Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Linux is brilliant at serving files. It's this ability that keeps the enterprise world turning to Linux for its heavy lifting jobs and that keeps the world Googling 24/7. But it's just as good at serving files from a computer tucked away under the stairs or stuck in the loft, and a server in your house is now becoming an essential accessory. Mobile phones, games consoles and even televisions are rapidly developing the ability to read, display and play files held on a media centre PC, and Linux is the perfect free software solution. All you need is a relatively low-powered PC, a decent amount of storage and somewhere safe to hide it.

Open sourcerers might have saved an Australian power supply system after its electrical grid control room network got infected with a virus. A Windows virus hit the networks of Integral Energy and, according to a submission to Slashdot, the virus managed to spread to the operator display consoles in the control room. Quick thinking techies in the control systems department of the utility swapped the infected Windows boxes for machines running Linux that they were using for development.

A lot has been written recently about so called “Open Core” software ever since Andrew Lampitt coined the term back in August of 2008. Many analysts have been critical about it, such as Richard Hillesley from The H Open in his recent article “Open core, closed heart?”. Many are also very positive about it such as Matt Aslett from The 451 Group. However, I think that most them are missing the elephant in the room: Open core is not sustainable in the long term because it represents the worst of both worlds. Open core tries to find a middle ground between proprietary software and free software, but it reaps the benefits of neither and inherits the problems of both.Let me show you by example. SugarCRM is one of the more popular open core software products available. The company offers the Community Edition for free under a GPLv3 license but also offers a Professional and Enterprise edition under a proprietary license. SugarCRM has been around since 2004 but it is already showing many signs of not being sustainable.

In diff tool speak, a visual diff tool is a GUI application. Meld is such a tool: a tool for displaying differences between files (and directories) and also for merging the differences. Meld is programmed in Python.

Your move Apple, oh wait - no! You've got to hand it to Palm, it's made itself one tenacious mole for Apple to whack. The company's long-running fight to keep the Palm Pre compatible with iTunes entered yet another round of assured futility over the weekend. This Saturday, Palm released version 1.2.1 of WebOS, which "resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with the latest version of iTunes (9.0.1)". It also fixes Exchange 2007 compatibility and some security issues, but that's not really the point of the rollout.

Last week Plymouth had picked up a DRM renderer plug-in, but now this week it has picked up an X11 renderer plug-in. This plug-in makes it possible to run Plymouth and its graphical plug-ins from within an X Server...

Linux Journal's Mitch Frazier show you how to use bookmarks in Konsole, KDE's terminal emulator.

Enough people loved Firefox's history and bookmark searching location bar that the name "AwesomeBar" caught on. While this tool is great for productivity, its omniscience is a serious privacy concern. Don't let your boss see that you've been looking for a new career on job search Web sites. You can clear your history, and completely exclude bookmarks from displaying in the bar, but why waste such a useful feature just to hide a few URLs? NotAwesome is a simple, free add-on that allows you to selectively hide bookmarks from the incriminating gaze of the AwesomeBar.

Back in March the open-source ATI Linux driver had gained support for an unreleased IGP known as the RS880, months before it would end up on the market and become known as the AMD 785G Chipset. The open-source support is there for this integrated graphics processor and motherboard chipset, along with the proprietary support through the Catalyst Linux driver, and there is even chipset documentation to help the CoreBoot developers. With the 785G being the latest (and likely last) ASIC in the AMD 700 series, we decided to look at the ECS A785GM-M motherboard. The A785GM-M from Elitegroup Computer Systems is affordable and offers a nice set of features for being a micro ATX motherboard.

Forget the netbook or the net-top PC. How about a tiny net-server that fits in the palm of your hand and sells for $600? A Japanese vendor is touting a lilliputian Linux Web server that weighs 8 ounces and consumes just 8 watts. At 5.2-inches-by-3.1-inches in size -- and 1.2 inches thick -- the OpenBlockS 600 is about the size of two cigarette packs side-by-side. For non-smokers, that's two iPhones stacked on top of each other.

Paris-based OW2 Consortium, whose members include Alcatel Lucent, France Telecom, Red Hat and Thales, will merge with California-based Open Solutions Alliance, which represents organizations including Unisys and Ingres.

Most often we are faced with testing out the latest motherboards, processors, and graphics cards to see how well they work with Linux under different conditions and a variety of tests. While those are obviously the components that most Linux users are concerned with when it comes to Linux compatibility and performance, plenty of peripherals to this day don't work under Linux or will only do so to a limited extent or after jumping through various hurdles to get a half-working device. With mice for instance, they generally will work fine when plugged into any modern desktop Linux distribution, but with some of the gaming and high-end input devices not all of the buttons will be detected or other features will not work. When a company came along that we never heard of, Mionix, claiming to offer some of the best gaming products, curiosity got the best of us and we decided to see how well the Saiph 3200 from this unheard of company would work on the Linux desktop.

This has been of particular help to the 30 or so children with severe learning difficulties, says Elias Portugal, a special-needs teacher at the school. Before, he struggled to give them individual attention. Now, the laptops are helping them with basic language skills. "The machines capture the kids' attention. They can type a word and the computer pronounces it," he says.Nearly all of Uruguay's 380,000 primary-school pupils have now received a simple and cheap XO laptop, a model developed by One Laptop Per Child, an NGO based in Massachusetts. The government hopes this will help poorer and disadvantaged children do better in school while also improving the overall standard of education. These ambitions will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects.

Rory Cellan-Jones visits a school in Kigali where children are using computers supplied by the One Laptop Per Child project.... They are loaded with software designed to limit energy use so that they can be used for many hours without requiring their batteries to be recharged. They can also link to one another via wi-fi to form a network that connects to a distant internet link. This video was filmed on a mobile phone.

At the end of her term, competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is wrapping up two open cases against Microsoft... FSFE is involved in both. We are concerned that the Commission may end up reversing years of successful antitrust work if Neelie Kroes settles for far too little in order to close a deal, any deal... So far, Microsoft is only offering the interoperability information on what is falsely labeled as "reasonable and non-discriminatory" (RAND) terms. From our perspective, such terms are both unreasonable and discriminatory, because they make it impossible to use the interoperability information in Free Software.

Sdenka Salas, a teacher who is working with Andean children from Aymara and Quechua communities, wrote a book in April about using Sugar in the classroom. She recently completed the English-language version. She has kindly made it available for download.

T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. This years event will be held on 3 and 4 October 2009 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

Does the troll-blocking organization that recently secured a set of supposedly Linux-related patents from Microsoft need sizing for a penguin-shaped tinfoil hat? Or was the IP sale really Redmond's secret scheme to "create fear, uncertainty, and doubt" in the open-source community?

Larry Ellison claims the European Commission investigation into his proposed takeover of Sun Microsystems is costing him $100m a month. Coincidentally that is exactly how much Ellison spends on scented candles to keep his fleet of fighter aircraft smelling fragrant. The Oracle boss accepted that European regulators have a job to do but said the longer it takes the more money Sun was losing. Competition Commissioner 'Steelie' Neelie Kroes announced a phase-two investigation into the $7.4bn deal earlier this month. She is particularly concerned by the fate of open source database MySQL which is seen as a future competitor to Oracle's core business

Just about a week after X Server 1.7 RC1 made it out, a second release candidate for this next X.Org Server is available. This second release candidate brings bug fixes and other improvements, but the code is currently within a feature freeze...