Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Taking frequent computer breaks can save you from a debilitating repetitive strain injury (RSI). However, if you're like most people, you probably get caught up in your work and forget to take breaks as often as you should. The Workrave desktop applet can keep you on track.

In a continuing discussion about the difference between pluggable security and pluggable schedulers,Linus Torvalds added "the arguments that 'servers' have a different profile than 'desktop' is pure and utter garbage, and is perpetuated by people who don't know what they are talking about." Regarding the comparison between pluggable schedulers and pluggable security, Linus stated: "Really - not only is the whole 'desktop scheduler' argument totally bogus to begin with, quite frankly, when you say that it's the 'same issue' as with security models, you're simply FULL OF SH*T."

"Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?" It's a fine song lyric for Chicago, but when it comes to computers, the answer is, "Yes, we really care. We, really, really care that our all are computers' servers logs, e-mail date and time stamps, and our backups agree on the date and time." How do you do that, though? The usual answer on SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) networks is to have each PC call in over the Internet to a NTP (Network Time Protocol) server. That's fine, but it does waste a few bits of network bandwidth and with any modern Linux you can set up your own personal NTP server for your PCs.

Microsoft is claiming that releasing the .NET Framework reference source code under the Microsoft Reference License will give developers the opportunity to understand more about .NET. That sounds good for open source, doesn't it? Wrong! Microsoft's so-called opening up of .NET Framework is setting a trap for open-source programmers. Open-source developers should avoid this code at all costs. If you ever, and I mean ever, want to write open-source code, I recommend you not come within a mile of Microsoft's .NET Framework code or any other similar projects that the boys from Redmond "open" up.

Last Wednesday, I went to a pub with some people from work. I wore a t-shirt I picked up at Linux World Boston in 2003. As my co-workers left one by one, I moved to the bar to strike up a conversation with the bartender. It was a quiet night and serving drinks slowed down as everyone left.

It seems like only a short time ago when the idea of running Microsoft's Media Center Edition of Windows (MCE) struck me as the best idea in the world. It gave the appearance like it did it all, but that changed as MythTV developers honed their own skills and really took the MCE platform to task. Today, MythTV remains ahead in features and even has a few small, non-US OEMs selling these boxes, ready to go.

Frederic Lepiedannounced the hardware4linux.info website on the Linux Kernel mailing list,"the site is collecting hardware compatibilities and incompatibilities with Linux distributions in a collaborative way: users run a hardware collector program, upload the resulting file and then rate and comment how their hardware works."The project's website goes on to explain,"components are rated according to their Linux compatibility. You'll see on the site some numbers like 4.5 x 2 for rated components. This means that the mean note for the component is 4.5 and that 2 persons have noted this component." The rating scale goes from -5"does not work" up to 5"works out of the box".read more |Sponsor KernelTrap.org

Looking for a small, fast Linux system? Take a look at Puppy Linux 3.0, which weighs in at just 96MB and runs from just about every imaginable media including CD, DVD, flash disk, hard disk and Zip disk.

On Monday. European think tank the Globalisation Institute made a submission to the EC proposing that all PCs and laptops should be sold without an OS in order to foster competition and bring down prices, saying the current practice "imposes an extra cost on virtually every EU business." Three-quarters of silicon.com's 12-strong CIO Jury IT director panel have now backed that call for naked PCs, although the argument is far from straightforward.

I was an 18-year-old chemistry major working at Dunkin' Donuts when I got my first help desk job. Over a weekend, I went from deep-frying old fashioned donuts to fixing whatever computer a student brought in off the street. And I spent months in the computing center with guys who told stories. Thirteen years later, I'm a sysadmin and a programmer. I still pull all-nighters tweaking Perl scripts or helping a friend move their blog to a new ISP. And I still mostly work with men. We know that Open Source communities want more women. But what can we do to get there? Here are some things that I think we can do right now.

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing.

I have been using the same computer for over seven years. I know that this sort of thing doesn't become a Borg like me but that is just how it is. To rectify this situation I have been slowly, piece by piece, assimilating components to create a new Locutus that will be more than just a bitzer but a new version of itself. Due to my experiences with windows I was semi-expecting it to not boot, have a kernel panic, the network wouldn't work and I would have to find some way of installing a lot of drivers. This didn't happen at all. Everything worked as it was supposed to. There were no errors, no popups, no installing of drivers needed. Everything just worked.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #59 for the week September 23rd - September 29th, 2007. In this issue we cover the Ubuntu 7.10 Beta release, newly approved LoCo team and Ubuntu members , LoCos participating in Ohio LinuxFest 2007, and, as always, much much more!

Olswang has launched a new unit dedicated to advising on open source technology, as the law firm aims to cash in on the software’s increased use in the UK. The dedicated unit will be led by former Slaughter and May partner and head of technology Nigel Swycher. It will specialise in advice on procurement and intellectual property (IP) issues arising from use of the software.

The world is changing and online applications are becoming more and more popular, whether for e-mail or word processing. The developers behind Bigboard and Gnome's "online desktop" initiative think it's time our desktops started catching up. Read on to find an interview with Colin Walters, more information about Bigboard, the online desktop and the obligatory screencast showing it off!

The Canary Islands have two derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the university’s Software Libre Office (OSL).

Sorry.. I was doing well for a while pulling all the relevant links together about Linux making headway worldwide, then I got waylayed. I've come out of retirement because of THIS monstrosity of an ad which I increasingly see coming up on Linux related pages. I hate advertising like this that is designed to confuse, but just in case you missed it: "State Government says Linux was too big a risk"

The following ballot is for voting on a Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process. The vote is being conducted in accordance with the policy delineated in Section A, Standard Resolution Procedure, of the Debian Constitution. We are now in the second and final week of this vote. At the time of writing, 132 people have voted, out of a potential 1049. This is somewhat of an record for low participation.

Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was. It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out. My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Beginnings of a list view, and an applet browser integrated into Plasma. Optimisations in Konqueror. More work, including image practice support in Parley. XMP metadata support in Digikam, with new splashscreens announced. Work on playlists in Amarok 2. The Noatun music player becomes a KPart, with musings on its KDE 4 future. Further work on Phonon, with developments on the GStreamer backend. KNetworkManager is ported to work with NetworkManager 0.7. Deep refactoring in the Eigen 2 library rewrite. Kickoff is ported to KDE 4 as a candidate menu replacement option. A plan is hatched to get Kopete ready for the KDE 4.0 release. Import of the KBreakout game to playground/games in KDE SVN. Final moves in the recent KDE SVN reorganisation effort. The KDE Bug Tracker starts to be upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0.