Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Integrated Neurology Service SINEURO's office, located in São Paulo, Brazil, migrated from various versions of Windows (from 98 to XP) on a network of five computers with eight nonskilled computer users. I was the consultant in charge, and I spent no money on new hardware. Thank to the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), hardware that's too old for new versions of Windows runs Linux applications just fine over a network from a server.

Having established itself as the leading enterprise Linux vendor, Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle. It's a tall order, and among other things it will take a business plan that lets the company move smoothly through this make-or-break stage.

I've used Ubuntu Linux now for the better part of a year; there have been some stumbles along the way, but for the most part, I'm sold. I find myself having to do a bit more maintenance than I would with Windows, but I also like the flexibility that it affords me, along with knowing that I'm not being forced into using software in ways I don't want to (DRM), and not having to pay multiple hundreds of dollars to use it.

November 1st has come and gone, and that means that Asus has begun shipping the Eee PC, a $399 ultra-light laptop that could give both the OLPC and major laptop makers a run for their money. We're going to focus primarily on the software side of things, but in a nutshell, the first widely available model packs a 900MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of solid state memory. It weighs just 2.1 pounds, has a 3.5 hour battery, and a tiny power adapter, making it a perfect machine for stuffing in your bag whenever you leave the house. But it also has a tiny 7 inch 800 x 480 pixel display, which can cause some problems with certain web sites and applications.

A six-person startup is readying a modular, open source hardware/software system resembling a set of electronic Legos. Bug Labs claims device developers can build "anything" using "Bug," which comprises an ARM11-powered base and various modular add-ons. Boldly suggesting that "CE" could someday stand for "community electronics" instead of "consumer electronics," Bug Labs invites hardware and software developers to contribute to the "open source" project, designing hardware and software modules of their own, and sharing their work back into the community. One suggested mix-and-match combo is a GPS/digital camera device that acts as a mobile, standalone Web service for publishing geo-tagged photos.

When deploying Red Hat Virtualization, the host operating system is domain0 or dom0, and the virtual machines that run on top of domain0 are domainU or domU. Installing SystemTap on domainU is no different from installing SystemTap on non-virtualized machine or domain0. Here's how to do it.

It is not uncommon for those who write about Linux or other FOSS software to be inundated with feedback from users. At times that feedback is a bit unbalanced, a trifle raw and, occasionally, plain silly. It is, however, uncommon for a writer to set out to deliberately provoke Linux users with over-the-top stuff - just to prove his contention that said users are a bunch of ferals. This category of writers are called trolls; one surfaced recently in the shape of Infoworld's Russell Kennedy, who, in a three-part series titled "why Ubuntu (still) sucks", managed to rouse people enough to invite sufficient bile to prove his claim - which he laid out in the last part of that series.

"Linux really wouldn't have gone anywhere interesting at all if it hadn't been released as an open source product. I also think that the change to the GPLv2 from my original 'no money' license was important, because the commercial interests were actually very important from the beginning. The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers and pushed people to improve usability," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

The longer I program, the more structured my programming methods have become. Currently I am busy playing with generated documentation and unit testing. Generated documentation is an all round great idea, but it has a drawback: You need to generate it all the time. So I set out to use Subversion’s post-commit hook to generate fresh documentation for my PHP projects using phpDocumentor. I have written a little Python script that you can call from Subversion’s post commit hook. This script scans your subversion project for files that have the phpdoc property set. If any of these have changed, then it regenerates your documentation using phpDocumentor. It can also deal with files that are not kept in your Subversion repository and supports anything also supported by phpDocumentor.

Last week saw a slew of articles suggesting that Ubuntu Linux was damaging hard disks. The truth is a little more complicated than that but just in case, try this trick for monitoring the state of your hard disk load/unload cycles before you make any rash decisions.

An illusion in the minds of many is that Center for Certification of Health Information Technology (CCHIT) certified EHR systems are interoperable. The reality is that this is something that CCHIT does not currently test for but will ostensibly test in the future. This CCHITannouncement is interesting in that CCHIT will"...begin building a testing resource to evaluate compliance of electronic health records (EHR) and networks with certification criteria for interoperability. This new initiative will make it easier for health information technology companies to add standards-based information exchange capabilities to their products and prepare those products for certification. The testing software will be developed under an open source license so that it is free and publicly available, and the Certification Commission will use the software running on a secure platform during its inspection of a product's compliance..."

There are a few things that are fundamentally different about this video recorder which may take a little getting used to. First, this product is open. Not open as in the wind blows through it, but open as in anyone can hack around with the firmware, making changes and if they are for the better, giving them to the community. The second change is that this recorder really doesn’t have any storage of it’s own to record to. You’ll need to provide storage in the form of one of the many popular memory cards (complete list below), a USB drive or your networked share.

When it comes to big enterprise IT deployments in the U.S., there is no enterprise bigger than the federal government itself. Linux vendor Red Hat is hoping for a larger portion of the government's multi-billion dollar IT spending with its widest-ever array of security certifications, thanks to assistance from HP. HP today released new Multi-Level Security (MLS) Services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in support of the open source OS vendor's government push.

Notch it up as a victory for open source over enterprise software. Zenoss, a provider of open source IT management software, has beaten off competition from four leading commercial software providers to land a deal at global technology firm UTStarcom.

Linuz Gazette Issue 144 for Noveber 2007 is out. In this issue: Virtualization made Easy by Edgar Howell, 3D programming with Vpython by Maxin B. John, Slow Receivers in a Distributed Data Management System by Sudhir Menon, FlickOff: Escaping the Clutches of Web 2.0 by Ben Okopnik, Ecol by Javier Malonda and The Linux Launderette.

Every year (bar one) since 1999, around 800 people have got together on an annual basis to discuss an operating system that was for a long time deemed to be on the fringes. These days that description does not apply, but the gathering is still as informal as that inaugural session during the tech boom.

The Hardy Heron Roadmap has over 130 new ideas that have been proposed thus far. I’ve examined each one of these ideas in detail, threw out the ones that weren’t interesting to me, wrote an explanation for each. Of course, the juiciest items have already made headlines, such as the new theme that is being planned… “I for one, welcome our new hopefully non-brown themed overlords!”

The New Zealand State Services Commission's (SSC) championing of open-source software in government helped its ICT (Information and Communications Technology) branch pick up an award in the government category of the inaugural New Zealand Open Source Awards, held in Wellington this month. The SSC has developed and published guidelines to government agencies that are considering open source, says the deputy commissioner and head of the ICT branch, Laurence Millar. The guidelines were published on the e-government website in 2003 and then updated, he says.

The situation and rules for the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) are starting to become clearer. As you may know, this is a follow-up to the September 2 vote where the Microsoft/ECMA OOXML (”Open” “XML”) specification failed on both measures to become an ISO/IEC JTC1.Given the way the system works, this means that we get to go on and try something else to make it a standard. And if that doesn’t work, try something else. Repeat until either the opposition goes away, gets bored, or no one remembers what you were trying to do in the first place (grin).

I’ve known for a long time to stay away from the short, sweet and simple “rm -rf /” command. It deletes every file on any writable filesystem mounted by a *nix system, but what exactly happens if you do run it? Do green leprechauns jump off the screen to warn you that you shouldn’t do it? Not quite. Here’s a video with the verbose option set to make it a little bit more interesting. I’m running it in a virtual machine so I can capture video of all the “action” - it was a bit slow to complete, but I’ve gone ahead and increased how quickly it runs to not be nearly so boring. Enjoy!