Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ubuntu 8.04, dubbed Hardy Heron, is out this week and Linuxophiles worldwide are excited. It’s not hard to see why, but is this really the much-fabled year of the Linux desktop? Will the Heron match the unmet hype of predecessor Gutsy Gibbon? And let me tell you just how spectacular and cool Wubi is.

Good systems administrators know that implementing a robust backup procedure is one of their most important duties. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most complex and least fun. When the phone rings and there's a panic-stricken user on the other end who has just lost a crucial document, you need to be confident that you can promptly recover his missing files. Failure to do so can bring about a speedy end to a promising career in systems administration. So what's a budding sysadmin to do? Download the latest release of Bacula and watch those backup woes disappear into the dark of night.

Linux is expanding its influence outside of the world of smartphones, and is poised to take a significant share of the mid-range mobile phone market as well, according to a new study from ABI Research. The study, released this week, found that efforts to promote and standardize Linux on mobile phones are paying off, while problems relating to Linux's processor requirements are being alleviated.

Frustrated software programmers unable to sign up to the voluntarily run community of developers behind the Debian GNU/Linux operating system have criticised the management of the project. Voicing their frustration on discussion forums, including Planet Debian, developers had begun to question the Linux-based operating system's future, according to reports.

Red Hat has published a "preview release" of Fedora 9, the next version of its freely available Linux distribution, which will be the last public release before the final edition next month. The final version of Fedora 9 was initially planned for next week, but the release has been put back by two weeks to 13 May, according to the Fedora Project.

SCO has filed its monthly operating reports for SCO Group and SCO Operations for the month of March, and it looks like SCO Group has achieved its goal of having no money left for Novell, although it's hard to tell, since the document for Group is almost blank. I totally know nothing about accounting, so I'll just list what I notice, and you can figure out what it means.

Preparations for Akademy 2008 are in full swing, but KDE e.V. is already looking forward to next year and asks potential hosts to submit proposals for Akademy 2009. For the first time we also invite proposals to hold Akademy and GUADEC, the GNOME community conference, in the same location. More information can be found in the Call for Hosts for Akademy 2009 below or in the joint press release of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation.

On Thursday, the Ubuntu 8.04 magic happens. The operating system - called Hardy Heron at playgrounds around Silicon Valley - goes up for download in its various forms, most notably Server and Desktop. Like most open source jobs, these Ubuntu OS releases are protracted affairs. Canonical, the corporate body behind Ubuntu, has already told everyone what to expect with the OS during the beta process. We covered most of the major new features last month and won't bore you with the details again.

Bob Bickel, co-founder of Ringside Networks, says companies need to harness the power of social networking and entice customers to visit corporate Web sites with the same eagerness they show for sites like Facebook. He believes the Ringside Social Application Server -- an open source platform that puts social networking tools on any existing Web site -- is the answer CEOs are looking for.

Robert Shingledecker has announced the final release of Damn Small Linux 4.3. From the changelog: "Updated Firefox browser to version 2; updated murgaLua to 0.6.8; updated nano-tiny to 2.0.7; updated and consolidation of mydslBrowser with new mydslBrowser.lua; new picture puzzle added to Games collection; new calculator.lua replaces Calcoo; optimized minirt24.gz - much smaller; new background and theme for both JWM and Fluxbox; updated 'noicons' boot option to suppress icons in JWM; fixed removal of mydsl extensions on traditional hard drive installations; dropped SCSI modules for needed space - available in the modules section; fixed CD recording scanbus device error by adding scsi/sg.o module; updated editor.lua - menu issue resolved for new murgaLua version...."

One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject. As the name suggests, Writer's Tools is a collection of various utilities that might be useful for writers. It's a little rough in places, being only at version 0.9.27, and possibly a little idiosyncratic, but like Emacs, Writer's Tools is so varied that it undoubtedly has something for everyone, regardless of their writing habits.

Registration is open for the tenth annual edition of OSCON (Open Source Convention), as well as for a co-located Ubuntu Live conference. Scheduled for Jul. 21-25 in Portland, Ore., O'Reilly's OSCON 2008 is expected to draw some 2,500 open source experts, visionaries, and hackers.

Asustek Computer plans to share its experience with open-source software in its popular Eee PC low-cost laptop at the OpenTechSummit Taiwan 2008, which runs from April 25 to 29, the company said. The Taiwanese PC vendor is the largest corporate sponsor of the event and is currently selling the most popular laptop that carries an open source OS, the Eee PC.

Today's Web development tools offer capabilities that go beyond basic HTML editing. I compared three Web editors for Linux -- Screem 0.16.1, Bluefish 1.0.7, and Quanta Plus 3.5.7 -- to determine how well they handle today's Web editing needs.The three programs are similar in many ways. All three are primarily code editors with syntax highlighting, smart indentation, and other features to make writing and editing code easier. Screem is tightly integrated with the GNOME desktop environment, while Bluefish will run on KDE and GNOME. Quanta Plus is a KDE application distributed with KDE.

A break-in can happen to any system administrator. Find out how to use Autopsy and Sleuthkit to hit the ground running on your first forensics project. There are certain aspects to system administration that you can learn only from experience. Computer forensics (among other things the ability to piece together clues from a system to determine how an intruder broke in) can take years or even decades to master. If you have never conducted a forensics analysis on a computer, you might not even know exactly where to start. In this guide, I cover how to use the set of forensics tools in Sleuthkit with its Web front end, Autopsy, to organize your first forensics case.

he boards of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation have issued a call to co-host Akademy and GUADEC, the flagship conferences of the KDE and GNOME projects respectively, during the Summer of 2009. This would be the first time that the conferences are to be co-hosted. The combined conference is expected to have around 800 attendees, being one of the biggest meetings of free software developers in the world. The content of the conferences will be organized independently, with a number of co-ordinated cross-over sessions with appeal to all attendees.

[Now this is cool! - Scott]

As part of the on-going agreement with Novell, Microsoft is identifying and converting unsupported users of Linux to the latest versions of Suse Linux. After a long period of doubt, skepticism and criticism over their agreement, Novell and Microsoft are finally starting to see the benefits of the 5-year alliance originally announced in December 2006. Continuing to dabble with the ‘dark side,’ Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell said in a recent press-release, describing the outcomes of their alliance with Microsoft, "It's very encouraging to see that our business and technical collaboration continues to resonate with customers around the globe."

Many people leave their computers on around the clock. This usually implies that all the attached hard disks are always spinning. Constantly spinning up a hard disk normally increases the chances of drive failure. When a disk is not powered it should last longer than if it was spinning. There is a delicate balance between having a hard disk spinning down and up too frequently and leaving it spinning around the clock. If you have a filesystem that you want to have near instant access to but do so on an infrequent basis, you might like to use spindown to automatically spin down the disk containing that filesystem after you have finished accessing the drive.

Microsoft's Office 2007 Word documents do not conform to the newly-approved Open XML (OXML) international standard. Alex Brown, who heads up the group responsible for maintaining the OXML standard at the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO), revealed the less-than-pretty findings in a blog post late last week. He said that OOXML, which last month – in the face of heavy opposition – just scraped in enough votes to be passed as a standard by the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), does not adhere to the latest specifications of the draft standard (ISO/IEC 29500).`

[This is funny and sad at the same time. - Scott]

We live in the age of the spinmeister, the age when language is used more as a means to confuse than to educate, an age when obfuscation is preferred to clarification. Hence, one should not be surprised to find Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation, referring to a face-to-face meeting of kernel developers and industry people as a "high bandwidth set of interactions." The Foundation, one must bear in mind, was formed at the beginning of 2007 by a merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards