Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

You know you can schedule recurring jobs with the cron command. What if you want to run a certain command just once, or a limited number of times, but still at times when it is inconvenient to type in the command interactively?

Most 2.6 Linux kernel releases have contained a unique name that is only visible within the top level makefile. Some examples, 2.6.17 was named "Lori Rules", 2.6.16 was named "Sliding Snow Leopard", 2.6.14 was named Affluent Albatross, and 2.6.13 was named "Woozy Numbat"

Kyle McMartin recently posted a patch to thelkml with the intention of making the kernel name visible, leading Linux creator Linus Torvalds to explain, "well, part of the charm of the name is that it's totally meaningless. I can pick names out of my *ss, and they don't matter in the least, and nobody will ever see it except in the kernel diffs."

After only nine weeks of operation, the open source Xara Xtreme project -- which is building a commercial-standard vector graphics program -- has reached a 0.5 version status with Xara LX for Linux. All tools are fully functional, and users can now save and export files as bitmaps, according to the project team.

Richard Green, the Sun Microsystems executive who will lead the company’s effort to open-source Java, says a major issue with any such move is the longstanding fear that Java will fracture and follow a path similar to Linux.

The spirit of the RISC OS desktop can now be easily installed on Debian GNU/Linux systems, after the ROX desktop collection was released in a Debian package. The package came about after Dennis Tomas decided pull the suite into one place for users to download and install.

The Federal Aviation Administration Latest News about Federal Aviation Administration has saved US$15 million by migrating computers that manage air traffic flow to Linux, according to an announcement issued earlier this month. The upgrade is part of a broader service-oriented architecture initiative that will replace proprietary traffic management systems with applications using Java.

The HRP-2m Choromet can lay down and stand-up by itself. The 35cm tall robot can also stand on one leg. The HRP-2m Choromet runs real-time Linux on a 240Mhz CPU (SH-4). This robot has 20 degrees of freedom, a gyro sensor, acceleration sensor and an Ethernet port.

Though it was still rainy here at the Annahoeve in the Netherlands, the KDE 4 multimedia meeting was definately up to speed. This article will report on the progress the hackers made yesterday, including the "why" and "what" of redesigning and speeding up amaroK, work on the KIO slaves and Phonon.

Barclays is buying every one of its online banking customers anti-virus software in a bid to improve security. The bank has signed a deal with F-Secure for 1.6 million licences of the Finnish firm's anti-virus program.

[This isn't FOSS related but I thought it was worth posting. How can you run Windows and not use at least one Anti-virus program? - Scott]

In the rainy Netherlands, eighteen KDE hackers have been working in the Annahoeve on Multimedia for the fourth incarnation of KDE. This report outlines the meeting topics, and the results of interesting presentations and explains how KDE developers outbid each others marshmallow records.

The results of LinuxDevices.com's sixth annual Embedded Linux Market Survey are in! This brief summary outlines our interpretation of a few key data points. Overall, we find the results encouraging for embedded Linux, and for companies in the embedded Linux OS and tools market.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected a patent that Forgent Networks was asserting against the JPEG images standard. (Linux-Watch)

In an email interview, Venkatesh Hariharan, head of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat India and coordinator of the challenge, provides details about the event.

Elephants Dream is a new 11-minute animated short film produced by the Orange Blender Project. Described as the first "open movie," Elephants Dream was modeled, animated, rendered, and composited using open source software, and all of the original content and data files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The film premiered last month, and is now available on DVD.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability ofGCC 4.1.1 saying, "this release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC [4.1.0]. GCC 4.1.1 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features." GCC 4.1.0 [story] was released 2 and a half months ago in March of 2006.

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.1.0 from a gcc.gnu.orgmirror.

It's been said that a mechanic is only as good as his or her tools. In this recipe I'll tell you about little-known freeware and shareware utilities that can help system builders do a faster, better job of diagnosing and repairing ailing computer systems. All of these tools are completely free of any spyware or adware, and none require any registration whatsoever. Together, these tools will equip your toolkit to fix a dozen common PC problems.

One of the reasons that I prefer using Vim to a word processor or GUI application is that my hands rarely need to leave the keyboard. I can do all my copying and pasting using Vim keybindings. When it comes to my window manager, I try to do the same thing -- work with tools that let me use the keyboard to navigate as much as possible without having to use the mouse. If you use KDE, you can save quite a bit of time by becoming familiar with all of KDE's shortcuts.

In the last several days a flurry of postings about a new company calledM2Z piled up in my email box.Technorati finds 163 new posts on the subject.Google's Blogsearch finds 329. (As of 4:30am Friday morning, which is when I'm writing this.) The pile will get a lot higher before M2Z gets off the ground. Or buried under it.

A unique closed-source network monitoring product called Splunk is helping the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) further its mission to "accelerate the adoption of open source software across the globe."

Linux will become the dominant operating system (OS) for Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) Latest News about Oracle databases by 2007, displacing Solaris, according to a recent survey from the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUC) -- but just by a smidge.