Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The KDE PIM crew met again at Osnabrück for three days of hacking, discussing and community building. The big topics were Akonadi and KDE 4.1. The team settled on the plan to release KDE PIM with KDE 4.1 based on the traditional backends and include the first platform release of Akonadi as the future base for PIM applications in and around KDE. The meeting was kindly hosted by Intevation and supported by the KDE e.V. and KDAB. Read on for a report or see the notes on the website.

One undeniable sign of progress among Linux distributions is the proliferation of easy-to-use, graphical package management applications. Tools like yum, Synaptic, and CNR are the rule these days rather than the exception. Mac OS X has free software fans, and a well-maintained collection of software at MacPorts, but for a long time those fans have been limited to the command line for finding, installing, and updating the offerings. Now a new utility called Porticus has arrived to present a slick GUI interface to the MacPorts collection, and it could make some converts.

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement. Not only did his company pick wisely when it came to endorsing an open source technology, it also convinced a major, publicly traded entity to part with $1bn for no discernable return - despite its own challenges in making money.

Free software programmers are fond of saying that they'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel. Apparently that attitude no longer applies to desktop menus, considering all the new options springing up. A few years ago, just about the only menu choices on the main desktop environments were the ones that shipped with them, or the exhaustive Debian ones. For five years, GNOME didn't even have a menu editor.

Last time, we spoke about the Linux process scheduler and how it runs in the shadows swapping processes in and out of a running state so everyone gets a stab at the CPU. Today we’ll go over how the kernel keeps track of time and just what it means to do something in a jiffy.

Microsoft today flung open its software APIs and protocols to all comers. Is it enough to persuade the European Commission to drop anti-trust investigations of the company? In a word, no. The Commission today noted that Microsoft has issued four statements in the past promoting interoperability, and it wants to see if a) the new pledge conforms with EC competition law and b) if Microsoft actually walks it like it talks it.

You might think you need to be familiar with assistive technologies like the Orca screen reader to determine whether your application is accessible. The truth is that with just a couple simple rules and an open-source tool called Accerciser, the task at hand is fairly simple. Before you start diagnosing your application with specialized tools like Accerciser, you should ask yourself a few straightforward questions about your application.

Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what? That's the question that occurred to me yesterday, while sitting in the audience of a tech session at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles — the big annual conference for what most of us still call public broadcasting. I sat there hearing panelists tell story after story about what stations can do with piles of open code, tools and standards. In cases where the nature or provenance of recommended code was in doubt, questions from the audience went, "Is the source code for that available?" or "Is that open code, or just an open service?"

Webcams are everywhere these days: they're standard on a lot of laptops, LCD monitors are starting to incorporate them, and decent standalone USB webcams can be had for less than $40. In this two-part series we'll set up a Webcam on Linux, and then use it to perform a number of amazing and fun tasks.

If you need to set up a secure, easily configurable Web server in as short a time as possible, then Abyss Web Server might just be the product for you. In development since 2002, its current version (2.5) runs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. Its simple installation and setup (no obscure text configuration files) allows you to code your site with PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and even ASP.Net, if you're using the Windows version.

University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming. Microsoft knows from history that this will be fatal in the long term, hence its decision to extend free availability of core development tools to students. Most of my generation of computer science students quite literally never touched any IBM kit, even though - back then - it had a bigger share of the IT market than today is enjoyed by Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard put together.

The Viewglob command-line utility lets you see the files available for your shell command completions in a separate window, leaving your regular terminal window uncluttered. Viewglob packages are available for various versions of SUSE as well as Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The main Viewglob download page also lists RPM packages for Fedora and Debian.

Veteran tech entrepreneur Bob Bickel has let out a whisper of his new venture, Ringside Networks, which will aim to make social networking applications work outside the network.

The KDE e.V. welcomes a new Supporting Member, OSN Online Social Network GmbH, a company based in Düsseldorf in Germany. Supporting Members help the community with financial support, their contribution is used for example for sponsoring developer meetings you often read about on the Dot.

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the name of the next Ubuntu release - Meeky Meerkat. Er, well, it's really called Intrepid Ibex and will likely arrive in Oct. as Ubuntu 8.10. It sounds as if Intrepid Ibex will center on laptop features such a tool to switch automatically between Wi-Fi and dial-in services.

Combining multiple photographs taken at different exposures lets you create a single image with good highlight and shadow detail. Tone-mapping applications like Qtpfsgui are the traditional way to do this, but tone-mapping is slow, difficult to use, and can produce strange visual artifacts. A new tool on the scene is easier, faster, and produces nicer results: Enfuse.

The Linux kernel has merged three hypervisors into its mainline tree, starting with KVM in 2.6.20, and continuing with Xen and lguest in the 2.6.23 release of the kernel. Hypervisors let users run multiple operating systems on a host system. Lguest is the simplest of the three in terms of usability and implementation, which makes it a good candidate for helping you learn how virtualization works.

It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify. Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. The Alpha 6 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features.

linux.conf.au has an interesting structure which differentiates it from most other events. Every year, a completely new set of organizers takes over the event, moves it to a new city, and puts its own stamp on it. They have a great deal of freedom in how they run LCA, but there is still a group of Linux Australia members and past organizers who keep an eye on things and help ensure that the event does not run into problems. The result is a conference which has a lot of fresh energy every year, but which is also reliably interesting. Many attendees consider it to be one of the best Linux events to be found anywhere in the world.