Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

With speculation building that Microsoft will bring Windows 7 forward by a year, ostensibly to staunch the loss of the Vista weary and Vistaphobes to alternative operating systems, now is a good time to look at the state of development tools for Linux. Software developers have got it surprisingly good - unlike, say, creative types who pretty much shy away from Linux on the desktop because of the unavailability (for the foreseeable future) of popular applications such as Adobe Creative Suite in a native version.

Hewlett-Packard unveiled its first new thin clients since acquiring Neoware last fall. Among the new products is a Debian- based "t5735" model featuring a CPU and GPU (graphics processor unit) from AMD, which acquired GPU specialist ATI recently. The announcement is HP's first in the category since it completed its $214 million acquisition of Neoware three months ago. The t5735 is based on an AMD Sempron 2100+ processor clocked at 1GHz. The graphics processor is a Radeon x1250, suggesting that the chipset could be AMD's 690G or 690V; the 690x chipsets are AMD's first to include an IGP (integrated graphics processor), following AMD's acquisition of ATI.

One thing that did not make it into the Linux Networking Cookbook was a chapter on setting up VLANs (Virtual LANs). VLANs are logical subnetting, rather than being constrained by your physical Ethernet switches. Now that “smart” switches have gotten so inexpensive, VLANs are nice options even for small networks.

Bombay, India. While the official name of the city is now "Mumbai", the name "Bombay" is still used by a lot of the inhabitants, and its use draws images of one of the world's largest cities, a gateway to the sub-continent. Therefore an invitation to speak at Techfest 2008 (http://www.techfest.org/), a large student-organized technical showcase, was impossible to turn down. Techfest is a yearly three-day event that encompasses "everything technical". While computer hardware and software had their place, the fest also included demonstrations and competitions centered around alternative energies, clean water production, recycling and included civil and mechanical engineering challenges.

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL. Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion – helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash. But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups.

Just as Camino offers Mozilla Web browsing capability tightly integrated with OS X system services, its new sibling, Correo, aims to bridge the same gap for email. The open source email reader is based on Mozilla technology, but unlike Thunderbird it ties in to core Mac OS libraries in order to better the end user experience. Correo 0.3 is the newest release, a 20MB .DMG file available for download from the project page. The application is a universal binary compatible with OS X versions 10.4 and up. Right now, two localizations are available: English and French.

Many companies consider instant messaging to be a distraction, but IM can be an effective communication tool if used properly. OpenFire is an open source enterprise IM server that has lots of features to streamline communication within an enterprise. The server is written in Java and uses Jabber, which is one of the most popular open protocols for real-time communication. In addition to being cross-platform, OpenFire is easy to set up and administer. While the basic version of the OpenFire server is available free of cost, an enterprise version, which costs $15 per user per year, adds features suitable for a large multi-office corporation.

Many moons have risen since I last gushed about Splunk, so what better way to reinvigorate our personal buzz than to install the latest version and write a how-to. After talking about a few neat features, we will briefly discuss how to set up central syslogging and how to install Splunk, before a tangent into "working around the free version's crippled interface."

2008 is off to a fine start for the world of Linux sound and music software, so this week's story is straight reporting from Studio Dave, with breaking news from various points on the Linux audio compass.

dhtmlxGrid is a JavaScript grid control that you can use to create an AJAX interface to a relational database server. The grid view provided by dhtmlxGrid offers actions that one would expect from a desktop grid control, such as sorting by columns by clicking on them, resizing columns, rich cell rendering, keyboard navigation, themes, and drag and drop. The standard edition of dhtmlxGrid is available under the GNU GPL and free to use, while other editions include additional features and cost from $150 to $450 depending on your needs. Methods in the JavaScript API for dhtmlxGrid indicate if they are only available in the paid versions. For this article I use the free GPL version.

If you have more than one computer or run more than one operating system (for example, Linux and Windows on a dual-boot machine), you probably need to keep the bookmarks in your browsers on the different platforms in sync. Firefox has several add-ons that can help you. For instance, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, Box.net Bookmarks Synchronizer, and Chipmark all provide good synchronisation features, and they allow cross-browser import and export and bookmark visualisation. However, all of them store data on a third-party server (sometime subject to a fee), at which you need to register.

Bombay, India. While the official name of the city is now "Mumbai", the name "Bombay" is still used by a lot of the inhabitants, and its use draws images of one of the world's largest cities, a gateway to the sub-continent. Therefore an invitation to speak at Techfest 2008 (http://www.techfest.org/), a large student-organized technical showcase, was impossible to turn down.

Novell has extended a set of development tools so they can be used to write applications and other software for rival Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. Novell announced earlier this week that its openSuse Build Service development tool, which already supports Novell's openSuse variations, Ubuntu and Debian, among others, will now support software from Red Hat, Novell's main competitor and the leader in enterprise Linux, and CentOS, a free "clone" of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

LXer Feature: 27-Jan-2008

In this week's LXer Roundup we have an article on how to access Linux partitions from Windows, should your business choose KDE or Gnome when running Linux, Ken Starks Yanks The Window Shade, The Everex Cloudbook gets ripped apart by FCC, An open letter to Linus Torvalds, Apple cripples Sun's open source jewel and a field guide to free software supporters. Plus a humorous press conference, a couple of FUD articles and Linux For The Masses? Bet On This Winner.

ECMA, the international IT standards association, recently published its responses to comments of the ISO National Bodies in response to Microsoft's Office Open XML application for ISO standardization (the actual 2,293-page response is closed to the public). The ECMA proposals will be discussed at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva after which the National Bodies may reconsider their original vote. Microsoft's responses make clear that within one year, it will have four different OOXML specifications to implement and interoperate with, and each of those specs will be closed. Under no circumstances should such a flawed specification become an international standard.

One of the main reasons people move from Windows to Linux is the promise of greater security from malware on the Internet. Everyone knows you need to add extra security to try to keep a Windows desktop safe, but what do you have to do to accomplish the same thing on Linux? To answer that question, we asked a number of well-known Linux kernel hackers and a security expert for their thoughts on the matter.

What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all. Or have we?

This article provides an overview of Linux-based tools for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including a quick take on the ESRI's ArcReader. Future articles will explore this and other individual tools in greater depth.

Tomorrow, January 26th, Gareth Greenaway, SCALE Operations Chair, and Orv Beach, SCALE Publicity Chair, will be on the Digital Village radio show. Digital Village is carried on KPFK (90.7 FM in the Los Angeles area), and streaming audio at http://www.kpfk.org.

This week Richard Seibt, the final CEO of an independent SUSE, held his third Open Source Meets Business Congress in Nurnberg, Germany -- birthplace of SUSE. Seibt says the event plays host to 720 people, 60% of whom identify themselves as "c-level decision makers" and 20% of whom say they are "IT professionals." The Congress lasted three days. The first day was the Investment Summit, intended to instruct attendees on "why to invest in open source," and featuring keynotes from venture capitalist Larry Augustin and IBM's Bob Sutor.