Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

On January 17 of this year the first beta release of Renoise 1.9.1 was announced. Along with new features and fixes for its Windows and OSX versions, this release includes the first version of Renoise for Linux. This is rather significant news: Renoise is a popular program, with an active community of developers and users in the Win/Mac music worlds, and a native Linux release has been a community priority. The wait is over, so let's see (and hear) what Renoise brings to the Linux audio software party.

If all goes according to plan then MySpace will finally open its platform to developers on Tuesday, in keeping with plans announced last October. Details are vague but the youf social networking arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire has at least confirmed the platform will support Google's OpenSocial interface. The timing couldn't be worse. Besides lagging pimply faced rival Facebook's decision to open up its platform to developers in May 2007, the move comes at a time of apparent declining interest in social networking. A bit like the Citizen's Band (CB) radio fad in the 1980s, the novelty appears to be wearing off now people have discovered its limited usefulness.

Like many VoIP telephony companies, Junction Networks uses Asterisk and other open source software to provide its customers with highly customizable VoIP service. Junction has been able to migrate its business model from a conference bridge service provider to a full-fledged telephone services company largely because of the flexibility and lower capital requirements of open source. "We're a completely bootstrapped company," says Mike Oeth, founder and CEO. "We were never locked into a business plan that was sold to investors." He says Junction is successful because it has been able to follow its customers' desires with open source.

Linspire, the company behind the commercial Linspire and the Freespire community desktop Linux, announced Jan. 31 that it was offering a new custom desktop Linux Build Service to its partners. The service is designed to make it easier for resellers and white box vendors to quickly deliver affordable custom desktop Linux configurations to customers. Linspire has courted this market for many years. Indeed, Linspire, its commercial Linux, is for all intents and purposes a reseller, rather than end-user, desktop Linux.

The latest release of open source database PostgreSQL hit Monday, packing a claimed record number of new and improved features. That means 280 patches. Version 8.3 of the sturdy alternative to MySQL has been re-worked for developers, DBAs and users with improvements targeting performance and maintenance.

High-end open source blogging applications may have all the features you can think of, but you may not need all that. For simple blogs, a lightweight alternative like Chyrp is worth a closer look. Chyrp runs on the PHP/MySQL stack, has a clean interface sprinkled with AJAX, and administration features that you can learn without resorting to a manual (in fact, there is no manual to speak of).

Photo mosaics are recreations of one large image composed of tiny tiles of other smaller images. They can be a fun project and make good use of the hundreds of less-than-extraordinary photos on your hard drive. We compared three easy-to-use Linux-based utilities for generating photo mosaics -- Pixelize, Metapixel, and Imosaic -- on speed, quality, and other factors.

Do you wish you had access to your home file server without leaving your firewall wide open to attacks? Well today's your lucky day! While you can implement this on any OS its easiest to do this on Linux. This article will show you how to lock down your firewall and implement a port knocker to let you in.

If you cannot face the thought of hunting down and re-installing all of your Firefox extensions one by one on a second computer, you need, appropriately, an extension to simplify the task. CLEO, the Compact Library Extension Organizer, can package all your extensions and themes into one installable .xpi file. Extension seriesYou can install CLEO from its homepage or the official Mozilla Web site. You must also install FEBE (Firefox Environment Extension Backup), which CLEO uses to back up your extensions.

There are a number of ways to view the proposed Microsoft takeover of Yahoo. And, frankly, none of them is very encouraging. Yahoo is a company on a very slippery downhill slope, one that saw the company announce last week that it was to chop 1000 jobs in an effort to restore profitability. Microsoft is a company desperate to shore up the gaping hole in its business that is the Internet. And Google? Well Google just carries on being Google and growing stronger and stronger by the day. The concern, however, is that between the three the online advertising market is pretty much locked up and this deal will ensure it is even more so.

Linux certification body Linux Professional Institute has added another African country to its ranks with the inclusion of Egypt as an LPI affilliate. Egypt joins a growing number of African LPI affiliates including South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.The LPI also announced this week new affiliates in Pakistan and the United Arab emirates. Egypt joins LPI ranks.

Novell has announced a pre-built "starter" system for Suse Linux Enterprise Server, which will eliminate the complicated procedure normally required to get Linux going on a mainframe, the company claims. Available from last Friday, Suse Linux Enterprise Server Starter System for System z provides a pre-configured disk image that installs like any other system z service, into a virtual machine, using standard mainframe tools, according to Novell.

The openness of the Internet is what made Google -- and Yahoo! -- possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place. So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

[This is not directly FOSS related but I believe it to be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

LXer Feature: 3-Feb-2008

In the ramp up to SCALE next weekend we have a SCALE announcement, a concise history of Linux, Nokia acquires Trolltech. We have articles on VLAN's and Rootkit detectors on Linux, How to apply Unix philosophy to personal productivity, Eight interesting improvements in GNOME 2.22, Mythbusters- Vista gets BUSTED and the big news of the week, if not the month Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo for $44.6 Billion dollars.

During the recent Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, former OLPC CTO (and XO challenger) Mary Lou Jepsen discussed the real-world difficulties with using the kid-friendly laptops, including the creation of an XO "hospital" used to repair broken computers. Apparently, in the crowded conditions of schools in places like Nigeria, the little green laptops have a tendency to be jostled around and even knocked on the floor from time to time. As there's typically no repair shops nearby, the kids have learned to fix the systems themselves, setting up a "laptop hospital" where they can repair what's broken using simple tools and cheap replacement parts.

In recent weeks I have banged on about Open Source, expending two articles on Firefox alone. Open Source applications make their code available to everyone. Disagreements and rabid balkanisation within the Open Source community aside, for our purposes the term might as well refer to free software whose licence allows you to share the source code, alter it, use it, do with it what you will.

"I re-ran some statistics the other day on our kernel development rate, and changed my formula after Andrew accused me of severely undercounting the rate of change," noted Greg KH during a discussion about the stability of the Linux kernel while undergoing significant changes. He continued, "turns out that as of 2.6.24-rc8 for the 2.6.24 kernel release we did: lines added per day, 4945; lines removed per day, 2006; lines modified per day, 1702"..

Should Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! go through, the combined company would face one very major infrastructure question - how far is it willing to go in the war against Google? According to some, Google enjoys a major cost savings advantage over its rivals through a series of bespoke data centers. The ad broker crafts its own servers, using cheap memory, cheap disk and cheap low-power chips. Such systems, destined for failure, cause little damage when they go down because Google's software spreads well across hundreds and thousands of machines. Google treats its clusters of machines as a single entity rather than worrying all much about individual boxes. Along the way, the company saves on energy and infrastructure costs by relying on components that many major companies would consider below their standards.

Sebastian Kuegler of KDE recently agreed to give an interview, the first in what I hope will be a series. His responses are well thought out and detailed. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Last year, Dell began offering Ubuntu on non-corporate desktops and laptops, opening the door for other large computer companies to follow suit. With this offering came a lot of discussion over what Dell should include with each computer sold. In a recent iTWire article concerning Dell's inclusion of its re-worked Ubuntu 7.10 and LinDVD (a commercial Linux DVD player), comments ran the gamut from FOSS purity to legal questions to even questioning Dell's motives. Clearly the FOSS community is pulled in all directions trying to satisfy users. Is there any happy medium? Can the community balance the requests of purists and pragmatists and still release usable products?