Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It is the time of the yearto gather and spend some time on our favourite IDE. Continuing the tradition to meet in cities famous for alcohol-based beverages and oversized servings of meat, Munich was the obvious pick. Pretending to be a civilised crowd, we managed to convince the boss of the Trolltech's Munich office to generously provide us with a room, a 4MBit SDSL line and lots of coffee. Read on for the agenda and how any interested KDevelop helpers can join.

Setting up a virtual File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server with a database back end offers many benefits. By using a database, you can store a large number of users centrally, so it's easy to manage. It offers more security than traditional Unix OS authentication methods, because virtual users can access only the FTP server's resources, not the OS's. You can use the many Web tools that are available to easily install, configure, and manage the database back end.

Amarok project founder Mark Kretschmann was interviewed for "Not the Gentoo Linux Newsletter". He talks about Amarok and what makes this project special, its community, beer, more beer and other things of importance to him. Amarok headquarters is also pleased to announce Amarok 2 Technology Preview 1 for Windows, complete with an easy to use installer!

In the doublespeak of telecommunications politics "no compelling case" to regulate ADSL means it might be imminent and "it is unlikely there is a need to regulate" means "no way will there be regulation". Welcome to the brave new world of ALP telecoms regulation, or Telstra spin-doctoring. Take your pick!

Because the traditional System V init daemon (SysVinit) does not deal well with modern hardware, including hotplug devices, USB hard and flash drives, and network-mounted filesystems, Ubuntu replaced it with the Upstart init daemon.

This article is excerpted from the recently published book A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux.

Hey you, ya you! Do you write Bash scripts? Come here, I have a secret to tell you. Python is easy to learn, and more powerful than Bash. I wasn’t supposed to tell you this–it’s supposed to be a secret. Anything more than a few lines of Bash could be done better in Python. Python is often just as portable as Bash too. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any *NIX operating systems, that don’t include Python. Even IRIX has Python installed.

It's not like anyone has asked for Windows XP to run on the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, but Microsoft is getting ready to deliver it to us anyway. In an eWEEK news story by Peter Galli, Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft's Unlimited Potential Group, said Microsoft is conducting field trials to make sure that a modified XP Service Pack 2 will run well on the XO. According to Ayala, "We are encouraged by what we have seen of Windows on the XO machine so far, and field trials started at the end of January involving about 200 XO machines running a customized version of Windows XP SP2 with a reduced footprint image."

The commoditization of equity trades is giving Web 2.0 open source investment platforms a chance to win converts. An increasing number of Web 2.0 companies are turning to user-generated financial and investing content to give them a strategic advantage in the cut-throat equity trading business.

Although KOffice has its admirers, in many people's minds, it runs a poor second to OpenOffice.org. However, some European developers expect that situation to change, and to encourage that change, they have created KOfficeSource, a company incorporated in Germany. The company plans to offer support and training not only for KOffice, but also for Open Document Format, and programming using the Qt toolkit. The company's business plan highlights its founders' hopes that KDE-related technologies will become mainstream, and illustrates the current level of acceptance of free software tools in business.

Maverick programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham is challenging all comers to beat him after finally releasing a working version of his Lisp update – called Arc. Best known for his pioneering early 1990s work on web development and spam filters, Graham announced in 2001 he was working on an economic version of Lisp, one of the oldest languages still in regular use for production systems - with Cobol and Fortran - that’s used in artificial intelligence programming and considered something for “serious” developers.

Subtitles may not mean much for the English-speaking part of the world, but for the rest of us, they are the difference between truly enjoying a movie or just watching the screen, trying to decipher the events. While Windows has a nice variety of tools to manipulate subtitles, Linux applications too can accomplish such tasks. From editing to ripping to converting, here is a list of some useful tools.

If you've dabbled even a little bit with security matters, you know that giving root rights or the root password to a common user is a bad idea. But what do you do if a user has a valid need to do something that absolutely requires root rights? The answer is simple: use sudo to grant the user the needed permissions without letting him have the root password, and limit access to a minimum.

Krita isn't really going to kill anything or anyone. What it will do is meet most of the needs of users who want a modern, sophisticated native paint and image-editing application for Linux. It was designed from the ground up for graphics professionals.

Not every proprietary program can drive a person crazy, right? Some, like Norton Ghost, are superb tools for anyone to use. But, the fact that these tools are proprietary can drive open source fanatics up a wall. It’s not the price of the software that makes the real difference (although it’s a reason to migrate from one software to another for many people); it’s the idea that proprietary software comes with boundaries that keeps the user experience confined to…well, being the user. That’s enough to drive any developer crazy.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution now includes virtualisation software Parallels in its partner repository. The move by Canonical, commercial sponsors of Ubuntu Linux, is a first for Ubuntu as Parallels is a commercial package and not free to use. However, by including Parallels in the partner repository Ubuntu users are able to easily install it should they want to use it. Installing Parallels using the Ubuntu package management tools will make it much simpler for users to install the software rather than installing from the command line.

Storing backups on optical media such as DVD-R discs suffers from two major drawbacks: DVD discs are easy to scratch, and the media itself degrades after a while. You can deal with the scratching issue by careful handing of the media, but even expensive media becomes unreadable over time. Dvdisaster aims to help you recover the information off scratched and aged media.

"Work continues to progress well but I've hit a few snags," noted Matthew Dillon, referring to the ongoing development of his HAMMER filesystem. He began by highlighting a number of problems with the current design, then adding, "everything else now works, and works well, including and most especially the historical access features."

This is just a reminder that the Demonstrating Opensource Health Care Solutions Conference (DOHCS) '08 conference will be taking place this Friday February 8th at the Westin LAX Los Angeles. This event brings together many of the brightest minds in Open Source health care to discuss and evangelize the latest and greatest happenings with case studies, technical looks and more. This years event features both a business and technical track.You can find out more information by visiting http://www.dohcs.org . LinuxMedNews readers can pre-register (select Purchase Tickets) to attend the event for free by using the coupon code (not promocode) "OPENHEALTH" at checkout. Hope to see you there!

Cape Town-based open source software developers KnowledgeTree have just expanded their operations into the Iberian peninsula in a deal with Sybase SBS Software in Spain and Portugal. The master distributor deal will see Sybase SBS Software develop a network of new reseller partners in the region. Developed in South Africa, KnowledgeTree is an open source document management suite built on Apache, MySQL and PHP (Lamp).

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, will on Thursday begin making commercial applications available to Ubuntu users directly through the desktop, in a step designed to simplify software installation. The company is making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users via the operating system's built-in software update tool, using a feature called the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels Workstation allows users to run Windows and Linux simultaneously on a single system.