Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Pentaho Corp., the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced that its current version 2 alpha release of the Pentaho BI Platform, as well as future versions, will be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GPLv2). GPLv2 is a software license published by the Free Software Foundation. Pentaho will also provide a “FLOSS Exception”, which simplifies distribution of Pentaho BI Platform with certain other open source licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org). The Pentaho BI Platform is the underlying infrastructure that provides integration of Pentaho’s reporting, analysis, dashboard, data integration, and data mining capabilities into the Pentaho Open BI Suite.

Pia Waugh is a leading advocate for FLOSS in her home country, Australia, and all over the world. In addition to running a consultancy in partnership with her husband, she is the vice president of Linux Australia, the president of Software Freedom International (sponsor of the annual Software Freedom Day events), and on the board of directors of the OLPC Australia program. Perhaps because her activities are born out of a love for open source software, or maybe because her husband Jeff is also a major figure in global FLOSS, Waugh says the balance between work and life for her right now is "nonexistent. But we love what we do."

It all started in 1975 with a man named Will Crowther who wanted to create something for his daughters that tied together two of his loves: role playing games and cave exploration. The result was a game called "Adventure" (also sometimes called "Colossal Cave"). He wrote the game on the mainframe he used at work and while his daughters loved it, others who discovered the game did to, and they shared it far and wide. Stanford student Don Woods discovered the program on one of the university computers in 1976 and with Crowther's permission extended the Fortran original, adding more rooms and treasure.

While eBay was once seen solely as the world's garage sale, it is evolving into a general commerce marketplace, and that makes auction monitoring applications all the more useful. JBidwatcher, one of the best open source eBay utilities, has just released a major update. Let's take a look. JBidwatcher is the work of Morgan Schweers, who has overseen its development for close to eight years. It hasn't always been easy, though -- JBidwatcher 0.9 was released in 2003, but 1.0 didn't come until 2006. Since that time, only a few minor updates came down the pipe, usually to fix breakages when eBay changed its formatting or URI scheme.

Getting high-performance, three-dimensional graphics working under Linux is quite a challenge even when the fundamental hardware programming information is available. One component of this problem is memory management: a graphics processor (GPU) is, essentially, a computer of its own with a distinct view of memory. Managing the GPU's memory - and its view of system RAM - must be done carefully if the resulting system is intended to work at all, much less with acceptable performance.

If free software development goes by trends, then the current era might be called the Age of Extensions. In the last few years, every application from the Mozilla family to OpenOffice.org to Gedit has created frameworks in which developers can add their own small bits of functionality to an application. In the last 10 months or so, a community has taken this trend directly to the desktop with what it calls "screenlets" -- small applications that are added directly to the desktop. The result is dozens of tools, some new and many old, that are in most cases not only themable, but also heavily customizable.

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you're teaching someone how to do something on a computer, and recordMyDesktop is a great little Linux application for creating screencasts. YouTube is full of recordMyDesktop screencasts showing all kinds of captures, including Beryl/Compiz in action. Carla Schroder shows you how it's done.

In today’s world, web development is all about turnaround. Businesses want to maximize production outcome while minimizing development and production time. Small, lean development teams are increasingly becoming the normal large development departments. Enter Django: a popular Python web framework that invokes the RWAD (rapid web application development) and DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles with clean, pragmatic design.

The GNU diff and patch utilities let you compare files to generate a patch that describes the changes between files. You can then apply the patch file on that machine or another. You might think to use diff and patch on XML files, since they are just text files -- and depending on your application, diff and patch might serve your needs well. However, as things such as the sequence in which attributes are ordered in an element tag are not important in an XML file, using specific tools that are aware of the XML standard can make seeing differences and sending XML-aware "patch" files much more attractive.

Have you ever been in a situation where you realised the frailty of your own existence? It happened to me. I sat thinking this is the end of the line but how little did I realise that I had a saviour alongside me in the form of the free open source operating system called Linux.

As anyone who’s spent much time around the Mozilla community knows, t-shirts are an incredibly important part of our culture. So, when Mary showed me a stack of classic shirts she’d collected from Mitchell, chofmann, Myk and others, I thought it would be fun to document all the Mozilla t-shirts throughout the years (with a few Netscape ones thrown in for historical context).

Google Desktop has been available for some time now on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. However, Google Gadgets--mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on the desktop--have, until now, only been available on Windows and Mac. Jim Zhuang, of Google's software engineering team, announced the first Linux version on Tuesday.

In response to our request for users' thoughts on their favorite Linux games, we received, as anticipated, a flood of emails. Hundreds of games were recommended for inclusion in this compilation, with a few people eulogizing at great length why a particular title could not be omitted. To say that strong emotions were stirred by our previous '42 of the Best Linux Games' feature is an understatement!

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. They say never to begin a novel talking about the weather. I guess nobody told Dickens, but I digress…Today I booted into Windows XP MCE for the first time in 24 days. I would like to share my experience. I kept careful notes because I knew what to expect from past experience and I anticipated some of the problems that I will share.

Over the years, I came to appreciate a number of organizations that although not directly linked to free software and open source are of interest for the FOSS community. Pretty much everybody knows the free software foundation, the software freedom law center, the Linux foundation, The GNU project, the open source initiative, Creative Commons or Groklaw. Here is a list of other extremely interesting (mostly US-born) organizations and/or projects.

Canonical, the company behind the highly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, unveiled its Ubuntu Netbook Remix yesterday at the Computex show in Taiwan. The Remix is based on Ubuntu Mobile Edition and is designed specifically for mobile computers with a subnotebook form factor.

Want a version of Linux for your Intel Atom powered “NetBook” – aka Asus Eee PC type subnotebook? Canonical hopes that Ubuntu Remix will fit the bill for OEMs – and presumably users, too - and has launched it at Computex in Taiwan. Will it?

Note-taking applications are far from scarce on GNU/Linux desktops. If your needs are simple, you can use KNotes in KDE or Sticky Notes in GNOME. If you want integration with address books and email, you may prefer Evolution's built-in Memos pane. For those who need more than basic notes, the increasingly sophisticated Tomboy may be a solution, assuming they have no objection to running an application built using Mono. However, by far the most versatile note-taking application is KDE's Basket, a tool so flexible and complete that you might prefer to think of it as a personal wiki, a producer of scrapbooks, or even a creator of temporary desktops. The future of Basket as a project is uncertain at the moment, but that doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of its power.

Tony Luckoffered some statistics focused on the frequency of developers that only contribute to the Linux kernel one time,"I skimmed through looking for drive-by contributors (defined as someone who contributes to just one release and is then never heard from again)." Starting with the 2.6.11 kernel, he suggested the following numbers:"63 [developers contributed patches] in version 2.6.11 [and then were] never seen again, 148 in version 2.6.12, 128 in version 2.6.13, 92 in version 2.6.14, 96 in version 2.6.15, 122 in version 2.6.16, 137 in version 2.6.17, 140 in version 2.6.18, 135 in version 2.6.19, 95 in version 2.6.20, 136 in version 2.6.21, 153 in version 2.6.22, 179 in version 2.6.23, 179 in version 2.6.24, and 304 in version 2.6.25".

The open-source Linux operating system is seeing major growth in the mobile and embedded space, especially in the smartphone market. Handset makers and mobile carriers are adopting open-source software because it significantly reduces licensing and development costs and also provides higher flexibility. That is why analyst firm ABI Research is predicting that Linux-based mobile devices will account for nearly a quarter of the smartphone market within the next five years.