Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The U.S. Supreme Court Monday refused to hear Microsoft's appeal of a lower court ruling, thus setting the stage for yet another antitrust trial for the software giant. At issue is a private lawsuit brought against the company in 2004 over whether the Redmond, Wash. company unlawfully used its monopoly power to crush Novell's incipient move into productivity applications 12 years ago.

[You know what I love about the U.S. legal system? It's expediency.. - Scott]

When Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian takes to the stage to open the company’s BrainShare 2008 conference here March 17, he will talk about what has been achieved over the past year and what he hopes to do in the year ahead. Part of that will be to stress the company’s financial performance and stability, and its commitment to growing its product set and customer base.

The next major, long-term support version of Ubuntu is days away from its first, and only, beta release. Ubuntu has announced that Ubuntu 8.04 is now in beta freeze. What this means is that no new package changes are going to be allowed in the well-regarded Linux distribution. The only exceptions will be for bug fixes for already known problems.

Looking at the software listed at Kokkini Zita it's easy to see where developer Fons Adriaensen's interests lie. He has written one of the best organ synthesizers for Linux, he has contributed to the LADSPA collection of processing plugins, and he has provided Linux sound researchers with some excellent tools for measuring and representing audio signals. He is also involved in improving Linux support for the Ambisonics technology of encoding and decoding multichannel audio.

As you might expect, GNOME 2.22, the latest version of the popular desktop, which was released last week, has some functional tweaks and new default applications. If the release has a focus, it is on utilities, ranging from added features in standard GNOME applications such as Evolution and Archive Manager to improved accessibility and a handful of new applets. Few of these changes are dramatic, but the overall impression is of dozens of small enhancements that nudge GNOME toward greater usability.

Since Asus announced that it would release a Windows XP version of phenomenally popular Eee PC for the extra cost of a Windows license, market pundits have been kissing the cheaper Xandros Linux version goodbye. However, Asus is ambivalent about the issue.

Today is St. Patrick's Day, a national holiday in Ireland that's celebrated by people of Irish lineage worldwide. Like Ireland itself, the holiday is associated with the color green -- as are many things in the Linux universe.

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) of South Africa on Friday elected a new chair in Habari Media’s Adrian Hewlett with Ananzi MD Mark Buwalda taking up the deputy chairmanship. The election of the 2008/09 board for OPA comes at a time when the OPA faqces challenges to its monopoly over the local online publishing metrics system.

Most users know about proprietary software packages such as Norton Ghost that can be used for cloning hard disks for backup or distribution purposes. And a few may know about Partition Image, an open source alternative for saving partition images. But how many users know about Clonezilla, an all-in-one cloning tool that promises both speed and power?

Sunbird, Mozilla's calendar application, supports extensions just as Firefox and Thunderbird do. What kind of extensions work with a calendar? How about being able to get a weather forecast when you're setting up a golf date, or exporting your desktop calendar to a Web service? World Weather+ is a great extension that grabs weather data from the Weather Channel. It displays the current conditions on the left side of Sunbird, below the task section. To get started, download and install the add-on, select the add-on's preferences, and provide it your ZIP code. It will then display your location's current weather conditions along with the option to view the forecast for the next nine days.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for alternate direction layouts (vertical, horizontal) in Kickoff. Improvements in the Device Notifier applet, with support for window icons in the Pager Plasmoid in Plasma, with the "Trash" applet moving into kdebase, the "Luna" applet moving to extragear, and the "Contacts" and "Converter" runners moving into kdereview. Support for online play (using the GGZ network) in the KSquares game. A new default theme for the KSame game..

Hardware compatibility has long been a problem for Linux—though it has gotten much better over the years—so it will be surprising to some to see a kernel change that will make some hardware cease working. For others, who follow kernel development a bit more closely, it will come as no great surprise that NDISwrapper was disabled by a change made to the kernel back in January. NDISwrapper has never been very popular with kernel hackers, but, because it is GPL licensed and allows more hardware to be used, there are folks on both sides of the argument. For a while, it looked like NDISwrapper had lost that argument, but the 2.6.25-rc4 release restores the functionality it requires.

If you’re a heavy command line user then you probably find that on most days your desktop quickly disappears under multiple terminal windows. Or your one terminal window has tons of tabs open and you can no longer tell which is which. Sound like your desktop? Then take a look at Terminator, a terminal window that can be split up into multiple windows that sit side-by-side.

LXer Feature: 16-Mar-2008

In this week's Roundup we have several Microsoft related articles, how to back up Linux with ease, a petition for open standards in the European Parliament, 10 Linux commands you’ve never used, OLPC: one virus per child and the future belongs to Linux. Ken Starks tells us "You only know good when you've seen bad..." and our own Carla Schroder replies with the "Care and Feeding of Baby Linux Users" and we have a couple of FUD articles for your enjoyment as well.

At the CeBIT convention in Germany the other week, Asus unveiled a new edition of its flash-based Eee sub-notebook PC, nominally running a custom version of Xandros Linux. New models, Asus said, will run Linux ... and now Windows XP. According to Asus' press release, Microsoft Works and many of the Windows Live applications will come preloaded with the system. It claims it has sold 350,000 units so far and is on track to selling anywhere between 3 and 5 million by the end of the year.

It should concern us that most computer users -- ourselves included -- see themselves as dependent variables in respect to large companies' privacy policies, rather than as independent variables. I mean, it's understandable that big companies think of themselves as In Control. Hey: they are. They should have an obligation to care about users' privacy, and to explain their privacy policies. But why should we behave as supplicants to these companies, or even to governments, in respect to how anybody or anything treats what we regard as private information about ourselves and what we do in the world?

It's funny how some people are so stuck on the idea that Windows, and only Windows, is the one true operating system that they can't even hear their own words. That's the case with a recent news story with the headline, "Windows XP Will Fill Two-Thirds of Asustek Eee PCs." (This article will only be online until April 13.)

Zend Technologies is introducing paid support along with APIs to help build and maintain business-critical applications using its integrated and certified PHP stack.

Ok, confession time. I love webgen but the Geek Ranch site keeps getting more complicated. We want blogs, .... Or, put another way, the dynamic content keeps growing. I finally gave in and admitted we need Drupal. So, on to installing Drupal 6. No hosting location I work with has it on the auto-installer, so on to manually doing it.

When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience.