Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Draw is probably the most under-estimated of the OpenOffice.org applications. Either users seem to expect it to be equivalent to the GIMP or Visio, or they fail to see its desktop publishing possibilities -- but in all cases they are disappointed. Probably, that explains why the OpenOffice.org Extensions page has only a handful of Draw extensions. It may also explain why some of the few that are available are limited in functionality and awkward to use, and almost all seem to still be in heavy development.

Mozilla has pushed out the initial release candidate of Firefox 3 for download. The new Firefox code of the firm’s increasingly popular web browser is available in 45 languages as a public preview for developers, as well as anyone else who fancies tinkering around with Internet Explorer’s closest rival. Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for nearly three years.

"This time around, we have 60+% of the changes in drivers, notably drives/video and drivers/media, with some infiniband, networking and usb lovin' to fill things out," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc3 kernel. "The rest is (as usual) mostly arch updates," he continued, "this time mostly mips, m68k and uml." Linus noticed that Linux kernel development has been managed with git now as long as it was managed with BitKeeper, a little over three years for both tools. He explained, "the most striking difference has nothing to do with git or BK (the switch-over timing was just the reason I decided to take a look), but with the fact that we're not just continuing to develop, but we're developing faster and with more people,"

msort is a tool for sorting text files. With both a command-line and graphical interface, it allows you to pick out where your sort keys are in a file and lets you select how to order those keys in a number of ways. Compared with the GNU sort program that is installed on most Linux systems, msort offers more flexibility in defining where your sort keys are and how to order them, as well as great internationalization support with full support for UTF-8, the ability to sort a file using different locales for different sort keys, and support for numbers in non-Western number systems.

Free software users rarely, if ever, need to be concerned about the license that governs the applications they use. Unlike developers or distributors, users are unlikely to pay attention to whether a program is released under a BSD, GPL, or some other license—not so with proprietary software. If Blizzard Entertainment has its way, it could get a whole lot worse, with proprietary vendors controlling the behavior of its users and enforcing it by way of the Copyright Act.

The recently appointed head of Microsoft's global Linux and open source team hopes the company will have a clear and comprehensible open source strategy by 2015. Sam Ramji wants people to clearly understand what projects the company is contributing to, and what code Microsoft is making available - along with the terms - on a routine basis. It seems Ramji is talking about people both inside and outside Microsoft knowing what’s going on. "We don't have hard rules... right now, it's still careful judgment case by case. By 2015, I think it would be set up a," he told Reg Dev, just before his promotion.

Wikis are a great way to collaborate on text documents, but different wikis sometimes use incompatible wiki markup languages, and few wikis provide simple WYSIWYG editors to shorten the learning curve. Even for those fluent in wiki markup, using a word processor to create wiki content is often more convenient -- especially for publishing existing documents and for creating complex tables. Now the newly available Sun Wiki Publisher simplifies the process of publishing an OpenOffice.org Writer document directly to a compatible MediaWiki wiki from OpenOffice.org 2.4 or later without the need for a Web browser.

Microsoft is talking to Yahoo! about an alternative transaction that doesn't involve an acquisition, the world's largest software maker said Sunday. Yahoo said it is open to "pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders." The announcement comes two weeks after Microsoft abruptly stopped its pursuit of Yahoo, withdrawing a sweetened $46 billion offer and saying it would not make a hostile bid for the Internet company.

wine-1.0rc1 was released on Friday, May 9th, 2008. Wine is now in a code freeze in preparation for the 1.0 release. According to http://wiki.winehq.org/WineReleasePlan, wine-1.0.0-rc2 will be due out Friday, May 23rd, 2008. It will be something like be the next to last release candidate for 1.0. Alexandre is on vacation, so git is a bit stale. In particular, Photoshop CS2 and DNS 9 don't install properly due to a regression introduced just before his vacation started; here's the fix. Some effort has been put into making it easy for people to automatically report "make test" failures; see MakeTestFailures for info and results.

