Showing all newswire headlines

Puppy Linux is a lightweight live Linux distribution that you can boot and run from a CD, USB stick, or DVD. One of its features is the ability to create specialized "pups" -- new versions of Puppy Linux geared toward a specific purpose. Digipup is one such example, with a focus on amateur radio. I spun it up, and found Digipup to be a great way to check out amateur radio utilities for Linux.

A couple of times I’ve encountered problems with the sound card on Debian boxes. Some notes I’ve found that may help others having difficulties: Check the permissions on /dev/dsp, and make sure that the relevant user(s) are in the audio group in /etc/group. You may need to log out & back in again for this to take effect. If using the alsa sound daemon, install the alsa-utils package and run alsaconf. This should pick up your sound card. You may need to run alsamixer to check the volume levels are correctly set afterwards. Blindingly Obvious (but easy to overlook) Note: make sure that the volume control on xmms (or other media player of choice), and on your headphones/speakers is sufficiently up. (I once spent ages prodding at a user’s sound config before realising that the headphones had their own volume control which I hadn’t noticed, and it was all the way down.) With KDE, I found recently that to get sound running it was necessary to run the KDE sound control utility, turn off KDE’s sound management and click Apply, close the utility down, reopen it, turn the sound management back on, & click Apply again. Then it worked.

The German government says that its "Advancing eGovernment" conference held at the end of February in Berlin also provided impetus for greater use of open standards in information technology both in industry and in public administration. As a result of this conference, the German government plans to implement open document formats in its administration.

It was back in February that we originally looked at the AB9 motherboard from Abit; however, this P965 motherboard had a few problems that had prevented this motherboard from functioning well with Linux. But have things since improved for this motherboard? We now have our compatibility report for the Abit AB9 as we see if things have changed for the better or worse under Linux and Solaris.

I kept coming across these claims that Microsoft and OLPC had partnered to put Windows XP Starter Edition on the OLPC, and according to one report, this was being done to get the XO laptop into US schools. None of this jibed with what I had been hearing from sources, so I decided to look into it further. As it turns out, a number of new outlets, including the AP and Reuters, mischaracterized the situation.

Several months ago, the Fedora Board (in consultation with Red Hat Engineering) decided to increase the length of time that Fedora releases are supported, in terms of updates. This decision was retroactively applied to Fedora Core 5, allowing it to remain a fully maintained release for several months longer than it would have under the old policy. Fedora Core 5 will reach its End of Life for updates on Friday June 29th, 2007.

I know it's probably just a matter of timing and deadlines, but it's kind of interesting that Professional XML was released a full month before Wrox's Beginning XML. After all, being a linear sort of fellow, reviewing "beginning" before "professional" makes more sense to me...particularly since this book suggests reading Beginning XML if you are totally unfamiliar with this markup language.

Core is a minimal distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system designed to be the basis for a complete system constructed by the end user. A fresh installation of Core (which will take approximately 15 minutes) will boot into a console and provide the user with the tools needed to download, compile and install other applications.

When you're designing and developing new software systems, it is often hard to see how all the pieces are suppose to fit together. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one tool that allow developers and architects to ease the process and create a big picture before committing to a particular technology.

The Digital Doorway project, aimed at bridging the digital divide by supplying remote rural communities with access to computer and Internet technology is well on its way to connecting 140 communities to the Internet. Thanks to additional funding, applications are open for 40 more of these robust open source systems.

Linspire & Mirus Continue Partnership Expansion Of Linux-Only Product Line To The Consumer Market

With an estimated 50 million tons of electronic waste generated globally every year, e-waste and its disposal is a growing problem. Sangonet and the Information Technology Association will run a one-day conference alongside the Futurex show in May to bash out the issues.

Have you ever wondered what would have happened if all the important data have been stolen from your mobile PC? For example the information about a confidential project you have been working on for the last 2 years in your company ... A horrifying vision, isn't it? If you don't want it come true, please consider encrypting your home drive. Here is how to do this in Linux.

I've just set up an"Open HealthCare" LinkedIn.com group to facilitate networking between biz devs, boosters, coders, contributors, venture-types. If that's of interest the invite link ishere. Please feel encouraged to forward the invite url to anyone who might benefit. Thanks.

Yes, Melinda, there is a choice: Functional ProgrammingBook review While it may appear that object oriented programming has achieved dominance in terms of programming language paradigms, there still exist outposts that refuse to submit to the benefits of polymorphism, encapsulation, and object inheritance.

LXer Feature: 03-May-2007

When the timing is right, things just naturally seem to fall into place and work for good.

Rootsh is a shell that logs everything a root user sees on his terminal. This is useful if you have more than one system administrator for a server and you want a record of exactly what any given user does. Despite the fact that the latest rootsh release was in March 2005, it still does its job great.

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Debian Etch system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

Web standards body World Wide Consortium plans to open a Southern Africa office later this month. Africans get ready to set some standards.

Rick Marshall has begun aVistA blog with some good prose:'...In the beginning it had no name. Amazingly, those who fought their David-and-Goliath battle to bring VISTA to the world merely described it rather than naming it, almost unthinkable in this era of branding urges so powerful we had to coin the term"vaporware" for our empty software names. Instead, the fathers of VISTA offered us abundant anonymity, a wealth of medical informatics with no name...'