Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Today we're going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a good tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It's good for managing multiple sound devices, and it works in all Linux environments including other window managers, or no X Windows at all.

Sun has claimed that completing its purchase of the open source database developer MySQL will enable it to become the most complete provider of open source server software. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive, said in a conference call on Tuesday that the US$1 billion acquisition "completed our capability to deliver a holistic, secure, open source platform for networks", providing the last, key piece in a software stack that now rivals Microsoft's.

Medsphere, an open-source VistA vendor and their customers, gave a talk on their system and their strategy at HIMSS yesterday. Relative to the number of vendors present at HIMSS, very few held a session at the "University" section of the tradeshow. Medsphere did and highlighted several of their key successes. Overall, I was impressed. Read on after the gap for my review of the session.

There are lots of ways that software gets included in Fedora releases. Because Fedora is a community-powered Linux distribution, the most common (and likely the easiest) method is when a community member packages and “owns” the task of building it for Fedora. This story follows that process.

TheDailyPlate.com is a free, online eating journal with a lot of features that make it useful for the health conscious. The site is developed completely in PHP on MySQL, Apache, and Linux. LAMP was a natural choice, the founders say, because so many other Internet companies have experienced success with the now-ubiquitous platform.

Product revenue grew 9 percent year-over-year - Achieved non-GAAP operating margin of 10 percent

From the concept of copyleft to the status of community projects, free and open source software (FOSS) raises endless legal issues, many of which are subject to rumors and misconceptions floating around the community. To help reduce the confusion for those managing software projects, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has released a freely distributable guide entitled "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects."

The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brusssels was a great experience (as usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from the KDE perspective.

Most portable audio players can play music encoded in the MP3 audio format, but some consumers also have music in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, or even WMA files. How do you change from one format to another when you need to? Here are some of the best audio conversion tools available in Linux. One of the simplest and most elegant ways to convert audio files is by using the audio-convert script. It makes use of Zenity to display GUI messages and windows, but does the rest of its work from the command line.

News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature. However, you can add geographical information to your photos (i.e., geotag them) even if you don't have a fancy camera or GPS receiver using the Geotag tool.

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is.

The organizers of Open Source Software Summit (OSSummit) Asia are now looking to hold the conference in mainland China. The event, organized by the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, was originally set to be held in Hong Kong in November last year, but was postponed due to the lack of response.

Imagine standing on the road. An oncoming car is heading rapidly towards you. You have a choice to move, or to stay. Now consider that in business you need to choose a server platform wisely but often Windows shops become entrenched because it is the status quo. A couple of user experiences show why you ought to think about it more.

Version 7.0 of the open source operating system FreeBSD was released early this morning with a host of features that promise significant improvements in performance and SMP scalability. FreeBSD 7.0-release is available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and powerpc architectures. The version for the sparc64 architecture will become available in a few days.

Last summer, Microsoft said that February 27, 2008 would be the single biggest day of releases in its 30-year history, promising major updates to its server operating system, developer tools and database.

Those enterprising folks at Game Cube Linux (GC Linux) claim to have developed a proof of concept version of Linux running natively on the best-selling Nintendo Wii games console. The software exploits the Twilight Hack, a quirk in some versions of the Zelda game that lets external software to be loaded without performing hardware modifications. The hack fools the system into loading code from an SD memory card.

The GNOME Foundation has turned its attention to accessibility for people with disabilities. To help improve both Web accessibility within GNOME and the project's long-term direction, the Mozilla Foundation is joining the GNOME advisory board, and plans to help improve integration of the XUL development platform with GNOME. Even more significantly, the GNOME Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, Google, and Canonical are jointly sponsoring a $40,000 outreach program to help improve accessibility in GNOME.

Gnuplot can generate sophisticated graphs and output them in vector or bitmap image formats. It can produce many graph types, and you can customize the way the output will look to a great extent. But the customizability of gnuplot can work against it when all you want a simple line graph comparing two series of data points. In those cases, gplot lets you use gnuplot to create simple graphs using more semantic options to customize the appearance of common graph objects.

A few weeks ago I promised to bring in some more general news from the world of Linux audio software development. Alas, my plans were ambushed by the happy intrusion of the release of Renoise for Linux, but I'm back on track. As promised, here's more straight reporting on the world of Linux sound and music software, starting with some news about recently released music notation programs.