Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In August 1993, Ian Murdock founded the Debian project and nurtured the free open source operating system into one of the most popular Linux distributions, supported by an established community of developers. Today, Debian is used by thousands of individuals and various large and small businesses worldwide, though no concrete numbers are available since users are not required to register.

For most computer literate children, a request from mom to get her set up on “this web thing” is met with panic and a feeling of drudgery. Are you about to expose your sweet mother to spam, phishing, viruses, or worse? Or perhaps more frightening, sign your life away as a 24/7 tech support center? Perhaps, but there’s a better way. By setting your mom up on a Linux machine, you can give her a safe, lean computing experience that will let her do all of the things she wants to do without giving you a nervous breakdown.

Microsoft has committed to becoming a mixed ASP.NET and PHP shop for the "foreseeable" future should its proposed Yahoo! acquisition succeed, rather than convert popular services like Yahoo! mail to Microsoft's .NET architecture. Chief executive Steve Ballmer confirmed, though, that overlapping online properties would be axed. Ballmer did not say what Microsoft ASP.NET or Yahoo! services based on the open source PHP Microsoft would keep, kill or merge, but he highlighted overlap in search, ad serving and mail.

San Jose-based startup DeviceVM made waves last year when it unveiled Splashtop, a nearly instant-on Linux environment stored in the flash memory usually reserved for motherboard BIOS. The company previewed an upcoming revision to Splashtop at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in January, then gave us the chance to take a hands-on look at this intriguing system software.

You probably don’t lose any sleep worrying that your word processor is saving files in the wrong format. You may have some old files that don’t open correctly, or someone might have sent you a spreadsheet that doesn’t work in anything but Excel, but you probably found some way to work around the problem.

Australian university students have developed a Linux-based data forensics tool to help police churn through a growing backlog of computer-related criminal investigations. The tool was developed by students from Edith Cowan University's School of Computing and Information Sciences and will help the Western Australian Police Computer Crime Squad process their forensic investigations.

South Africa-developed open source document management application KnowledgeTree has boosted its feature set to include full Microsoft Office 2007 support in its latest release. Built on Apache and PHP, KnowledgeTree also includes a new web services-accessible document search based on the Apache Lucene project and online visual comparison of document versions.

The Novell-sponsored project porting the Silverlight cross-browser plug to Linux is getting patent protection from Microsoft, indemnifying users from aggressive patent holders and litigators such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

Cryptmount allows you to encrypt both your filesystems and swap space. An encrypted filesystem can be stored on a block device like a normal filesystem -- for example, using /dev/sda2 -- or inside a normal file in another filesystem. This later method is especially handy when you would like to work with an encrypted filesystem without changing your partition tables or working with the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Cryptmount can also encrypt your swap space so that information from an encrypted filesystem is not inadvertently made less secure by the Linux kernel swapping a process out to disk.

Venture capitalists (VC) first discovered open source during the dot-com bubble at the turn of the millennium. When the bubble burst, open source was connected closely enough with its general failure that all but a handful of VCs lost interest. In the last few years, however, investor interest has started to return, due to growing acceptance of open source software and the success of existing open source companies. What now attracts investors to open source companies, VCs say, is the higher probability of innovative ideas and quicker time to market, as well as the ability to develop niche markets that were previously too small to develop profitably.

Hosted by Sun Microsystems, the Sun Tech Days developer conference in India has grown over manifolds over the last eight years, say company executives. Over 9,000 developers attended last week's Sun Tech Days in Hyderabad, which was beamed simultaneously to Chennai and Bangalore, compared to some 170 who participated in 2000.

Last week we learned how to configure soundcards for playback with ALSA. It's easy, it works on all Linuxes, it doesn't create conflicts or introduce latency, and it doesn't require the X Window System. Today we're going to use ALSA for recording, and learn how to test our sound system.

Linux is sometimes belittled for having inferior applications, but that's simply not the case. Take DVD rippers, for example -- a plethora of them work on Linux machines. With so many to choose from, which is the best?

The Cobra programming language has been made available via open source, according to its author, Charles "Chuck" Esterbrook. Heavily influenced by Python, Cobra runs on .Net, Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Solaris, and is said to combine productivity enhancements from a variety of languages.

The KDE community has released another update to its cutting edge KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.2 has, along with the bugfixes some new features in Plasma. The panel can now be configured to sit somewhere else than at the bottom and UI options for changing its size have been added.

Earlier this month at JBossWorld in Orlando, Florida, Linux.com had the chance to sit down with Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's new vice president of middleware, to talk about his job, the middleware marketplace, and the open source community.

Anyone who has thought that, as nice as the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child computers are for the target market of third-world children, they'd also make a lot of sense for U.S. kids too, is in good company. The mayor of Birmingham, Ala., Larry Langford, had the same thought and the result is that the city will be deploying 15,000 OLPCs to its school system.

Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie tried to clarify Microsoft's software plus services internet strategy. And guess what, it involves advertising and Yahoo!. Ozzie opened Microsoft's Mix 08 offering developers the "big picture" on a strategy he promised would culminate with massive software and service launches at Microsoft's mega Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.

[Still sounds like they need to buy Yahoo more than want to buy Yahoo to me. - Scott]

When you want to customize the look and feel of your Linux desktop environment, you can find many resources for altering window managers and interface widgets, but working with icons has always been more of an issue. Now you can get help with icons from a new program called Tango Generator. The major Linux desktop environments (such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce) adhere to an icon theme specification from freedesktop.org.

Just when Microsoft thought it was on target with its forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser, the goalposts have moved. The Web Standards Project (WaSP) has released its latest browser standards compliance test - Acid 3 - and every browser that WaSP tested failed. IE 8 is, of course, not available for test yet. But given the abysmal performance of IE 7, Microsoft developers have a lot of work to do.