Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Nathan Zale Dowlen objects to proprietary software, so when he opened his new law office, he outfitted it with Ubuntu Linux and open source software. Cost was the main factor in his decision at first, but he has since come to appreciate the security found in FOSS and the ease of use found with Ubuntu. Dowlen has used Linux and open source software since 2006, when he attended the Nashville School of Law, and had no trouble with compatibility, since "OpenOffice.org will open almost anything thrown at it." He recorded lectures with Audacity and even found that his "Linux based laptop did a better job of automatically finding printers on the school's wireless network than when it ran Windows."

In this second part of my survey I focus on the tools that achieve this new synthesis of arts. Alas, due to space constraints I am unable to include all the software I would like to have reviewed, but perhaps a future article will deal with those programs. Meanwhile, I present to my readers these brief profiles of Pd, Fluxus, and AVSynthesis. Each of these programs takes a different approach to the practical concerns of blending images (moving or still) with sound (realtime or recorded).

It is interesting to watch the activities of JTC1/SC34 as they go through the motions of processing activities related to OOXML, long after any serious justification for their continuation has ceased. That is the nature of bureaucracy — wind up their clockwork and watch the little soldiers go through their prescribed motions. Come back in an hour and they may be stuck in a corner or knocked over onto the floor. But they'll keep on moving their feet, back and forth, in small steps toward ends unknown and unknowable, the little senseless mechanical men.

At the beginning of its massive legal fight against Linux in 2003, The SCO Group Inc. imagined a day when companies like IBM, Novell Inc. and others would pay it large amounts of cash for alleged infringements on SCO-owned Unix code. Instead, even as those legal fights meander through U.S. courts, the tables were turned and SCO yesterday was ordered to pay $2.55 million to Novell for collecting Unix licensing revenue from Sun Microsystems Inc. that it wasn't entitled to collect.

Since I participate in the Brazilian group that analyzed the OpenXML, I have the distinct impression that a hidden agenda have guided the decisions of the JTC1 and more recently the SC34 at ISO. Not so long ago, the major evidence for me was the number of countries that changed their votes in the last days OpenXML voting, signaling a major political agreement for the approval of standard, but now, a few months later more strange thing is happening.

Remodeling? Like free software? If you answer "yes" to both questions, try taking Sweet Home 3D for a spin. The open source, cross-platform 3-D interior design application is simple to use and simple to learn. You don't create individual objects in Sweet Home 3D like you do in a modeling app like Blender; instead you focus on the layout and design of the rooms themselves.

There are few pieces of software that users touch more often than office productivity suites. The market monster is, of course, Microsoft Office, with the lion's share of all licenses for office productivity tools. But two trends -- open source and cloud computing -- are offering a new generation of Office alternatives that businesses may want to consider.

It didn't take the enterprising community of Asus Eee PC users long to come up with some great tweaking tools for this Linux-based ultra-low-cost laptop. Just a few weeks after the official launch of Eee PC, the first tweaking utilities started to appear on the EeeUser forums. Today, you can choose from a wide selection of tools that can help you to customize your tiny laptop and make your work on it more efficient.

Virtualization has evolved from a development tool running on the desktop to an essential component of IT infrastructure strategy. Companies use virtualization as a means to increase desktop, server and storage utilization, to consolidate data center operations and utility costs, and to reduce the data center's floor space.

Google's purchase of YouTube always seemed questionable to some observers: it looked as if Google were buying itself a whole new source of copyright lawsuits. One of the benefits of that purchase came through on July 2, when a U.S. District Court ordered Google to hand over its complete set of YouTube traffic logs, containing information about every video viewed on the service. See Groklaw for the full text of the order. If this order stands (and it appears that Google will not appeal it), millions of users worldwide will have their viewing data handed over to a litigious entertainment industry company. There's a couple of important implications to draw from this turn of events, so LWN will venture a little far afield and take a look.

The Postal project includes three programs aimed at benchmarking mail server performance. The main program, postal, sends email messages to a specified list of destination addresses at a specified rate. Postal can let you see how fast your system can process incoming email and thus can help you measure improvements to your mail server when you are making software and hardware changes. For example, you can use postal to tell you whether switching to a different IMAP server will allow you to deliver more messages per second on the same hardware.

In an effort to shine more light on the traditional"dark art" of software development, Borland Software on Monday announced Borland Management Solutions. The three-pronged product leverages Borland's Open Application Lifecycle Management framework, and is designed to enable users to better orchestrate, measure, predict and improve software delivery.

Computing is on the verge of a major paradigm shift with the modern rise in prominence of virtualisation. Fuelled by big corporates interested in the consolidation and energy saving potentials, improvements in virtualisation have hit the point where Linux could be a casualty.

In the first installment of this tutorial series we configured Ubuntu to share with Windows and set your Computer Name and Workgroup values. In Part II, we discovered the nitty gritty of the network connection details in Ubuntu. Finally, we'll figure out exactly how to share the files on your Ubuntu machine, both quick and easy, and with access controls.

There's no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo. But if you want a distro that teaches you the basics of Linux as you set it up; is well documented, lightweight, and zippy; and has a dependency-resolving packaging system, you need Arch Linux.

It is recommended that a resizing procedure be tested before performing it on a filesystem that contains critical data. It is also strongly recommended that data backups are created and verified before resizing filesystems. To assist the reader in becoming familiar with the resizing procedure, the rest of this article describes a scenario in which un-partitioned disk space is used to test logical volume and ext3 filesystem resizing.

Miguel de Icaza has criticized plans for the next GNU Gnome cross-platform environment that risks damaging the Linux desktop ISV ecosystem by focusing on the Mac. De Icaza, leading the Mono and Moonlight cross-platform .NET projects at Novell, has warned a "new crop" of developers pushing plans for Gtk+ 3 risk "throwing away years of work" on Gtk+. They're also failing to recognize the value of having an ISV ecosystem working to put Gnome on Linux. Gtk+ is the tool set for building the Gnome graphical user interface, with version three the next planned major update.

A Datamation editorial by Matt Hartley argues that Linux purists should quit complaining about closed-source code and get on with their lives. Boycotts against vendors such as nVidia that refuse to disclose source code for their drivers will only make software companies think twice about supporting Linux, he maintains.

OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent "squatters and phishers" from snapping them up. He's keeping them safe so you can have a chance to use them. However, to some people, based on Johnson's past practices, it's not clear how OpenDomain.org differs from other organizations that buy up domain names in the hopes of future gains.

The reasons for the user revolt against KDE 4, which we reported on yesterday, are still being sorted out. They appear to be a complex mixture that includes the assumptions that KDE used in its planning, the rush by distributions to include a release that was not ready for general use, and sensationalism in free software blogs and journalism. One reason that has yet to be discussed is one of the potentially most significant -- the apparent shift in the FOSS user base. Judging from the quickness and thoroughness with which KDE 4 was rejected, the audience for free software seems to have shifted from a small group of knowledgeable users that treasures innovation to a larger one that values convention and familiarity and is actively suspicious of change.