Showing headlines posted by dave

With great pleasure I would like announce creation of the kde-graphics-devel mailing list. The list is developer oriented and will be the central place for all eye-candy development within KDE. Developers and researchers from the computer graphics field are welcomed and strongly encouraged to subscribe. Everything computer graphics related will be on topic - that includes developments within the X.org community, uses of OpenGL within a desktop environment or simply sharing your latest computer graphics research findings with others.

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Bruce Byfield released a short introduction into apt-get on NewsForge. Again, developers were advised to close bugs automatically with a changelog entry only in connection with a proper description. Jason Boxman wrote a guideline for using Exim 4 and Courier IMAP on a Debian system.

To paraphrase this LA Times story: The RIAA and MPAA got their posteriors handed to them on a platter this year. HR 4077, the PIRATE Act, and INDUCE (among others) all got bogged down in Congress. If this news fills you with holiday cheer, you should donate to Public Knowledge, the D.C.-based nonprofit that made it happen. I've been working with this organization since their formation and can vouch for both their effectiveness in lobbying and that their hearts are in the right places. 'Tis the season for giving. 'Tis also the season for tax-deductible donations.

The New York Stock Exchange announced its new TradeWorks trading system today, though portions of the system have been in place for months. Described as an "Extreme Availability" system by IBM, it includes up to 3,000 -- 650 are already in use on the floor of the NYSE -- custom made wireless handheld devices used by floor brokers. The handhelds talk to Linux-based workstations, which in turn talk to HP servers, and they speak to IBM Z-series mainframes running a DB2 backend.

Got questions? LinuxQuestions.org has answers -- and a lot more. This popular and well-established site run by Jeremy Garcia has at last count 148,040 registered users. That's 4,473 more registered users than the Linux Counter itself.

"The Cybersource Linux vs. Windows TCO Comparison is back and better than ever. In April 2002, Cybersource undertook the first study contrasting the overall Total Cost of Ownership differences between Linux and open source platforms on the one hand, and Windows and Microsoft platforms on the other. We have now updated this report to accommodate the changes in both platforms. We have also extended the model to increase its relevance and accuracy.

Steven Noels, a Belgian consultant and member of the Apache Software Foundation claims running a business based on open source software is possible.

Application News MozSource, the independent company that operates the Mozilla Store and the Netscape Store, has announced the launch of its new high-quality, affordable technical support service for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla 1.7.

Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.

A recent controversial IDC study said that some 62% of the TCO of Linux comes from support, versus only about 50% for Windows, for which support is slightly cheaper. Though you can argue about the validity of the survey's results, no one can deny that Linux would be a more attractive solution if it were cheaper and easier to support. OpenCountry, a small company with big aspirations, is today announcing new software that aims to make that happen.

An introduction to several Linux MIDI utilities, including JSynthLib, Midirgui and SynthEd.

Linux PDA software vendor Empower has joined Texas Instruments's (TI's) DSP (digital signal processor) third-party network, and will offer TI's DSP customers products and services related to Linux PDTs (portable data terminals), including industrial, portable medical, point-of-sale (POS), asset inventory, and enterprise applications.

Stanford Computer Science Researchers Analyze 5.7 Million Lines of Software, Identify 985 Software Bugs - Most Already Fixed by Open Source Community

It's been fun being a columnist here at Linux Magazine, but when a full-time job as senior editor at my old publisher comes knocking, I have to answer. But before before I bid you a fond farewell, let me pull out my battered crystal ball and take a look at Linux ten years down the road.

In the previous three articles, I introduced my templating system of choice, the Template Toolkit (TT). Since those articles were intended as overviews, I didn't have much space to go into meaty examples. So, in this article, I'll look at how I'm using TT every day to help me manage the Stonehenge Consulting web site (http://www.stonehenge.com).

Last month's "Extreme Linux" introduced MPI-2, the latest Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard. MPI has become the preferred programming interface for data exchange -- called message passing -- for parallel, scientific programs. MPI has evolved since the MPI-1.0 standard was released in May 1994. The MPI-1.1 standard, produced in 1995, was a significant advance, and the MPI-2 standard clarifies and corrects the MPI-1.1 standard while preserving forward compatibility with MPI-1.1. A valid MPI-1.1 program is a valid MPI-2 program.

Last month's column looked at the basics of generating RPMs, including the format of the all-important .spec file. In theory, those principles should be enough to let you create .spec files and RPMs for a number of purposes. In practice, however, RPM generation is complex enough that some examples are sure to help. So, this month's column presents two examples: creating a non-program RPM and creating a program RPM.

Is there any multimedia software that Linux users love to hate more than RealPlayer? RealPlayer's bad interface, proprietary and poor-sounding codecs, and overall poor support for Linux have irked many a Penguinista. But in an effort to appease and appeal to the growing horde of Linux users, Real open sourced its server software in 2002, followed by its client software, RealPlayer.

When MySQL 4.0 was released, it included a host of new features. We've already discussed MySQL 4.0 several times in Linux Magazine, but the query cache only received a brief mention in the September 2002 "LAMP Post" column (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-09/lamp_03.html). And since the query cache is disabled by default, there's a good chance you've not stumbled across it yet.

Why would you want to give a program more than one name? How can you move quickly through the filesystem like Star Trek's Enterprise jumping through a "worm hole"? What good are multiple views of the files in a directory? You'll see these things and more, as we look into Linux filesystem links.