I have already written on this topic once and I thought that sufficed. Nonetheless, I soon found myself when pressed shirking my duty, by not making it easy for the reader to view (or not) the footnote contents and easily return to the same section of text. In my case, the reasons were I kept forgetting the syntax, partially due to the lack of constant use. The second reason was my trying to create descriptive, unique names in both directions. And the third, I was being pressed to do too many tasks, hence, I neglected some.

LXer Feature: 18-May-2008

This week we have MIT students showing the power of open cell phone systems, a Linux ThinkPad, W3C 'clarifies' HTML 5 v XHTML, why your internet experience is slow and reviews on 7 Desktop Distros, 5 Linux Browsers and some great Linux programs for kids. Also, Carla Schroder shows us how to become system rescue gurus, fixing Debian OpenSSL, a Asus Eee PC review, Linux gains action RPG and we have a couple of funny articles for your reading pleasure, STFUbuntu - The HOT New Linux Distro and an advert on the Novell website, Taking the Vista leap?

An independent effort to develop the software originally designed for the $100 laptop has been launched. Sugar Labs will take the laptop's innovative interface, known as Sugar, to the "next level of usability and utility", according to its founders. It is intended that the free software will be made available on other PCs, such as the popular Asus Eee.

This article reviews 7 of the most used audio players for Linux, 2 KDE players (Amarok and JuK) and 5 GTK players (Banshee, Beep Media Player, Audacious, Exaile and Rhythmbox). I tried to keep the reviews objective, however the scores are (and I can't possibly think of a way to do this another way) subjective.

Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures. In India too, while piracy dropped by two percentage points, in value terms, it rose to $2 billion in 2007 as compared to $1.28 billion in 2006.

Leslie Hawthorn, a Program Manager in Google's Open Source team, gave a talk at BSDCAN 2008 on Google's ongoing Summer of Code project. She started by explaining what the open source team does, including enforcing license compliance, hosting over 700,000 open source projects with Google Code, academic research, funding open source development, and community outreach including the sponsorship of conferences such as BSDCan. She went on to discuss how she got started running the project after its initial launch in 2005.

KDE is attending this year's LinuxTag in Berlin with a wide selection of talks. Starting with Aaron Seigo's lecture about KDE in the mobile world and a KDE-related series of presentations on Friday. There are also some stalls where you can meet people from the KDE community.

Quite a few reviews of new Linux releases these days try to determine if a distribution is "ready for the desktop." I myself have probably been guilty of using that phrase, but I think it's time we officially retire this criterion. What defines an operating system as being ready for the desktop? Surely everyone has a different opinion on the actual definition. While my search for an official definition or list of guidelines has failed, to me this phrase means that the OS is usable by everyone, meets everyone's needs, and is able to do everything that everyone wants it to do. In that regard, is any operating system truly ready for the desktop?

Randall Stewart of Cisco Systems gave a talk titled SCTP, what it is and how to use it, discussing the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). A paper that was displayed on the overhead projecter before the talk began summarized: "Integrated into FreeBSD 7.0 -- first standardized by the Internet Engineering Task force (IETF) in October of 2000, in RFC 2960 and later updated by RFC 4960. SCTP is a message oriented protocol providing reliable end to end communication between two peers in an IP network."

Italy-based KDev has found another use for its tiny, cellular radio-equipped Linux box. In its newest "Easy Guardian" iteration, the Acme FoxBox works as a network monitor that uses ICMP pings, SNMP scans, and text messaging to alert users to network events.

On the surface, a little choice isn’t going to kill anybody. In fact, choice is good. And if some poor kids can get a laptop, learn a bit and be exposed to the world I don’t care about the operating system. But here’s what gives me pause about XP coming to the XO (statement, Techmeme): There’s no way Linux will get an equal shake on OLPC’s XO. In fact, I reckon that more XO units will ship with XP than Linux in the not too distant future. Why? Governments are making the buying decisions. Not kids.