Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Free and open source software (FOSS) is only beginning to find a foothold in computer science departments in North America. FOSS tools may be used in teaching or be the subject of research or special committees, but few departments include courses that introduce students to the FOSS community. As a result, when North Carolina State University created a FOSS graduate course in the 2008 spring semester, it turned to Red Hat to find an instructor with a suitable background of FOSS involvement and university teaching experience. Community manager Greg DeKoenigsberg recommended performance tools engineer Will Cohen, who now looks back at the experience with an eye to how what he and his students learned might help other instructors.

Building a MythTV digital video recorder (DVR) is a series of small battles -- configuring digital sound, aligning your video sources and channel guide data, getting XvMC running, and so on. Any tool that simplifies one of those battles is welcome, and GNOME LIRC Properties promises to be just such a tool. It is a shortcut to configuring infrared receivers and remote controls, and although it is not perfect, it is a good step in the right direction.

The traditional file permission model, where read, write, and execute permissions are set on each file for the user, group, and others (UGO) has one drawback: It can't be used to define per-user or per-group permissions. For that, you need to employ access control lists (ACL). Eiciel is a graphical tool that integrates with the Nautilus file manager and allows for easy ACL management. The UGO model lets you associate only one group with a file. If you try to define read permissions on a file for user Charlie and read and write permissions for user Alexia, and Charlie and Alexia belong to different groups, you'll see what I mean. With ACLs, you can specify elaborate permissions for multiple users and groups.

SSHMenu adds a button to your GNOME panel that displays a configurable drop-down list of hosts that you have might like to connect to with SSH. SSHMenu is packaged and available in repositories for both Ubuntu (as sshmenu-gnome) and Fedora (gnome-applet-sshmenu). Other SSHMenu packages available for both distributions do not include GNOME support. In those, the button for the SSH menu is started in its own window and an xterm is started when you wish to connect to a host with SSH. If you install the GNOME-aware SSHMenu packages, you can add SSHMenu to your panel by right-clicking the panel and choosing "Add to Panel..." and selecting the "SSH Menu Applet." When using the GNOME-aware SSHMenu, a gnome-terminal is started to handle your SSH connections, and you can select the profile gnome-terminal should use on a per-host basis. That lets you specify a font and background color in the terminal that can act as a reminder of which host that terminal is connected with.

My previous article discussed a set of dynamic menus based upon no more than one, simple web page template, a few appropriate text files and absolutely minimal php code. There is a caveat, I dodged my responsibilities, i.e. I showed no effort to catch failures and errors. This was due to my initial code being flawed, hence, the first article was able to stress the core simplicity of the endeavor. Now, however, I attend to more serious business of both noticing failures and notifying those responsible.

With openSUSE 11.0 just a few days away, it’s time to look at one of the stars of the show: KDE. In openSUSE 11.0, you get two KDEs for the price of one. Here we’ll take a look at what’s coming in KDE, and talk to one of openSUSE’s KDE contributors, Stephan Binner.

Email: businesses can't stay competitive without it, but the bigger a company is, the more of a headache managing an email server can be. There are plenty of email management tools on the market, but many are expensive or lack easy customization. AtMail recently added an open source option to its product line that offers many of the same features commonly found in other Web mail apps, but for the low, low cost of free.

As the representative for Norway in the recent OOXML ratification process, Steve Pepper has become an outspoken critic of the IEC/ISO process. Pepper is also a passionate advocate of XML, open standards and Topic Maps. Here Pepper, who is in South Africa for the XML in Government workshop, speaks to Tectonic about what happened in Norway, Topic Maps and why open standards are important for governments.

Already announced, the new winner is IBM’s RoadRunner – the first supercomputer to break the ‘mythical’ 1 TFop/s barrier. At a recent benchmark, it achieved 1.026 TFop/s on the Linpack benchmark. The OS is yet to be confirmed, but pretty-much every other IBM computer in the list is running a version of SUSE. I’ll be guessing much the same as you! Assuming the remainder of the list looks a lot like the previous list (November 2007), running second and third, we find a couple of IBM Blue Gene systems, then SGI and Hewlett Packard get a look in.

