Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The free software RAW photo converter Rawstudio released version 1.0 in April, marking the culmination of two years of work. This release carries on the Rawstudio tradition of providing a lightweight, dependable tool for photographers. Source code tarballs and binaries are available through the project's Web site. As of press time, pre-built packages are up for OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. In addition, Ubuntu users can access the 1.0 release and daily builds through Rawstudio's APT repository.

The last week Toledo hosted the biennial9th European Congress on Telepathology and 3rd International Congress on Virtual Microscopy, thanks to the excellent organization of Marcial Garcia Rojo (Hospital General de Ciudad Real, Spain), Gloria Bueno García (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) and Jose Sagristan and colleagues (Health Care Service of Castilla-La Mancha, SESCAM, Spain).

Despite the rather surprising news that Microsoft won't have a comprehensive open source strategy until 2015, there's increasing evidence that it has at least established its shorter-term tactic: to head off the growing use of GNU/Linux. That might seem an obvious thing to do, but it's different from earlier attempts to paint *all* of open source as hopeless for enterprise use. Instead, Microsoft is adopting a “divide and conquer” approach, whereby it sends out soothing messages to open source application projects – including much billing and cooing in an attempt to encourage hackers to make their code work better on Windows – all the while putting in the boot where GNU/Linux is concerned.

Tulip a framework that allows you to create, visualize, manipulate, and export large graphs. Tulip can import graphs from the popular Graphviz package and allows you to export a graph visualization in a number of bitmap image formats as well as SVG and EPS for eventual inclusion into a PDF file. Packages for Tulip are available for Ubuntu Hardy and for openSUSE as a 1-Click Install. There are no packages of Tulip in the standard Fedora repositories, but there are binary RPMs offered on the Tulip download page. In this article I'll install version 3.0.0 from source on a Fedora 8 64-bit machine.

DeviceVM announced that its quick-booting Splashtop Linux implementation is being pre-installed in ROM (read-only memory) on four new Asus motherboards. Asus says it plans to ship over a million Splashtop-ready motherboards per month, making this one of the largest Linux deployments ever.

A former Gentoo developer yesterday revealed that he has been working on a new hardcore Linux distribution, dubbed Exherbo. Bryan Østergaard said on his blog that Exherbo was at the “experimental” stage and for that reason isn’t openly encouraging anyone to attempt to use it. He said work on the Linux distro has been ongoing over the past few months, and that some elements of Exherbo have been based on ideas and experiences from Østergaard’s time at Gentoo.

Protecting servers by placing them behind a firewall is a best-practice methodology for systems administrators, but it's not a panacea: those systems are still visible to network scanners such as nmap and nessus. While services like SMTP and HTTP may need to be accessible to the public, most enterprises also have private internal servers that require external access by traveling support staff. For those users, fwknop, an open source utility that provides single packet authorization, can help sysadmins hide their servers from network nasties.

In When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?, I mentioned that I'm considering upgrading my System76 laptop from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. A commenter named Scummy suggested that a similarly configured Dell system is cheaper: Dude - you just paid a $350 ‘Linux Tax’ by NOT going mainstream in your hardware…

Linux e-mail vendor @Mail Monday released an open source version of its Webmail client and is making it available for free. The client, @Mail Open, is AJAX-based and works against any e-mail server that supports the IMAP and POP3 e-mail protocols, including those from Microsoft and IBM/Lotus.

This story is about an young female hacker who becomes the student of an even more unlikely female computer hacker and their journey to become "Open Source Hackers".

In an age when paper qualifications and certificates of one description or another are touted as evidence of competence, it's refreshing to know that the top MySQL expert in Australia has only been officially certified on a version of the program which came out years ago.

Ok, you have to give some kudos to Windows: everyone knows what a window is. In the Linux world, KDE and GNOME aren’t quite as obvious. A gnome stands in your garden or inhabits the World of Warcraft, and KDE doesn’t even spell a word. The truth is they’re the two major window environments for Linux today; if you don’t like one type of UI you have another. Here’s what they do, how they differ and how you can bend them to your will.

Since the introduction of AMD's new Linux OpenGL driver and their open-source strategy running in parallel, the past few months have been especially exciting for ATI Linux users and the Linux graphics scene in general. To many Linux users, ATI graphics have went from being a name synonymous with problems and poor 3D performance to being an open-source crown jewel that has set a precedence in the industry by releasing their GPU register documentation, but at the same time continuing to develop their high-performance proprietary driver for users interested in the best performance and enabling all of the bells and whistles on their graphics card.

I've been using Linux full-time instead of Windows since July, 2006. After happily using SimplyMepis Linux for 15 months, I switched to using Debian Linux full-time in December, 2007, after I installed Debian Etch (KDE) for the very first time. I carefully documented that entire installation and its subsequent configuration in My Debian Adventure. Since then, I've been very happily using Debian Etch, the "Stable" branch of the Debian family of distros. Once I experienced Etch's rock-solid performance, I was never even tempted to delve into the newer Debian Lenny (Testing branch) or Debian Sid (Unstable branch), even though those other branches had newer Linux kernels and software versions. All of that changed yesterday. Now I'm using Debian Lenny and I probably won't go back to using Etch. This article explains why, and describes my Debian Adventure with Lenny.

First through the Eee PC and now through its PC motherboards, Asus is rapidly carving a global reputation for itself as the company which knows how to take Linux mainstream. The question is will including the minimalist cut-down version of Linux called Splashtop on a million motherboards a month finally bring on the Linux desktop age or has it made the desktop redundant?

In this corner, the challenger, the former executive director of MIT’s Media Lab, software guru, now with Sugar Labs, the champion of Linux, Walter Benderrrrr! And in this corner, the champion, the co-founder of MIT’s Media Lab, best-selling author, founder and chairman of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the hardware champion, Nickolas Negropont-eeee! All right, let’s get ready to stumbleeeeee!

A new advocacy group, the Public Software Foundation (PSF), is working to make free and open source software available to local libraries so it can be checked out and used just like a book or video. The premise is simple: hand out one CD and maybe you've taught one person; make it available in a library and perhaps you'll reach hundreds or thousands.

The man who once was the president of OLPC, the initiative to provide “one laptop per child” to some of the world’s poorest and digitally divided children, has joined Sugar Labs. Why? To do what Nicholas Negroponte won’t – providing open source opportunities for learning, instead of being just another laptop seller.

I was resolved not to write another Unixfication story until I had more concrete news of Sun and Linus actually working together, and filed it away under “Maybe”. Like many of the speculative peices I write, it was a thought exercise with the objective of “shaking the tree” so to speak.

With Fedora 9, the Fedora project continues its tradition of being the most innovative major distribution, combining new applications from other distributions as well as its own inventions. However, in no other release has Fedora walked the line between leading edge and bleeding edge so precariously. At times, as with its updating of subsystems and its selection of desktop software, Fedora 9 manages to innovate without inconveniencing users. But, in other cases, most notably in the changes to package installation, the project has chosen innovation over usability.