Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop, which is expected to move into beta testing within weeks, offers an improved desktop with enhanced graphics, Open Office 2.0, support for the Oasis file format, a new Access-like database application, improved wireless support and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office, according to a Red Hat document on the new desktop released at the company's recent summit.

India's biggest life insurer, the LIC, recently decided to shift its IT requirements on to Linux. Rishiraj Verma spoke to all those who were behind this landmark decision

The National Science Foundation has awarded $500,000 in grant funding to support a research and development partnership between the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This initiative, "Toward building a Performance-Predictable Wireless Mesh Network", focuses on the development of wireless routing protocols, network testing systems, and gateway discovery in open-source technology. The grant, part of the Network Technology and Systems Program of the NSF, provides support over a three-year period.

Although Palm no longer rules the PDA world, it doesn't mean that your old Palm OS device has to collect dust. You can still use it for some nifty open source applications.

TimeSys's subscription-based online service offering for embedded developers has gained a Linux 2.6.17 reference distribution for Atmel's AT91SAM9261 SoC (system-on-chip), new 2.6.11 patches for Freescale's MPC8272-ADS PowerQUICC II development board, and documentation related to static device nodes, cross-compiling drivers, and subversion.

How important are Domain Name Services? Consider this, suppose you want to set up your own web site, you go to a commercial registrar and attempt to acquire a domain name. The purchasing process won't proceed unless you can enter the IP addresses or Internet names of two existing, registered DNS servers for your domain.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is due to release the second draft of the GNU general public license version 3 (GPLv3) Tuesday, according to sources close to the organization.

With Fedora Core 6 Test 2 set to be released July 26th, it is time we announce the End of Life of our various Legacy supported releases. After much discussion on fedora-legacy-list and the fedora-legacy on the freenode network, we have decided to end of life the following releases when FC6 Test2 is released.

Prentice Hall has published a new book, C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, authored by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield of Trolltech. Billed as "The Only Official Best-Practice Guide to Qt 4.1 Programming", readers will discover the most effective Qt 4 programming patterns and techniques as one masters key technologies ranging from Qt's model/view architecture to Qt's powerful new 2D paint engine. The authors provide readers with unparalleled insight into Qt's event model and layout system. Then, using realistic examples, they introduce superior techniques for everything from basic GUI development to advanced database and XML integration.

Context, dear boy, context A data model is a methodology for storing, handling and manipulating data. There are lots of them around. One of the most commonly employed at present is the relational model. Brainchild of Edgar Codd, it rapidly came into favour after he published hisseminal paper in 1970. Many of the popular database engines today (for example DB2, Oracle and SQL Server) are based on the relational model.

Enea will demonstrate the Linux port of its "Linx" interprocess communication (IPC) technology at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF), next week in Orlando, Fla. The company touts Linx as a more performant, scalable alternative to TIPC (transparent IPC) in heterogeneous, distributed computing environments such as those found in telecommunications.

An unconference is based on the idea that the best parts of conferences are the discussions in the hallways and over meals -- not the planned sessions. BarCamp will begin today with a blank, wall-sized paper agenda that participants fill in with sessions they want to lead. Some will come with ideas in mind, others might be inspired during the day.

Pentaho announced that its core open source BI platform and related projects hit a cumulative monthly download record of more than 55,000 in June. This rapid market uptake follows a series of significant second-quarter achievements for Pentaho and its Open BI Suite. As recorded on http://www.sourceforge.net and http://www.javaforge.com, Pentaho’s project downloads totaled more than 55,000 in the month of June.

I have been collecting signatures to the Petition to protect Information Technology property rights at the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Separate from this I received a message from someone in Australia doing similar work with Linux Australia, who also have a petition to their parliament documented as part of their legal issues. The focus on the petition is to tie anti-circumvention provisions to actual infringement, something that was contained in Bill C-60 in Canada.

Linux is uniquely positioned in the OS space with implementations in both the smartphone and feature phone segments. This is in sharp contrast to Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm which have focused on the smartphone segment. However, Linux phones still represent a small segment of the overall handset market.

The third of four days of the eighth Ottawa Linux Symposium saw a deep discussion on the relative merits of various network file systems in a talk called "Why NFS sucks", a tutorial on reverse engineering a USB device, an introduction to SELinux rival AppArmor, and an update on the status of the Linux Standard Base, among other topics of interest

Longtime Linux admins know that SSH, the "Secure Shell" protocol, is one of the most handy and potentially critical utilities in their software toolbox. Using multiple terminal emulators in an X Windows environment on a workstation, or via the Screen utility, a sysadmin for Linux or other Unix-based OS servers can manage several systems simultaneously with ease. Network administration shell or Perl scripts can make use of SSH to perform automated tasks on multiple servers at once simply and securely.

The MEPIS Linux project team on July 21 released SimplyMEPIS 6.0, its first public distribution to incorporate a Ubuntu core. Based on the Dapper LTS package pool, v6.0 runs the latest security-patched 2.6.15 kernel from Ubuntu-Security and is designed for stable, long-term use and support, project founder and chief maintainer Warren Woodford said.

Many have written about how going Open Source changes your business model or sales process. Dana Blankenhorn notes that the open sourcing of Hyperic's product changed how they work. It required them to write code for stability and continuity, as well as adopt more Open Source tools.

With software companies better able to crack down on piracy, some people find they're having to make tough choices, according to Grigor Gatchev. Nearly every day in Bulgaria, he writes, computer experts have conversations that go something like this: