Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

I just committed a change to the default desktop containment that removes desktop icon support. Yes, it has finally happened ... no more splattering icons from the "desktop" folder across the screen. Buh-bye. Let me pause while some of you get all worked up and ready to punch the "Add comment" link to flame me to kingdom come.

Last month, Daryl Lee gave us a taste of the language Scheme in the article It's time to learn Scheme with a C++ code generator. This time we will be looking at some practical examples written with Scheme Shell (SCSH): finding and replacing text in a bunch of files, sorting files in two different ways, and converting data from a CSV file to an HTML file. SCSH is a scripting language based on the programming language Scheme. It was created by Olin Shivers to replace long sh or bash scripts and extends the Scheme language to make it far more suited for shell scripting.

Linux-based sub-notebook for $219 (£111/€139), anyone? That's what Hong Kong-based Bestlink is currently offering - if you're prepared to buy in bulk. Dubbed the Alpha 400, the Eee PC-like machine sports a 7in, 800 x 480 display but is based not on an x86 processor but a 400MHz, 32-bit XBurst chip. It's got 128MB of memory and 1GB of Flash storage.

Two weeks ago, the third edition of theLibre Graphics Meeting was held in at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland. Sponsored by KDE e.V., Boudewijn Rempt, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi from the Krita project and Gilles Caullier from the Digikam project attended this yearly conference on free graphics software.

Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME offer a popular interface to computing. Unfortunately they are also often heavy on resource usage. By contrast, the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users. The boundaries between desktop environments and window managers are often blurred. No window manager by itself offers the things included in a run-of-the-mill point-and-click environment: a desktop with icons, a task bar that shows the running programs and a system tray. Of course, you can always piece together a solution featuring your favorite WM along with Idesk and the right now unmaintained PerlPanel. But such a solution will never look coherent and appealing.

The Open CourseWare movement is centered on freedom of information, so it’s only natural that Open CourseWare offers education on an open format such as Linux. Whether you’re just getting started or are an advanced developer, there’s something out there for you to learn. Here, we’ve highlighted more than 50 of the best Linux courses you can take.

Not long ago it was unclear whether the PC--originally conceived as a US$100 laptop for children in developing countries--would ever become a reality after a long series of delays. Now the XO laptop seems on the verge of becoming a hot item, and all the research that went into it is leading down divergent paths.

Although the company has long used open source software within its internal operations, Android is Google's highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company's walls. Google is hardly the first company to try using open-source software to shake up the industry. What's notable is Google's willingness to ruffle feathers in the open-source world, including those of potential allies such as Red Hat, with its approach.

One of the joys of software development is the ease with which you can create complex stuff out of thin air–or your own imagination. Creating new software may fulfill a need that could not otherwise be met. However, you can take advantage of a standardized way of doing things, so that you don’t have to start from scratch every single time. In the case of infrastructure software, using an established standard enables you to concentrate on your specific business needs, and not the supporting systems.

If Eclipse was hoping to escape its current over reliance on IBM then it's off to a slow start judging by early work on its next platform - E4, due in 2010. Project members are meeting during the next two days at an E4 summit in Ottawa, Canada, to push on with the practical work of building E4, announced at EclipseCon in March.

When Bassim Hamadeh was a student at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand the challenge of procuring the right textbooks for his classes. "They were high-priced, poor quality custom textbooks," Hamadeh says. So he started planning a business that would make it easier for professors to create and publish high-quality custom texts, and provide those materials to students at an affordable price. Since its launch in 1992, Hamadeh has been running UniversityReaders on open source software.

The Fedora project has always offered installation options. The best known of these options are the Fedora spins -- roll-your-own install images that emphasize a particular desktop or purpose, such as providing the distribution's complete repository on DVD. With Fedora 9, the project has expanded its traditional emphasis with two new tools: LiveUSB Creator, a Windows application for producing live Fedora flash drives, and PreUpgrade, a wizard to help existing users move from one release to another. Each in its own way helps to clarify part of the process of installing the Fedora operating system.

Microsoft announced on late Wednesday it will support ODF version 1.1 in the release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2), scheduled for the first half of 2009. The company will also support PDF and XPS in Office 2007 SP2. OOXML is partially supported in the current version of Microsoft's office productivity suite and, according to Microsoft's announcement, will not be fully supported in Office until the release of "Office 14", which as yet has no confirmed release date.

Last week you learned how to rescue a failing hard drive by copying files to a second local hard drive. Carla Schroder walks through network rescues, Windows machine rescues, and fixing the MBR in Part 2 of 2 of the System Rescue series.

At it's most basic level, Wuala is an online storage service. Like other services it aims to allow you to access your files from anywhere, even if your home or office computer is turned off. You can store any file in your Wuala 'drive' and they can be any size (up to your storage limit, of course). The big difference that sets Wuala apart from other offerings, such as Amazon's S3, is that Wuala is peer-to-peer. The developers of Wuala have adapted many of the ideas of peer-to-peer systems such as bittorrent to make your data both highly available and fast to download.

ApacheMap plots the location of each Web hit your site receives on a Google Map. The utility converts IP addresses from Apache logs into longitude and latitude information using hostip.info. HostIP relies on users submitting information about what geographic location should be associated with an IP address. This can present problems, because some IP addresses cannot be resolved into geographic information. In fact, the IP address I was using when I visited hostip.info was not recognized, but sites such as geoiptool.com offered a reasonable guess as to my location based purely on my IP address. Regardless, the results of a geographic lookup from an IP address should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Novell and Red Hat both updated their Linux operating systems Wednesday, adding improvements in virtualization, desktops, networking, management and hardware support. Novell released SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2 (SP2), while Red Hat shipped Version 5.2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both vendors added improvements on the desktop and the server.

Most of the time, Microsoft's public declarations are pretty easy to parse. A bit of pre-announcement here, a touch of FUD there, with the odd dollop of feel-good waffle thrown in for good measure. Occasionally, though, it produces what can only be called a googly – not to be confused with a Google – with announcements like this one about adding support for ODF in Microsoft Office:..

The recent success of the ASUS Eee PC has shown that running Linux from flash memory is now commercially viable in the consumer market. If you don't have an Eee PC, you can still run Linux from a humble USB flash disk, which will hold not only Linux but also your data. Several Linux distributions run from flash; here's how some of them compare. Some Linux distributions, such as Mandriva Flash, are specially designed to work from flash devices. Some provide installers to get them onto thumb drives, while others can be coerced onto a USB flash drive with some simple modifications. I tested five Linux distributions -- Damn Small Linux (DSL), Puppy Linux, Pendrivelinux, Ubuntu, and Mandriva Flash -- to see how they fare running from a flash disk.