Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

KeyTouch is an application designed to allow you to make full use of all the special function keys on your keyboard, whether the hardware supports Linux or not. It's a great idea, especially with all the multimedia applications that come standard with today's PCs. But as is often the case, the devil is in the implementation details. Marvin Raaijmakers wrote the first version of KeyTouch in 2004, after finding he could not configure the extra function keys on a new keyboard he had just bought. Today, KeyTouch is included in most modern distributions (Mandriva, openSUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu, to name a few) and the project is actively seeking packagers for other distributions.

Everyone knows the drama of Microsoft and Yahoo. Or at least, most know the most recent developments, as the series' beginning at the end of January has been so long-running and drawn out that many have put the early developments out of mind. When DailyTech last reported on the ongoing drama, billionaire Icahn was preparing his board ouster with the help of potential future board member and vocal billionaire blogger Mark Cuban. Microsoft said that it didn't want Yahoo, when Yahoo expressed fresh interest, but it softened a bit and applied for FTC approval of buying a portion of Yahoo stock to help Icahn, a pro-merger enthusiast, succeed in his takeover bid.

In this final installment to the series I'll double your reading pleasure by presenting two new Linux softsynths. Such a deal, two reviews for the price of one! When I wrote my article on the LinuxSampler Project I noted the distinction between a performance sampler and a studio sampler. It occurs to me now that the same distinction should be made with regards to synthesizers. The synthesizers profiled in this review are best considered as performance synths, so let's see what makes the difference.

Earlier this month Novell quietly released Moonlight -- a Linux client for Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Silverlight is a .Net-based cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for delivering rich media to the Internet. In a nutshell, it is Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash. To use Moonlight you need to make sure you have all of the current Mono packages installed. Ubuntu and Fedora come ready out of the box. On other distributions, check the package manager. You can also compile Mono from source.

Developers in the Debian project had a busy week cleaning up after the openssl vulnerability was disclosed. Once that was taken care of, they moved on to process-related issues. Clearly, some shortcomings in how Debian handles patches to the programs it ships have been revealed; now the project would like to face those problems and make things work better in the future. The resulting discussion shows Debian at its introspective best, and may well have results that other distributors will want to pay attention to. As a Fedora developer noted: "This bug could easily have been us on the receiving end." All distributors make changes to their packages, so all of them are potentially exposed to this kind of failure.

Last month Mandriva announced its latest Spring edition. Despite a few minor glitches, after several weeks of testing the two Mandriva flavors, I have finally come across a distro that gives you the best of the GNU/Linux and proprietary worlds in terms of ease of use, range of software, and stability on hardware that ranges from old Celerons to newer multi-core machines.

Mozilla's Screaming Monkey offers hope to developers who are frustrated by Internet Explorer's slow speed and skeptical of Microsoft's commitment to internet standards. So say representatives from Google and the Ajaxian community, in a joint presentation at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. According to the pitch, Mozilla's yet-to-finish Screaming Monkey will juice AJAX applications and guarantee that developers can use web standards for rich internet applications with Microsoft's browser. The Screaming Monkey project began almost a year ago to have the ECMAScript-4-compliant Tamarin virtual machine plug-in to IE.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan said the company's long-awaited operating system of the future will center around the Internet, and be distinct from the familiar Palm OS that's currently available. Palm has been somewhat tight-lipped about the future of its operating system development, but Colligan gave an interview to APC in which he described the "Nova" OS as a "next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications." Nova will be based on a Linux core and is scheduled to arrive next year.

Fotox comes with a small but useful feature set, including red-eye repair, sharpen, bend, stretch, noise reduction, cropping, and resize. It only supports the JPEG format. It fills a neglected niche in Linux photo editing, and that is an easy-to-use photo editor that includes the most commonly-used functions. It also comes with two useful features that a lot of bigger image editors don't have: panorama and HDR.

Joel Cohen is an Emmy award-winning writer and associate producer of The Simpsons. He’s also a keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit this June. Enjoy this sneak preview of Joel, and then join us in Boston to hear more from him about The Simpsons and keeping innovation alive for 420 episodes over two decades.

Microsoft is clearly worried about Google as a competitive threat. But the bigger worry continues to be open source, according to Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Ozzie, speaking at Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday, said that while Google is a "tremendously strong competitor... open source was much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business model.

Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts say sitemaps are important tools for promoting your site, because when a search engine picks up your sitemap, it automatically picks up a link to every page in your site. Not only does the spider crawl those pages, but the sitemap page shows up in search results for keywords on your blog. Sitemaps also make it easier for visitors to your blog to find what they're looking for, faster. Here's a look at three sitemap generators for WordPress and my experience with them.

Microsoft's controversial OOXML document format is not going anywhere, observes Jason Brooks in a blog posting at eWEEK. Brooks points to discrepancies between the ISO-approved version of the format and that used in Office 97 in suggesting that OOXML hardly measures up with ODF (Open Document Format).

A summit on the next version of Eclipse platform - E4 - has exposed fundamental disagreements between those who want to update the platform and those wanting to continue support for "old" Java. The dispute is over whether to focus on Java 5 or to continue supporting its aging predecessor Java 1.4. Eclipse projects currently embrace several versions of Java ranging from 1.4, released six years ago, to the latest Java 6.

Every so often, you read on Slashdot, Digg, or some other techie news site that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. It's finally to the point that any end user could sit down at a computer and happily compute away. The applications are sufficiently sanitized and Windows-like that even Grandma can use them. I think it's fair to say that most of our previous conceptions of "ready for the desktop" are moot points.

Taking a page from the doctors at Moses Taylor Hospital, IT staff at the Scranton, Pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that's turned out to be a life saver. The patient in this case was an aging Microsoft Exchange 5.5 environment that couldn't support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.

In previous installments of the crash course, you've learned how to build a simple basket tool, a task manager, and even a word game. This time, let's take a look at how you can use the skills you picked up from those exercises to create a simple application launcher, which will allow you to start virtually any application without leaving the convenience of OpenOffice.org. While working on this project, you'll learn how to create and use functions, handle errors, and how to populate list boxes using records from a database table.

Elonex is taking orders for a sub-$200 Linux-based laptop aimed at the British educational market. Based on a 300MHz processor, likely ARM-based, the Elonex One includes WiFi, Ethernet, Flash storage, USB, and a 7-inch, 800 x 480 detachable touch display.

Earlier this month KDE Italia attended Open Mind 2008. A Free Software event organised by Roberto Dentice in San Giorgio near Naples. There were KDE talks and KDE demonstrations. Read on for the report. At the three day event, a lot of school children with their teachers were involved to participate in the educational labs, for the talks and the workshops. We tried to show them why it is a good reason to replace Microsoft Windows on their computers to host GNU/Linux Free Software on their disks, they can learn more and be really free using KDE.

Six degrees of freedom (6DOF) devices allow for movement in three axes, tilt in two axes, and rotation in the third. Some of these devices look like small joysticks -- for example, the SpaceNavigator. These devices are typically used for computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and other 3-D applications. With a new programming library, you can now also use them with Linux applications. You might wonder why you would ever want to use such a device with a desktop application. Well, imagine using the rotation of the device to control your video playback speed, or moving the x-axis of the device to see the next image in a slideshow.