Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Services like Flickr and Picasa seems like an obvious way to share your photos with the world. But if you are the do-it-yourself type and prefer to share your photos from the convenience of your own server, give Pixelpost a try. This MySQL/PHP-based application allows you to publish a photoblog and tweak it any way you like. Better yet, you can extend Pixelpost's functionality via addons, so you can turn your basic photoblog into a powerful photo publishing platform.

The main idea behind this project is to reflect the enormous activity Ubuntu has on all fronts. We parse every data source we think is interesting to show you how much the community is working and display it in an easy-to-read format.

It's taken a remarkably short time for the One Laptop Per Child project to change from positioning itself as the saviour of children in developing countries to becoming a toady for Microsoft. In an interview with Business Week recently, Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the project, is quoted as saying that the organisation now needs to be managed "more like Microsoft."

[Well, there goes another great idea down the drain. - Scott]

In three years, Krugle, the company behind the code search engine of the same name, has gone from an idea to a company that's starting to produce revenue. CEO Steve Larsen, a veteran of half a dozen startups, attributes this brief time to market as being due largely to free and open source software (FOSS). According to Larsen, FOSS has shaped most aspects of the company, including its hiring practices and relations with business partners and users.

KDE was present at CeBIT 2008 in Hannover, the world's largest IT fair. The booth was located inside the LinuxPark in Hall 5, where Linux New Media had given KDE, Amarok and other open source projects the opportunity to present their work. Read on for more details.

CEO Jonathan Schwartz shows patience and eloquence in explaining how a company can make lots of money by giving away IP.

Tomorrow is the planned launch date for Gnome 2.22, the latest release in the ever-improving desktop environment popular with free software users. With the launch planned for tomorrow we thought a quick run-through of the main features of Gnome 2.22 was in order.

I listened to a webcast from JBoss World today with a group of people. After hearing several speakers announce new middleware products and initiatives (as JBoss is the leading force in open source middleware), one of them turned to me and asked, “Just what is middleware?” When I started to describe transaction servers and database connection pool sharing, she held up a hand and said, “No. I want to know what it is in real world terms, and why it’s a big deal.”

EnGarde, a GNU/Linux-based operating system produced by Guardian Digital, aims to provide a secure system that is easy to manage from anywhere. Its philosophy of including only what you need to lessen possible vulnerabilities, combined with strict SELinux application policies and default configurations tuned for security, make EnGarde an excellent base for a server -- though it's not without its problems.

Linux has proved to be much more resistant to malware than Windows, especially when it comes to viral infections, but any remote exploit makes it just as susceptible to worms, trojans, and rootkits as any other platform. Given all the fuss in the news recently about compromised Linux/Apache servers being responsible for infecting Windows users with malware when they visit those compromised sites, we thought it would be a good time to take a look at three of the best rootkit/malware detection tools available for Linux desktop and SOHO users. Here's a brief comparison of three popular choices: Chkrootkit, Rootkit Hunter, and Ossec.

The Australian survey, Open Source census 2007, funded by IBM and Fujitsu, was conducted by Open Source strategic consulting firm Waugh Partners under the guidance of NICTA (National ICT Australia). The survey sample included 327 individuals working on Australian Open Source projects in Australia and abroad, as well as 129 companies providing Open Source services. The Open Source census 2007 is claimed to be the first national research project to study companies and contributors involved in the Australian Open Source industry.

GUI calculators may be user-friendly, but they don't offer much comfort for a command-line power user. Fortunately, console-based tools such as bc, Genius, and Calc offer distinct advantages over their GUI counterparts.

Desktop Linux systems have been available from vendors both small -- such as NorhTec -- and large -- such as Dell -- for some time now. But, until recently, users who feel more comfortable buying from a retailer have had few choices other than some low-end systems from Wal-Mart. Things are changing.

Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been released for testing. The fourth beta of the next major Firefox version offers over 900 bug fixes over Beta 3, including improvements in download manager, full page zoom, better integration with Vista, Mac OS X and Linux, and significant improvements in speed and memory usage.

One of the things I always enjoy when creating presentations, letters, videos, graphics and other documents is playing with different fonts. Fonts can change a boring text-only presentation or paper into an exciting, stylish, wild or classic experience. Yes, it is very easy to get carried away, but that is part of the fun -- trying to achieve the perfect balance between form and function.

The proper use of source control systems is a critical skill for programmers to have, and something that many of them have to pick up through observation, trial, and error in the workplace. For students, or people who primarily program as a hobby, the learning process can be particularly slow and painful. Here are some examples and discussion on the best practices you can use to avoid common source control pitfalls.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, device-mapper-multipath is installed by default. This is a change from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. If a third party multipathing solution is in use, device-mapper-multipath should be disabled to avoid any conflict between multiple multipathing technologies.

Thai systems integrator Norhtec is preparing to release a sub-$300 ultra-mini PC (UMPC) laptop based on a Quanta design. Aimed at the developing-country market, the so-called Gecko Laptop is being built by Quanta and runs Linpus Linux Lite, a new distribution designed for small-screen mini-PCs.

South Africa’s nTier has completed a migration of the Water Research Commission’s Compiere ERP system from Oracle to the PostgreSQL-based EnterpriseDB. The commission made the move from the Oracle database to EnterpriseDB because the EnterpriseDB relational database was a more affordable option, nTier said in a statement today.

Programming the Asterisk open source PBX via the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) is a fun but exasperating exercise for the telephony programmer. It is fun since it can make a telephone dance, but frustrating because errors and debugging information can be difficult to catch since status information arrives on multiple channels: audible, Asterisk console, and STDERR. You can make the process of debugging a bit easier with the assistance of PHPAGI and Festival.