Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

We have previously came up with 8 ways to clean up your Ubuntu machine, but 2ClickUpdate manages to reduce all the steps to just a single click. If you are looking for a quick and easy way to update, maintain and clean up your *buntu machine, you have just found it. By itself, the update manager in Ubuntu has done a really good job in performing regular check with the repository and prompts you when there are update available. What it doesn’t do is to remove junk files and clean up your system. This is where 2ClickUpdate comes in. In addition to the regular system update, 2ClickUpdate also removes junk files, cleans used space and optimizes RAM memory.

For those with some extra time this holiday week in the United States, perhaps you want to try out the ZFS file-system on Linux? As was said this week when publishing ZFS benchmarks on Linux using the native kernel module developed by LLNL/KQ Infotech, the public release of this kernel module wasn't going to happen until the first week of January. Fortunately, we have been successful in overwhelming KQ Infotech with lots of interested users, so they have decided to go ahead and make the current beta ZFS Linux module available to the general public.

The Mozilla Project developers have announced the release of the first alpha for version 3.3 of Thunderbird, code named "Miramar". According to Mozilla Messaging Product Manager Rafael Ebron, Miramar Alpha 1 is aimed at "testers, extension developers, and other friends who are curious to follow the development of the next release of Thunderbird".

For those that checked in on the state of my thumb, thanks for your concern. If you missed my last column, I gave my thumb a good smashing just before SC10. I managed to navigate the show and New Orleans without any further thumb related issues. The show was a big success breaking last years attendance record of 11,000 people. As always, I have plenty to write about and will be doling out my reports over the next month. And, if you don’t read about it the week after SC, it does not mean the news is less important. There are only so many words, as it were.

When Novell announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Attachmate, someone remarked that they felt a chill passing through the Internet. While the company doesn’t get a great deal of mindshare these days, it was critical to the development of the enterprise that we know today. It was Novell that made networking popular and open to every platform. It was Novell that developed the concept of directory services. And it was Novell that brought us the idea of readily available, reliable network servers long before Microsoft or anyone else was a significant player.

Novell will honour all contractual obligations with its Australian customers and forge ahead with product development following the signing of a definitive merger agreement with Attachmate, according to Novell CEO, Ron Hovesepian. - In a letter to customers, the chief executive wrote that the merger, valued at $US2.2 billion, would in no way affect the company's support and maintenance. "We place tremendous value on the relationships we've cultivated with our customers and I can assure you that providing you with the innovative products, solutions and support you've come to rely on remains a top priority," the letter reads.

The announcement that Novell has agreed to sell itself to Attachmate for $2.2 billion does absolutely nothing to remove the huge question mark hanging over the future of Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Novell's open source Linux OS. Annoyingly for SLES customers, it actually raises as many questions as it answers. Novell put itself up for sale eight months ago following a takeover offer from hedge find Elliott Associates. Since then, long-suffering SLES customers have had to put up with uncertainty and doubt about the future of the server OS. Many of them must be wishing they'd made life simpler by picking Red Hat as their Linux supplier when they made their original purchasing decision. After all, no-one ever got sacked for not choosing Novell.

Novell did not specify which assets Microsoft will get, but senior IT analyst Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co. said in an advisory that they are “most likely related to WordPerfect, which Novell acquired in the late 1990s, and through which Novell had sued Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior.” The WordPerfect product line was sold twice, first to Novell in June 1994, who then sold it to Corel in January 1996. However, Novell kept the WordPerfect Office technology, incorporating it into its GroupWise messaging and collaboration product.

The days when Linux is an unknown quantity in a business are largely over — but that doesn't mean that every organization has tons of experience deploying Linux. Even if your organization has deployed Linux before, there are some common mistakes to be aware of. Here's five things you need to watch for when planning a new Linux deployment.

Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, has announced the release of SimplyMepis 11.0 Alpha 3 just in time to mark the eighth anniversary of MEPIS on November 21. SimplyMepis usually takes quite a while to cook and no final release date has been given.

Internet Connectivity and Networking (ICAN) has launched both a seven-inch and a 10-inch tablet running Android 2.1 on a 1GHz processor. The $400 ICAN! 7 and $500 ICAN! 10 ship with 16GB of internal storage, plus SD expansion, Wi-Fi, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, dual USB 2.0 ports, and HDMI ports, says the company.

The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools.

The latest release includes updated and reorganised boot help screens, as well as a reorganised Control Panel that places more frequently used items into the System Tools menu – AppsAudit and Run Command have been moved to the System Tools menu, while PPI Setup and TermServer Setup have been moved to Control Panel. The AppBrowser has also been updated, integrating setdrive, and the ondemand module for the Fast Light Window Manager (flwm_ondemand) has been updated to support a combined, single ondemand directory. Shingledecker also notes that a new data structure is used for wbarconf, which replaces wbar_exclude, so any current wbar_excluded items (xwbar.lst) will need to be remade.

There are plenty of extensions you can install that allow you to create PDF file for any webpage you come across. Well, if you are using Linux (particularly Ubuntu), this PDF creation feature is already inbuilt in your system and you can use it without installing any other extensions/applications. In Ubuntu, regardless which browsers or applications you are using, as long as it supports the “Print” function, you can quickly create a PDF, postscript or SVG file of the work you are doing (or the webpage that you have come across).

Canonical is attracting hordes of new Linux users with a ready-to-go, good-looking distro. But where does a noob go when they are no longer a noob? What is there for an IT pro with little Linux experience? How about the brand-new Bodhi Linux?

Attachmate says that Novell's openSUSE project will continue to operate as it always has. With Attachmate shelling out $2.2bn acquire Novell, SUSE Linux customers and contributors to the openSUSE project are understandably nervous about what Attachmate is planning for the community development that underpins SUSE Linux.

Google is playing coy over the future of Chrome OS, its still-gestating, browser-based operating system. When the project was first revealed in July 2009, Google said that systems based on the OS would arrive in the second half of 2010 — and through this past summer, it continued to make similar promises. But last week at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, CEO Eric Schmidt said that a completed OS was still "a few months away," seeming to indicate a delay.

At last I can write this up for you, my fine readers. Today we're going to learn about using Wake-on-LAN to wake up a server remotely, and automatic shutdowns. My master plan for my backup server is to automate everything-- wake it up, run backups for all the computers in my house, and then everyone shuts down for the night. (You might want to review part 1 and part 2.)

In our last article on the BlackBerry ListField we learned how to display data in a vertically oriented list. We explored drawing text and even how to search for entries with a progressive text search. However, the UI was somewhat bland. This article extends the prior code to upgrade the UI a bit. Along the way we demonstrate a technique for subclassing the ListField to bring some more life to the application and importantly to move in the direction of building more custom functionality to help your applications stand apart from the crowd.

OSADL, which has been overseeing real-time Linux (RTL) development patches to the Linux kernel, announced a "quality assurance testing farm" where manufacturers can test a variety of RTL systems under simulated production conditions. The multi-platform test center aims to prove RTL as a capable, and more flexible, alternative to real-time operating systems (RTOSes).