Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.

When you think of databases usually MySQL or Oracle or even Microsoft SQL Server come to mind. Yet, object oriented databases have the potential to cut down coding nuts and bolts and speed up app development time – particularly for those migrating to Linux from Windows. Here’s one such compelling SourceForge hosted open source system to do just this.

Breathe new functionality into your router with Tomato third-party firmware for popular models of Broadcom-based routers, including popular models manufactured by Linksys. Most consumers and users don't know the code for Linksys firmware is entirely open source and based on Linux. That allows developers to create customized firmware that extends the functionality of the router through a plethora of new features. Tomato provides a robust set of advanced features that outperform the default Linksys firmware, and rival other open source firmware such as DD-WRT in terms of functionality. Many different routers support Tomato, including models from Asus, Buffalo, and Linksys; a full compatibility listing can be found on Wikipedia or in the developer FAQ.

With the simplest of tools, I created a set of dynamic web pages. The tools I used were a sparse set of lean text files for content, one template page and all augmented by some anorexic php code. It's my propensity to experiment hastily pasting in rash changes that some times I soon rue. Nonetheless, my making such mistakes were the source of my determination to implement the subset of dynamically driven web pages described here. The aforementioned experience changed my direction as a developer. That outcome was positive for me. Finally,I can recommend these techniques to others that have a similar conditions on their site.

One of the biggest arguments used against Linux in grade school level education is that we aren't teaching kids to use the applications they'll use in the "real world". As the Technology Director for a K-12 school district, I've heard that argument many times. After all these years, I still don't buy it. Truthfully, to really give kids a well rounded education, we should expose them to as many different types of technology as we can. Children should be comfortable using whatever tool is at their disposal to accomplish a given task. This isn't a new concept by any stretch of the imagination. For some reason, when it comes to computers however, the "Microsoft Mantra" is all too prevalent.

The Linux kernel includes support for performing RAID-1 in software. RAID-1 maintains the same filesystem on two or more disks, so that you can lose all but the last disk and still retain all of your data. This seems wonderful until you consider that an error in RAM, a power supply failure, or another hardware component in the machine can still potentially corrupt your precious data. With Chiron FS you can maintain a RAID-1 on the disks of two machines over a network, so if one machine goes down, you'll still be able to access your filesystem.

Have you ever wondered what Iused and %Iused mean in UNIX commands like df or what people are talking about when the say inode? UNIX and Linux systems both use inodes, and IBM AIX is no different. Discover what an inode is and why inodes are important to UNIX, the structure of an inode, and commands for working with inodes.

Nearly a year after the Free Software Foundation released an updated version of the General Public License - the GPLv3 - there appears to be a great deal of confusion about what the license actually means, if one goes by two recent publications.

Here’s a little sneak preview of some of the educational sessions at this year’s Summit. And who better to outline their talks than the speakers themselves? In this first installment, Rik van Riel talks about computing speed; Fedora developer (and Red Hat engineer) Bill Nottingham outlines his thoughts on the most recent Fedora release; and Tom Callaway sums up his plans to speak about the simplest ways to use RPM.

With the recent release of Puppy Linux 4.00, developer Barry Kauler and his team have provided a lightweight but functional Linux operating system. To help reduce size and include more functionality over the previous binary-package-based Puppy 3.01, Puppy 4.00 has been compiled from a Slackware 12-based source. Yet despite its small size -- the ISO file is a meager 87.1MB -- Puppy has an abundance of applications, with more than enough for an average user.

Media processing vendor Pika Technologies Inc. recently announced that its Warp appliance line is customer-ready and ready to slay the Nortels and Ciscos of the world in a bid for the small to midsize corporate telespace. Pika's hardware line, which includes the Appliance for Asterisk and Appliance for Linux, is bundled with an open-source platform that will let develops tweak the software to their telephony needs.

IBM announced the completion of a one-petaflop supercomputer that runs Red Hat Linux. Twice as fast as the previous record-setter, the IBM Blue Gene, the Roadrunner uses a hybrid design that combines 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips with 12,960 Cell processor engines.

When you think of Linux, you probably think of open source software and security, but not gaming. Most people think if you are into gaming, Windows is your only option. A few years ago this might have been the case but not anymore. So, if you are a Linux power user, or just prefer Linux, here are a few of your options for playing games on your Linux box.

Silos and walled gardens are giving way to collabetition in the mobile handset industry. Faced with customer demands to innovate at nearly light speed, mobile handset makers are discovering that collaborating and using open source software can help them develop products faster, writes Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation.

Lakin Hospital, a long-term nursing facility operated by the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, has adopted an open source electronic health record. The implementation is part of an ongoing project that will unite all of West Virginia's state-run healthcare facilities through a contiguous electronic repository of patient information.

At the Geek Ranch we recently made a decision to implement some software in Python. Or, more accurately, I decided and there was no disagreement. Then Python gets picked as the best scripting language in the LJ Readers' Choice survey. That inspired me to write this article (and get ready for Perl and Ruby fans to start yelling at me). To understand my position, you need to understand my background and experience. Yeah, this is is going to be long but I think it is necessary.

Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle's Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS. Now it's IBM, which has taken old OpenOffice.org code under the now-retired Sun Industry Standards Source License and released it as a proprietary closed source freeware office suite. The first stable release of IBM Lotus Symphony, released last week, has no obvious advantages over OpenOffice.org. The suite is targeted at enterprise customers, at the expense of free and open source alternatives.

Project Gutenberg (PG) collects and maintains a library of public domain books in electronic text format, in an assortment of languages. That's all well and good, but potential readers still need a method to access PG's collection. I recently sat down to test a handful of e-text readers that offer integration with the 24,000 PG titles. Searching on Freshmeat and SourceForge.net turns up five alternatives: GutenPy, Guten, JBook, PyGE, and GutenBrowser. Of those, GutenPy, Guten, and PyGE are all Python applications, JBook is a Java app, and GutenBrowser is written in C++.

It used to be that companies could get away with stealing GPLed open-source code into their own software and no one would be the wiser. Those days are done. Oh, it still happens, but the SFLC’s (Software Freedom Law Center) recent legal actions on behalf of BusyBox’s principal developers have been putting the fear of open-source violations into unscrupulous software companies. In the latest chapter, SFLC has sued Bell Microproducts Inc. and Super Micro Computer Inc. for using BusyBox’s open-source software without honoring its open-source license.

Free-software advocate Richard Stallman has spoken out against the association of open-source software with London's "unethical" Oyster-card system. In an email sent to ZDNet.co.uk on Monday, Stallman criticised the use of open-source software, such as Red Hat Linux, JBoss middleware and Apache web-server software, in the online payment system for the Oyster contactless cards used on London's underground rail network.