Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With optical character recognition (OCR), you can scan the contents of a document into a single file of editable text. This article, which focuses on scanning books, describes the steps you need to take to prepare pages for optimal OCR results, and compares various free OCR tools to determine which is the best at extracting the text. First, fire up your distribution's package manager to fetch a few packages and dependencies. In Debian, the required packages are sane, sane-utils, imagemagick, unpaper, tesseract-ocr, and tesseract-ocr-eng. You may also install other language packs for Tesseract -- for example, I installed tesseract-ocr-deu for German text.

One of the things that initially attracted me to OLPC was that we Nepalis could it make it our own. So often ideas and initiatives that come from the West are pre-packaged and controlled. With XO's we can localize the Sugar interface, develop activities that accord to our needs and culture, and come up with power solutions that work in our particular environments. One of the key things that we needed to localize was the name of the laptop itself. This has happened in an unexpected manner.

Cooperative Linux (coLinux for short) occupies a unique niche in the field of virtualization -- that of running GNU/Linux natively in Windows. Although begun in 2000, the project has only recently released version 0.72, but it has given the underlying technology to several other higher profile projects such as andLinux and Ulteo Virtual Desktop. Now, with the current interest in attracting Windows users to GNU/Linux, as evidenced by such tools as Ubuntu's Wubi and Fedora's Live USB-Creator, the technology behind coLinux seems overdue for a closer look.

In a bid to further Linux file system innovation, HP has announced it is opening up its Tru64 Advanced File System (AdvFS) to the open source Linux community. The AdvFS file system, which has its roots in Digital Equipment Corporation's Digital Unix, is used in mission-critical deployments. HP, which gained AdvFS through a series of acquisitions, has its own flavor of Unix, HP-UX, and that has its own file system.

Nokia Latest News about Nokia is getting in the game of open source cell phone software with its newly acquired Symbian Latest News about Symbian platform. Nokia -- which had already owned 48 percent of Symbian -- bought the remaining 52 percent of the company Tuesday and immediately shifted the product to a royalty-free model. Several leading cell phone providers have already signed on to form the Symbian Foundation and support the single platform. AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone are all now on board.

Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded operating system of the same name, just turned 10, but it won't see its next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the company, 52% for about &euro264 million, or approximately $410 million. In addition to purchasing Symbian, Nokia says it will be open-sourcing the Symbian operating system.

Most free-libre accounting applications that ship with GNU/Linux distributions are for personal accounting only: they manage one person's finances. Corporations and accounting firms need far greater functionality, however, such as the ability to maintain a complete sets of multi-company accounts, tally final accounts automatically, generate MIS reports, and function synchronously across multiple offices. Though there are some free-libre applications with such functionality, such as SQL Ledger and Ledger-SMB, the lay user may find their installation complicated, as it can involve manual configuration with the PostgreSQL database, possibly the programming language Perl, and the remote access software Samba.

Goran Fransson, a Swedish developer and entrepreneur, has given a deposition in the Barracuda-Trend Micro case that appears to seriously undermine Trend Micro's patent on gateway virus scanning. As Linux.com reported in January, Trend Micro is suing Barracuda Networks before the American International Trade Commission (ITC). Trend Micro's claim is that, by distributing Clam Antivirus (ClamAV), the free software security application, Barracuda is violating Trend Micro's patent 5623600, which was filed on 26 September, 1995, and has since been used against such companies as Symantec and McAfee. The case is being heard by the ITC apparently because of Trend Micro's claim that, because ClamAV is developed by programmers around the world, it is imported software in the United States.

Motorola and Kodak announced a cameraphone that combines Motorola's "ModeShift" interface with Kodak imaging technology. Available in China next month, and later this year elsewhere, Motorola's MotoZine ZN5 mashes up a 5-megapixel camera with a multimedia smartphone.

Acer says the Aspire One is not a laptop. It might look and smell like one, but the company has gone to great lengths to promote the message that the One is an 'Internet device'. Others, such as Intel, refer to it as a netbook — a new category of device spawned by the Asus EeePC 701. You, friends, can call it what you want. We'll stick with mini laptop.

Sadly, some would say, we now have a dual boot XO. Gizmodo has just released a video of the XO laptop booting both the Linux-based Sugar and the Microsoft Windows XP operating systems.

Speedometer shows a graph of your current and past network speed in your console, letting you see your network connection's up and downstream speed and history at a glance. You can also use speedometer directly on a file to monitor the download performance and history of a specific download instead of all network traffic. When displaying the total network traffic, speedometer is sort of like gkrellm, in that you can see the current and past network performance on a graph, but you can easily run it over an SSH connection without having to set up gkrellmd.

Virtusa, a Sri Lankan IT services company founded in 1996, was using proprietary version control and collaboration systems to develop software for its clients until founder Kris Canekeratne decided that a custom solution built on open source components was a better fit for internal use. As a result, the company ended up saving millions of dollars on licensing fees and acquisition costs.

With Gizmo5, not only can you use your PC to make or get phone calls on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh PCs. But unlike similar programs, such as Skype, Gizmo5 uses open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jabber, which makes it interoperable with a variety of clients. Previously known as the Gizmo Project, Gizmo5 is both the name of a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network (with its own servers and users, working over the Internet) and of a program that lets you communicate by using that network. Though it uses open standards, Gizmo5 doesn't qualify as open software itself. It uses several proprietary codecs, and the client code itself is closed source.

Open source is no longer a novelty, even within the largest corporations. Today, 53 percent of businesses use open-source software, according to a recent CIO.com survey. However, not enough of those businesses are contributing code back to the open-source community, said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, at the Red Hat Summit. And such contributions would benefit the enterprise even more than it would the development community, he explained. According to Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, 75 percent of software is written for in-house use. As Whitehurst pointed out, much of that code is never used—a true waste of resources. "Think how much software is written out there that is behind proprietary walls," Whitehurst said.

Acoustic Reality is a Danish company that sells speakers, amplifiers, storage devices, cables, and other products to build top-shelf home entertainment centers. It recently released eAR OS Free Edition, a free media center system built on top of Ubuntu that features a free version of the Acoustic Reality software technology used in the $100 eAR RT-OS Enterprise Edition and in the company's hardware Media 4 products. It provides a user-friendly media center along with a nice implementation of Ubuntu.

If you drift between distributions, one of the first things you might notice is that Gedit, GNOME's text editor, is not always the same on each system. For instance, in Debian, Gedit is a relatively simple text edit, while in Ubuntu, it sprouts features that Debian users may never have seen. The difference is the plugins that each distribution packages with Gedit and enables by default. Many of these plugins make only small alterations by themselves, but enable a dozen or more and you'll find Gedit transformed almost out of recognition, regardless of whether you are using it to write code or plain text.

Disasters happen to the best of computers. Luckily, open source apps like SystemRescueCD, dd, Partedmagic, BackTrack, Security Tools Distribution, Helix, and TestDisk can help recover important data and bring dead systems back to life.

French open-source data integration vendor Talend Monday unveiled its data-profiling application, which will allow companies to assess their data quality as a key part of data integration projects. In an announcement Monday, the company claims that its Open Profiler application is the first open-source data profiler to be released to the marketplace.

Neuros Technology is the developer of the Neuros OSD, a digital media recorder. The devices works with external hard drives to archive and copy your media. Unlike a normal DVR, the OSD can record from any source: set top boxes, DVD players, DTV signals. It is limited to standard definition signals (720x480 max), but works with a plethora of formats, including MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, FLV, WMV, DiVX and others. Other limitations include S-Video input (no component) and no support for digital signals from HDMI sources.