the work that goes into keeping a shop like Plattsalat running. But with 250 members, making sure everyone gets their say can get complicated. In order to disseminate information and facilitate communication, Plattsalat set up its own wiki. Board member Thomas Becker says open source software "fits our philosophy, political ideas, and our aims to change the world for the better."

Ten days ago we got the first snapshot of KDE4. If you already played a bit with it, now you can continue discovering more interesting things playing with the unstable package of Okular, a universal document viewer for KDE4 based on the KPDF code.

Linux Platform Products revenue grows 30 percent year-over-year - Identity and Access Management revenue up 46 percent year-over-year - Announces voluntary stock-based compensation review.

This was a watershed year in the history of open source movement, particularly Linux, in India. This was not only because of large-scale enterprise deployments across many verticals, but also because Indian enterprise users seemed to finally comprehend the nuances of a subscription-based software adoption model.

Volunteer hackers still play an important role in open-source software development despite the many companies that pay developers to work on open-source products, according to Michael Tiemann, Red Hat’s vice president of open-source affairs.

Oracle's latest Express database toolset version is still free -- as in free beer -- but takes even more inspiration from the free software movement, albeit with a few catches. The database giant is launching into wide release today the latest version of Application Express 2.2, its free tool for building Web apps from a browser.