Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

IBM has confirmed that it will ignore a second petition to open source the OS/2 operating system. OS/2 community site OS2World.com organized the second petition in an attempt to reverse a 2005 decision by IBM not to open source the operating system.

GNU/Linux inherits a tradition of small programs that do one thing very well. A modern example of this tradition is Alexandria, a dedicated book cataloger for GNOME. Although a few workarounds would make it almost as useful as KDE's Tellico for other collections, especially music, Alexandria's focus remains squarely on books and their organization by library, status, and ratings. Perhaps its closest analogy is the online LibraryThing, although Alexandria actually predates LibraryThing and is designed for private, desktop use.

Whether by wind, vibration, or shaky hand, we have all taken blurry photos. But in the digital era, there is no need to despair -- you can remove shake and blur from your pictures after the fact. Several Linux-friendly utilities can help you. Deconvolution is the general process that helps remove the effects of camera shake and blur. If you want to understand the math behind the process, start with the articles referenced at Wikipedia and you can find as much detail as you want. In a nutshell, it involves taking the Fast Fourier Transform of the image (which makes it easier to see the tell-tale signs of blurring), smoothing out the artifacts, then transforming the image back into its original form. It is a CPU-intensive process, but for a shaky image there is no better use of your MHz.

After the star studded talks of the main event day, the final day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event returned to the un-conference format of small group talks, demos and discussions. KDE Dot News listened in to some of the sessions, read on for brief summaries. Benjamin Reed (RangerRick) started the day with a Q&A session on the Mac port of KDE. The Mac builds of KDE are available and work reasonably but there are a number of issues to be sorted yet as well as some bugs that have appeared with Qt using the latest version of OS X so it is not recommended for everyday use. Some unresolved issues include the duplication of Strigi against Apple's Spotlight and lack of a Solid backend. Benjamin hopes to have stable builds available for KDE 4.1.

Brightside is a small utility for extending the functionality of Metacity, the default window manager for the GNOME desktop. Now at version 1.4.0, it currently offers two mutually exclusive functions: corner actions that are activated when the mouse cursor moves to one of the desktop's corners, and scrolling with the mouse between desktops. Although its home page has been down recently, Brightside is widely available in the repositories of major distributions. A wiki for the project has been registered with SourceForge.net -- although no content or contact information has been added yet -- so the project may be in the process of moving.

I was eating breakfast in my favorite restaurant today and I noticed a sign up on the wall that said: "Free Range Eggs, $4.00 per dozen" Now at first I had the common knee-jerk reaction to the word "Free" that everyone does, thinking of the concept of "gratis". Then I realized that the word "Free" was related to "Range" and not the price of the eggs.

Red Hat has launched a testing and certification facility in Beijing, as well as opened another research and development (R&D) center in the Chinese state. These moves come under an initiative to encourage deployment of open source software in the country, which Red Hat has termed Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI).

Annvix is a distribution aimed at providing a secure, stable, and fast base for servers. Be warned, however: Annvix is not for everyone. When you boot the Annvix netinstall CD, you're greeted with a shell and informed that the root password is "root" and should be changed. It also advises that you set up your network and use lynx on another terminal to browse the documentation for the install. Already I could tell that this was not going to be your average user-friendly GUI installer.

Is the real challenge for PR just "influence"? Or is it something bigger thatn that? If so, are there ways we can help PR move past its history of spinnage and into a future of usefulness?

LinkXL is a new way to capitalize on your blog's popularity. It leverages the keywords and keyphrases you've been including in your content in an effort to get a higher page rank on search engines. LinkXL is an ad broker, but the ads are not really ads, they're just links from certain words in your blog posts to an advertiser's site. Advertisers pay a set amount to get a linked keyword -- usually around $5 per link, per month. Publishers stand to make a lot of money, LinkXL executives assert, because of the sheer volume of content available on most blogs.

LXer Feature: 20-Jan-2008

With more computer manufacturers announcing their Linux pre-installed offerings and retailers announcing the availability Linux based computers in their stores, this week's Roundup should be called "Coming soon to a store near you". Lenovo is finally getting their Linux laptops to market, Acer makes a trial run of laptops with Ubuntu on them, Shuttle reveals a $200 Linux box, Sears has Freespire based PC's for $199 after rebate and Everex's 2 pound, $399 Cloudbook is coming to a Wal-Mart near you. Also, KDE 4.0 hits the streets and in a collection of Microsoft related articles McAfee "accidentally" forgets to read the license, Pamela Jones says goodbye to Mandriva and the EU opens two new investigations against Microsoft while Bill Gates offers free customized Windows Live services to Finland's primary and secondary public schools.

Ohloh, the community site for developers, is making its tools open source, including the Web site itself. The Ohloh site collates information from public open-source version control systems, to create a database of the productivity of open source projects, and the developers working on them. A new "labs" section of the Ohloh site makes source code available, under the GPL version 2. This includes tools such as Ohcount, which counts lines of source code and can be used by companies to audit their software development teams.

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. The keynote was recorded, and is now available for streaming through Google Video.

The second day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, was a very busy day. Reporters and users joined the hackers, peeking over their shoulders, asking questions and generally trying to figure us out. Talks were given - most notably the keynote by Aaron Seigo, but also covering KOffice, the KDE-Edu project, and multimedia.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A whole set of bugfixes and feature additions in Plasma, and various optimisations across KDE. Usability improvements in Blinken. More work on the timeline tool, including fuzzy selection in Digikam. Support for XComposite translucency in the Konsole KPart. QtScript can now deal transparently with all scripting backends supported by Kross. Improvements in KWin Composite effects. Support for an old feature request, "parenthesis highlighting as an expression" in Kate...

We called it Free Software at first. It wasn't until we started calling it Open Source that the punditry line counts began creeping up higher than the code line counts. We had this baby and we were proud of it, and the deep rooted insecurity born of being the ridiculed and utterly misunderstood underdogs made us require the approval of business and Grandma Bessie before we could ourselves be satisfied. Well, now we've got it, and in some ways Open Source is not better off because of it.

LWN is about to celebrate a birthday. Picking the true anniversary of an enterprise like LWN can be a bit tricky - there are many points which could be said to mark the true birth of the organization. After some thought, we have decreed that LWN.net was born on January 30, 1998. So we have a tenth anniversary coming up. That's a long time - far longer than any of us thought we would be doing this. Life is funny that way, somehow.

Yahoo! has pledged to support OpenID from the end of the month, giving a massive boost for the online identity framework that aims to cut password headaches. Yahoo.com and sister site flickr.com will add support for OpenID 2.0, Yahoo! said on Thursday. Separately, Google's Blogger confirmed yesterday plans to become an OpenID provider.

MEncoder has supported video encoding for a long time with the MPlayer Project and FFmpeg, which also now is part of MPlayer now. Transcode is a new command-line tool on the horizon for video and audio transformations. Transcode used to give me horrors, but it is much better now. It does take some time to learn its wonderfully unintuitive syntax—the author used all the lowercase and uppercase English alphabet letters for specifying the command-line options. Using longer mnemonic options common in other Linux commands might have made things easier. Anyway, let's get to the meat of the matter.

Lots of open source tools can help you transfer photos and videos from your cameras to a Linux computer and burn them on to a DVD. But before you mail them to your uncles, aunts, and cousins, wouldn't it be great if you could add a customized case cover to your disks? Koverartist is a KDE application you can use to quickly put together an artistic cover for a CD case.