Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Imagine an application that combines the features of a wiki and a Web-based notebook. It may sound like an unusual mix, but Luminotes wiki notebook is living proof that this combination works rather well. Similar to TiddlyWiki, Luminotes treats notes as separate items which you can manage individually and show and hide as you see it fit. This makes Luminotes a perfect tool for managing notes in a non-linear manner.

Vyatta, the leader in Linux-based networking, today announced Vyatta Community Edition 4 (VC4), the latest release of its reliable, commercially supported open-source network operating system. VC4 delivers significant scalability improvements and expanded application support to the pre-existing router/firewall/VPN feature set and achieves a 10X price/performance advantage over proprietary network solutions.

A non-profit open source project with high-profile backers has released beta code for an open source Flash media player, with a media server in the wings. Open Media Now's Gnash player runs standalone or as a plugin, and may run better than Flash on constrained devices.

Personal data safety is big business lately. There are a variety of ways to protect your identity or keep your personal information from the prying eyes of dishonest people, but Eric Wolbrom has what he believes is a unique service. Keep You Safe makes it possible for subscribers to store all their personal data securely in a virtual online "safe deposit box," and share the key with someone they trust. When Wolbrom, a self-described "security geek," finally had the chance to launch Keep You Safe, he knew that building it on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) was the best way to keep his customers' data secure.

The GNU/Linux command line and desktop are both sophisticated interfaces, but they are mostly separate realities. You can drag text into a virtual terminal from the desktop, or use Edit -> Copy to move text in either direction, but by default moving files and directories between them is impossible -- a problem that often requires extra switching between them if you frequently work in both. Dragbox is designed to solve this problem and connect the two interfaces -- at least if one of them is GNOME -- through what might be described as a combination multiple clipboard and simple file manager.

Baker College of Flint, Mich., defeated defending champion Texas A&M University and four other regional winners from across the country to capture the third annual National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, which concluded in San Antonio, Texas, over the weekend. Texas A&M finished a close second, and the University of Louisville took third. Also competing for the championship were the Community College of Baltimore County, Mount San Antonio College of Los Angeles County, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Tokamak, the first International meeting of Plasma was held in Milano in northern Italy over the last weekend. 14 people joined the fun and spent some days hacking on the KDE 4 desktop shell. For the most part, it was like meeting friends, only that some had never met each other in person before. The meeting was filled with small sessions, such as discussing target users for Plasma to optimise the Plasma interface for. Topics were target users, underlying technology, scripting, integration with other parts, webservice integration, visual presentation, porting of Plasma to new technology in Qt, Italian profanity and how everybody loves pizza.

One of the more interesting technologies I've been exposed to in the past year is the Force.com platform. Salesforce.com, well known for their Software as a Service CRM product, has taken the expertise they've garnered delivering a high-capacity application to a global market, and used it to offer the underlying infrastructure to application developers.

Tim Bray, the co-creator of XML turned Ruby on Rails enthusiast, has told developers to face up to lingering performance problems in the scripting stack. In a keynote at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference last week, Bray called Rails "a big deal, a hot deal". And the Sun Microsystems director of web technologies is walking it likes he talks it: he's using Ruby on Rails for all his development.

The Redmond giant’s PR spin has gone into overdrive to warn budding potentials away from the evils of Linux and open source. The messages are consistent: Linux may be free, but there’s a catch; it has a higher total cost of ownership, a lower return on investment, less support and is a less sound platform. I declare bunkum. And here's why a Microsoft implementation at Video Ezy was a bad choice.

A new version of Ubuntu, a version of the Linux OS, is released on Thursday. Mr Shuttleworth said the success of the Asus Eee PC and the work of the One Laptop Per Child programme had driven awareness of open source. "There has been a sea change in the way people think of Linux, which is very healthy," he said.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes.

Do you struggle to keep tabs on your Thunderbird inbox? The SIMILE Seek extension might be the answer to your problems. The extension adds faceted browsing to Thunderbird, which allows you to search and manage your email messages in a radically different way than you are used to.

Open-source management company OpenLogic, backed by sponsors such as IDC and Unisys, has launched its long-promised Open Source Census, aimed at delivering the first detailed survey of how open-source software is used in the enterprise.

Your editor is typing this from the Linux Foundation's collaboration summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas. The day's agenda includes giving a talk on the state of the kernel during the evening reception; beer-fueled hecklers would appear to be in your editor's near future. The first day, though, included a rather more sober panel on the state of the Linux desktop which revealed some interesting thoughts on where things are going.

LXer Feature: 20-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have lots of Linux and Open Source news including how Sun has started working on a free video codec, Ken Starks comes "back from the mountain", The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons, A new spin on Xfce and the one place Novell can beat Microsoft along and other MS related articles. Plus, we have Blue Jeans Cable's response to Monster Cable, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users and in our FUD section we have Seagate killing Linux support, Linux wanting to destroy things and how Open Source is costing the IT vendors $60 billion. Enjoy!

Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, arguably the world’s most well known version of Linux, is set to be released in a mere four days. Keen as I am on – shock horror – Windows Vista, and less of a shock, Mac OS X, I await the release of Ubuntu’s newest bird with great anticipation.

We need a new conversation about infrastructure. That's what Linux, the Net, and half a million FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications require. Because they're all part of a new infrastructural system that cannot be explained in terms of the old one — especially since infrastructure itself is not well understood. Or rather that it is too well understood in a general way, though not in the specific.

The final release of Fedora 9 has been delayed by two weeks, so I thought I’d take this chance to look at what you can expect from Fedora 9 and why you should be excited!

Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.