Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Google's strict code of secrecy may work fine for protecting its internal operations. But the company isn't ingratiating itself to software developers by keeping major updates to its Android mobile software platform locked away in a Mountain View dungeon. Now, even those developers once very committed to pushing Google's technology forward are thinking about abandoning Android – the most closed open platform to not yet exist.

Adeona may have been the goddess of safe returns, but if a group of computer science professors and graduate students get their wish, they'll be viewed as the patron saints of secure laptop computer data, thanks to their new open source software service named after the Roman deity. Also, for those who worship at the altar of bargains, Adeona may indeed be a godsend: It's free.

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week.

Concerned about the increasing popularity of Web applications, Marco Barulli of the Clipperz project has written one of the first detailed suggestions about how free and open source software (FOSS) should respond to the trend. Although neither Barulli nor Clipperz is well-known, his ideas are being listened to by such figures as Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a long-time advocate of FOSS in Web applications.

For three health care centers, the challenge was clear: Find a way to improve internal communications by expanding e-mail accounts to all employees, including doctors, nurses, security staffers and dietary workers, without breaking their IT budgets. To do it, the hospitals needed to look at alternatives to traditional ways of creating and administering e-mail accounts. In the end, all three health centers chose an application that could do the work of Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange e-mail administration package while maintaining calendaring and other group features.

An open source software project, originally propped up by European Commission (EC) funds, has released an alpha version of its quality control program, Alitheia Core. Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS – pronounced squash) is intended to develop tools based on identified metrics to define and check the quality of open source software. European businesses, academics and open source software projects developed the new application.

Ampache is a LAMP application that gives you a Web interface to your music collection, allowing you to search, rate, and play your music over the network. It even offers transcoding support to allow clients to play back lossless-encoded FLAC files from the server and stream them to clients as MP3 audio files. Packages for Ampache are in the standard Ubuntu Hardy repository as well as a 1-Click install for openSUSE 11. No Ampache packages are in the Fedora repositories. For this article I'll build Ampache 3.4.1 from source on a 64-bit Fedora 8 machine.

Here are two powerful tools for your MediaWiki installation. One helps you populate your wiki quickly from data in a spreadsheet. The other creates PDF ebooks, complete with tables of contents and page numbers, with a single click from your wiki. MediaWiki, the open source software behind sites such as Wikipedia.com, is not just a wiki, but a complete content management system for Web sites and intranets. But if you have installed MediaWiki, you are probably familiar with the challenge of importing content from non-MediaWiki sources. A GPL-licensed Perl script called csv2wiki can help you convert or upload massive amounts of content into your wiki.

OpenOffice.org 3.0, the next major release of the open source office suite, is scheduled to be released in September. Which means that it is pretty much guaranteed to be included in the next release of Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009 and Fedora 10, all of which are due out in October. Until then it is easy enough to test out the beta releases of OpenOffice 3.0 without removing your existing 2x OpenOffice installation. Installing OpenOffice 3.0 beta also means you can test out Sun’s PDF import extension which is also still in development.

Mozilla Corporation has claimed that the transition to Firefox 3.1 won’t be “a major pain-in-the-ass” and pledged developers will not be hit by “surprises along the way”, after royally hacking off users with the 3.0 launch. The company's platform evangelist Mark Finkle said on his blog that extension developers, who suffered their fair share of headaches attempting to update add-ons when Firefox 3 landed last month, will not experience similar problems with the next version of the open source web browser.

Sometimes it's the little things that can cause you to rethink how you look at a company. For much of this decade Microsoft has been the"evil empire" with Apple, Linux and Google on the side of the Force. With Microsoft doing some positive things, Apple's decision to raise iPhone prices, Google's attack on single parents and Richard Stallman's attack on Bill Gates' philanthropy, these entities' images may be changing.

[Be warned, Rob Enderle wrote this. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems lost the first Rich Internet Application (RIA) war when Macromedia (now part of Adobe) ate its applets for lunch following a schoolyard brawl. Now Sun has a second chance. But, to succeed in such an unforgiving market, Sun needs something special. A mature, powerful platform, a buzzing community, some seriously talented people with an eye for visual design, and some butt-kicking WYSIWYG tools so that non-programmers are invited to the party as well.

LXer Feature: 13-Jul-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a slew of Microsoft related articles ranging from more MS-Yahoo! fallout to keeping a report in the UK from going public. A OpenSUSE 11.0 review, VMware Ousts CEO Diane Greene, The Swiss Army Distro, Xandros buys Linspire - What does it mean for Linux? and on a sad note longtime Linux evangelist Joe Barr passes away.

Tucked away in Deepshikha Monga's short article, "OLPC looks to World Bank for India funding" is a XO laptop bombshell: "Later this year, the XO laptops are expected to hit the retail stores. Sources say Reliance Communications, which partnered OLPC Foundation to conduct an XO pilot project in Maharashtra last year, is looking at retailing these laptops bundled with its CDMA modems." Might this be the reason for Nicholas Negroponte's visit to India in August for OLPC India Day? Regardless, it would be a shocking yet welcomed shift in strategy for One Laptop Per Child.

Virtualisation is a technology that can work wonders: provide a testing environment, enhance your processing power, consolidate your computing resources, decrease running costs, preserve legacy apps and more! Here’s how virtualisation can benefit you and why the Linux route really beats out the competition.

Nearly a year ago, we looked at the status of SystemTap in the context of Sun's much-hyped DTrace tool. Since that time there has been progress, but the basic problem still remains: Linux does not have a good, ready-to-run answer to those wanting the equivalent functionality of DTrace. Due to an apparent disconnect between the developers of SystemTap and the kernel hackers, tracing for the Linux kernel—never mind user space programs—is not up to the competition.

Online identity management and single sign-on still doesn't work. Not well enough, anyway. OpenID is a good step forward. So are a bunch of other less familiar approaches. But we still haven't arrived. For example, I've been a member of Blogger for the duration. That is, since long before Google bought the company. In the old days, making a comment on a Blogger blog was fairly easy. Now it's a lot more complicated. I'm sure that's mostly because comment spam is a gigantic problem, especially for a gigantic company like Google.

Since I did a look at Ubuntu’s early concept art and since I am usually very impressed by Fedora’s final art, I decided that it would make sense to take a look at what has appeared on the Fedora Art Team wiki. I have actually been waiting a few days to do this, since, as of just a few days ago, there were not enough submissions that I liked to talk about.

The emerging medium of the metaverse is giving aspiring filmmakers such as Ariella Furman an outlet to practice their craft in a new setting. Furman makes machinimas starring avatars that can be played either within Second Life or on an everyday Web site.

But what if...just what if you could open the eyes of hundreds, maybe thousands of people at one time. That would indeed be amazing. That is exactly what we are going to do. You and I. On July 28th, 2008; a significant percentage of Felton will go Microsoft-free for one week...maybe an entire month. Maybe for good. The arrangements have been made and the news is going forth in Felton. Businesses and home users alike are excited about one of their own -- Larry Cafiero of HeliOS Solutions West in Felton -- joining a committed group of volunteers into their town to show them a better way to operate their computers.