Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Wine project isn't the only free software project with official releases being few and far between, but the Haiku Project is in a similar boat. Development on Haiku, the open-source reincarnation of BeOS, started back in 2001 but the first alpha release was only released last year. This month, however, the second alpha release of the Haiku OS has arrived.

Google has published a statistical breakdown of the students accepted to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event. Each year Google seeks students and mentors from the FLOSS community to take part in it's annual GSoC event, which takes place over a period of three months.

Kris Occhipinti shows us how to move our window buttons back to the right side in Ubuntu's latest release, Lucid.

Google has released a preliminary software development kit for Native Client, its native-code browser plug-in. The company unveiled its Native Client SDK "developer preview" with a blog post on Wednesday, calling it "an important first step in making Native Client more accessible as a tool for developing real web applications." Google released a research version of Native Client a year ago - including a snapshot of its source tree - and this allowed for application development. But until now there was no formal SDK.

Many organizations have attempted to use open source sudo as their privileged identity management solution. While sudo might be a viable solution for small scale organizations, CSOs managing large IT environments are consistently discovering that sudo creates security, compliance and productivity challenges to large enterprises seeking to protect critical assets.

On April 29, the University of Colorado held a conference on patents and free software. Your editor, having spent the morning getting some significant dental work done, figured that an afternoon devoted to software patents would appropriately continue the day in the same theme - only without the anesthetic. The following is not a comprehensive report of the event; instead, it focuses on a few of the more interesting moments.

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it? A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support. It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

I've been avoiding video editing for years. I've seen a couple of tutorials that always made it look too complicated. But recently, at a model airplane fun fly, I shot a lot of short video clips with my digital camera. I needed a way to combine the good parts into a video I could put on the web. I tried a few of the video editing apps available for Linux looking for something that was easy for a first-timer to use, and settled on kdenlive. I was amazed how easy it was to use, even for a first-timer. Turns out there was no need to be afraid of video editing!

Tired of slogging through Facebook's interface? Sick of seeing the Fail Whale? Cut through the cruft and simplify your social services with Gwibber -- a microblogging client for Linux that supports Identi.ca, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Mark Sobell again delivers the answers to common Linux administration challenges, and provides thorough and step-by-step instructions to configuring many of the common Linux Internet services in A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fifth Edition.

Novell is close to launching Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 11 on the desktop and server. Which stands to reason. With all the new server iron being injected into the market, (and more to come later this year) and an impending release of Enterprise Linux 6 from Red Hat and the just-released Ubuntu 10.04 from Canonical, commercial Linux distributor Novell has to either put out a new version of SUSE Linux or crank out a service pack to keep pace.

Speaking at the Secure360 Conference here, Marcus Ranum, CSO of Tenable Network Security, said that the country's reliance on commercial off-the-shelf software has made us more susceptible to attack, not to mention less innovative and creative. Why don't we have a government coding office? We have a government printing office," he said. "Why don't we have a strategic software reserve? Is this putting us at a greater or lesser risk? I'm not sure. But our own software is probably a greater threat to us than anything other people can do to us."

The front-runners for replacing the expensive MS Office are openOffice.org and Google Docs, but which one is right for your business?

The release of GNOME 3.0, the popular desktop's first major release in eight years, promises to be the major free software event in autumn 2010. Where is GNOME now? What can we expect of GNOME 3.0? Of GNOME 3 as a series of releases? When I asked Stormy Peters, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where to go for answers, she directed me to Vincent Untz. A director of the GNOME Foundation and one of the senior members of the GNOME Release Team, Untz is better positioned than almost anyone to offer an overview of the project from both a general and a technical perspective.

Did you know your drive was SMART? Actually: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It can be used to gather information about your hard drives and offers some additional information about the status of your storage devices. It can also be used with other tools to help predict drive failure.

Cherrypal announced its first two netbooks to run Android. The Cherrypal Asia is available in seven-inch ($99) and 10.1-inch ($148) models, both of which run Android 1.6 on an ARM9-based Via VT 8505 processor clocked at 533MHz, and offer 256MB of RAM, 2GB of flash storage, Ethernet, WiFi, and USB connectivity, says the company.

In March, we announced a set of labels for use by people creating KDE software, to demonstrate their association with KDE. We chose three options: Powered by KDE, Built on the KDE Platform and Part of the KDE Family and asked for artwork for badges and banners to illustrate these terms.

Linux has no shortage of music players, and even KDE has at least two: JuK and Amarok. The one you decide to use is truly a matter of preference, and it would be pointless for me to attempt to convince you to choose Amarok. It is, however, my music player of choice. I mostly use it solely for the purpose of playing music, ignoring any additional features, but once I started exploring the latest version, I noticed that Amarok has several extraordinary widgets.

Learn how to install, upgrade and manage packages on your Linux® system. This article focuses on the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) developed by Red Hat, as well as the Yellowdog Updater Modified (YUM) originally developed to manage Red Hat Linux systems at Duke University's Physics department. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to explore the best ways to add new software and keep your system current.

I love software — really I do. I love to create stuff. Some of my favorite words to hear are: "Would it be possible to…?" The answer to this oft-spoken query is usually something between: "Why would you want to do that?" and "Of course, let’s see it in action." I love the "Get it done" aspect to writing software. Creating proto-types to test out an idea is arguably my favorite thing to do professionally. Production code is OK — if you can make a living writing it. It tends to get boring very quickly. If the code can be written well, that is great too. And if the code is easily maintained over time, that is even better. And usually, my code is. Except for the spurious comment that just says: // punt