Catch all of your podcasts in style with gPodder, a Python application designed to retrieve and organize your podcasts for easy playback. gPodder can handle both RSS 2.0 and Atom podcast feeds. As soon as you add episodes to the podcatcher, the application can download them using a few different protocols, including authenticated HTTP (for feeds that require a password) and BitTorrent. BitTorrent is especially nice for popular podcasts that have a lot of subscribers and large episodes, because you can use it to download from multiple sources, called seeds, and speed up your downloads.

As you may have noticed, Firefox 3 is released today. Excited by this prospect, the first thing I did when I got up was to rush to my computer to download it (yes, pathetic, I know). And what do I find? That only Firefox 2 is on offer. I go to the main Download Day 2008 site, and for all its flash/Flash zoomable graphics, I can't find any information about exactly when Firefox 3 will be publicly available, which seems crazy: the one thing this site should be doing is making it easy for as many people as possible to download Firefox 3.

Mozilla Mac developer Josh Aas has written a weblog post discussing some of the under-the-hood improvements specific to the Mac OS X version of Mozilla Firefox 3. Josh describes how Firefox 3 has largely switched from Apple's legacy Carbon API (initially created to make it easier for developers to migrate OS 9 applications to OS X) to the more modern Cocoa. He also details how Firefox 3 delivers native-looking Aqua-style form controls in Web pages and explains how this actually has very little to do with the change to Cocoa.

The trash project allows you to interact with your desktop trashcan from the command line. It lets users "undo" deletions made with the trash command in a similar manner to restoring files from the trashcan in a desktop environment. For experienced Linux users, the trash command comes in handy when you want to put a file into the trashcan from the command line. Because trash implements the FreeDesktop.org Trash Specification, it plays nicely with the trashcan offered by the KDE desktop environment. That means you can trash a directory from the command line and see it in your trashcan from Konqueror. Unfortunately, the trash implementation in GNOME 2.20 did not communicate with either KDE 3.5.8 or the trash command.

Novell Monday released updates to its Suse Linux kernel designed to make the operating system more efficient when running on top of VMware environments. The upgrade to the Suse Linux Enterprise kernel lets it take advantage of paravirtualization techniques so it runs more efficiently as a guest operating system. Specifically, Novell has built in support for VMware's Virtual Machine Interface (VMI)."The patch to the kernel provides increased performance and better interoperability," says Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of product management for open platform solutions at Novell.

One of the arguments I often hear from people who are trying to use linux for the first time is that they are not sure if they can switch back to their original choice of OS (usually windows), if they are not satisfied with their experience with linux. These are usually the people who are not as tech savy or previously had bad experience while trying to install linux which resulted in destroying their windows installation. With each iteration of windows OS Microsoft has made it less friendlier for linux to be installed along with windows.

While the computing giant has no immediate plans to open source DB2, market conditions may make it unavoidable, according to Chris Livesey, IBM's U.K. director of information management software. "We have a light version of the product offered for free, which is a step towards exposing our core (DB2) technology," said Livesey. "Looking at IBM's heritage in contributing to the open source market, we've been particularly keen to lead that market. Open source is an interesting space, as a whole. As the future unfolds, and the economics become clearer, there's going to be more commitment to open source by everybody. We've made good steps towards that."

Wide take-up of the new version would further boost the market share of the browser which is currently used by about 15% of net users. With the release, Firefox developer Mozilla is attempting to set a record for the most downloads over 24 hours. "It's a global effort to make history," said Paul Kim, head of marketing at Mozilla.

"I regularly run and post various benchmarks comparing POHMELFS, NFS, XFS and Ext4, [the] main goal of POHMELFS at this stage is to be essentially as fast as [the] underlying local filesystem. And it is..." explained Evgeniy Polyakov, suggesting that the POHMELFS networking filesystem performs 10% to 300% faster than NFS, depending on the file operation. In particular, he noted that it still suffers from random reads, an area that he's currently focused on fixing.

As free software projects balloon in size, many struggle to create and maintain a sense of community. One of the projects that has been most successful in its community-building efforts is the content management system Joomla! In the last couple of years, its Joomla!Days have been held around the world. A particular case in point is this past weekend's Vancouver Joomla!Day, whose organization and use of social networking to expand the scope of the event make it a case study in modern community-building.

Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it's the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable. When you mix a virtual machine with real software you get a virtual appliance. Some complete Linux distributions as well as specialized apps are available as virtual appliances. Thanks to the ease in packaging one, there's no shortage of virtual appliances around, if you know where to look.