Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

These days, when one talks about free software, the first word that comes to mind is Linux—be it the kernel or a distribution based on it (which would then be a GNU/Linux operating system, and its flavour marked by a brand name: Red Hat, SuSE, Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware...) At one time, there was another project worthy of note: BeOS. It wasn’t POSIX-compatible, but it was neat. But now, only free *NIX prevail... really?

The eighth annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) continued yesterday with more tutorials, the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing, the Open Source Awards, and Larry Wall's State of the Onion report.

A recent patch posted to the lkml contained the following description, "this patch adds an efi e820 memory mapping", in response to which Andrew Morton asked, "why?". Linus Torvalds offered his views on EFI, the Extensible Firmware Interface beginning by describing it as "this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)".

Last week in Part 1 we changed a bale of passwords. Today we'll take two more important steps to lock down our Asterisk@Home server: make sure that all Web administration traffic is encrypted, and lock down OpenSSH more tightly.

We have already discussed how you can create text user interfaces for command-line tools using dialog. This time, we are going to look at Zenity and KDialog, which allow you to create GNOME- and KDE-specific front ends for scripts.

The vendor is revamping its home page and has a preview available. Firefox users, however, are redirected to Microsoft's generic "page not found" message and screen.

Open source and unencumbered drivers for 3D acceleration on Linux are lagging behind their proprietary counterparts. When 2D hardware goes away and everything requires 3D hardware, what options are there for people who use free software? Old hardware… unless something changes. Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative. No, I’m not really kidding.

Responding to tough competition from comparative giants Nokia and Motorola, Matsushita (Panasonic) and NEC may form a joint venture around Linux-based mobile phones, according to several business papers in Japan, as reported by Reuters. The venture may focus on Linux OSes and applications, mobile phone hardware, and/or mobile phone chips, and may include Texas Instruments, the news agency reports.

A wiki software start-up is releasing two products into open source to help get more developers familiar with its commercial products. MindTouch, founded by former Microsoft employees, on Tuesday announced the creation of an open-source project around MindTouch Dream, software for building distributed Web applications using Microsoft .Net development tools.

A new report from Forfás has highlighted the growing opportunity to be gained from open-source software (OSS) for Irish independent software vendors and the higher-education sector. OSS is growing far faster than the industry average for the traditional proprietary software model.

If you've looked for a Linux laptop lately on any of the major OEM Web sites, you've seen it: the mark of the beast. The phrasing goes "Dell|Lenovo|HP|Acer recommends Windows XP Professional." What it means is that by virtue of a Microsoft marketing agreement, the OEM can make more money in the US by not pre-loading Linux than it could if it did. Things are different elsewhere.

Virtualization is all the rage these days. Advances in x86 performance, as well as the increasing energy requirements of servers, make efficiently provisioning machines a necessity. Xen, an open source virtual machine (VM) monitor, works with just about any Linux distribution. One useful feature for shops that care about high availability is Xen's ability to migrate virtual machines while they are running. By using VM migration, you can pool computing resources just as you can pool storage. Here's how.

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Christoph Berg implemented an overview page for tasks in the packages overview. He also announced that the repository has been moved to Subversion and that notifications are now handled by the Package Tracking System directly.

Virtualization is all the rage these days. Advances in x86 performance, as well as the increasing energy requirements of servers, make efficiently provisioning machines a necessity. Xen, an open source virtual machine (VM) monitor, works with just about any Linux distribution. One useful feature for shops that care about high availability is Xen's ability to migrate virtual machines while they are running. By using VM migration, you can pool computing resources just as you can pool storage. Here's how.

The eight annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) kicked off Monday at the Oregon Convention Center. The first two days at OSCON are all about tutorials, with half-day presentations by key contributors to open source projects discussing how to make use of their tools. OSCON has several tracks, including tracks for Web applications, databases, Perl, JavaScript and AJAX, Ruby, Linux, programming, and business.

Having been engineering director at one company that became public, and a founder and CTO of another, as well as a long time professional software engineer working at such companies as Matushita Electric (Panasonic), and even Rand McNally, yes, the people that make maps, I must admit, in all those occupations, I have at most rather infrequently encountered these Microsoft Windows operating systems I hear so many people talking so much about.

Michael E. Sullivan of IBM discusses how Power Architecture technology is being reborn under Power.org as a community-driven architecture and brand inspired by the open-source Linux model. Learn what motivated the changes, what they will mean for customers and partners, and what the new logo symbolizes.

Mark Shuttleworth, millionaire cosmonaut and self-funded Linux guru, has managed to make his Ubuntu project the Linux distribution of choice in just two years. But now the friendly brown OS with the cute drumming noises faces an awkward journey towards the commercial mainstream.

One of the ongoing problems with documentation at MySQL is that it is getting ever larger. Not only is the size of the docs increasing, but the formats and languages that we support is increasing too, and that is making it more and more difficult to effectively list them and make sure they are available.

The One Laptop per Child initiative for the developing world is gaining ground, with Nigeria planning to buy one million laptops. But the Microsoft/Intel EduWise consortium is also making headway in the same market.