Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Sun Microsystems is to pay $1bn for open source database developer MySQL. MySQL's open source databases are widely used online, but Sun is hoping to increase their use in more traditional IT and enterprise settings. The database is used by many websites - 50,000 copies a day are downloaded.

Free software projects have the irritating habit of choosing names that fail to reflect what the software does. A case in point is KBarcode. Although KBarcode does generate the barcodes you would expect from its name, for most people, it is probably far more useful as a label and business card editor. Anyone looking for these functions could easily overlook it because of the name -- and that would be unfortunate because, even with some awkward interface designs, KBarcode still compares favorably to similar programs.

Aria Systems provides applications that let companies perform automated billing services. Aria uses open source to deliver a product that costs its customers less than products built on proprietary software while providing them with secure, efficient, easy-to-use billing. CEO and founder Ed Sullivan says one factor that contributed to his idea for a better billing system came from his experience as a paying customer playing the popular Ultima Online game.

As much as I know we need a project management system to build the Geek Ranch I will leave that discussion for another day. But, my current experience illustrates a case when project management software doesn't solve the problems. The first building we are going to construct is what I will call the Auxiliary Building. This is a 4 meter square building that will house a backup generator, batteries and inverter and act as storage for extra chairs and such when the main building is open. During construction, it will serve as a storage space for tools and equipment.

We reviewed the RAW photo editor LightZone almost a year ago, when the Linux version of the product was a closed source -- but free -- download. After months of updates only for the Mac OS X and Windows versions of the application, Light Crafts has released a new beta for Linux. It is a substantial improvement -- but it also marks the end of the road for the free edition.

If you're reading LinuxSecurity.com then it's a safe bet that you are already using SSH, but are you using it in the best way possible? Have you configured it to be as limited and secure as possible? The goal of this document is to kick in the new year with some best practices for SSH: why you should use them, how to set them up, and how to verify that they are in place.

DVD burners such as as K3b and GnomeBaker use standard commands for manipulating .ISO images, such as mkisofs. However, they give users only limited control over the resulting images beyond selecting their contents. Users cannot even save the image to an .ISO formatted file; instead the burners save in their own project formats. Fortunately, this functionality gap is bridged by ISO Master, a program that, despite a slightly awkward interface, is intuitive enough that most users can quickly learn its fundamentals without having to refer to online help. Only the adding of a boot record is likely to give average users any trouble.

Until recently, Linux PCs were about as easy to find in stores as a vinyl record. Now, personal computers with the Linux operating system pre-installed are becoming more readily available, thanks to new models from upstarts and established PC makers -- and disappointment with Microsoft's new Windows Vista OS. In just the past several weeks, a handful of new, low-cost systems have hit the market that are powered by Linux -- open source software first developed by Linus Torvalds and enhanced by enthusiast programmers around the world.

Lenovo has launched a range of laptops pre-installed with Novell's SuSE Linux operating system, which it announced in August last year. Originally marked for release in the fourth quarter of 2007, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is now available pre-installed on Lenovo's ThinkPad T61 and R61 models. The notebooks are aimed at typical business users, and are expected to be expanded as an option for some Intel Penryn-based ThinkPads in February.

Are you dazzled by the way you can drag Google Maps around or move from one place to another without having to reload the screen? Or maybe you're a fan of Gmail and its look and feel? If you want to develop Web sites with Google's signature user-friendly features but are afraid of the work involved, take a look at the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

I remember when getting a decent PC would set you back at least a grand. Then it was $500. Now, it's $150!? That's the story that small vendor LinFX wants you to buy along with its PC with pre-installed Linux. How does LinFX manage to sell a fully operational computer with a 15-inch display for $150? Well, while the Linux distribution, PCLinuxOS 2007, is a state-of-the-art 21st century desktop Linux, the hardware, an IBM NetVista desktop with a 900MHz Intel Pentium III and 256MB of RAM, is right out of the year 2000.

As readers of the first part of this series will remember, your editor has set out on a project to digitize a set of old video tapes and turn them into properly-formatted DVD media suitable for handing out to the grandparents. Part 1 was about the task of capturing this data to disk; part 2 covers the video editors available for turning the captured data into something watchable, and part 3 covers the task of creating a DVD from the edited video.

In the latest Ubuntu weekly newsletter the Ubuntu folks announced the release of the Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Course. The modular course should take two days to complete all 10 of the lessons offered, but it is possible to cover topics and lessons independently of each other, learning whatever is of interest.

Opus Healthcare provides Web-based software solutions for doctors, nurses, therapists, and healthcare support staff. Recently, Opus moved from Unix on Hewlett-Packard hardware to a mixture of different Linux distributions on Intel. Opus CEO and co-founder Tim Rhoads says it has been a "bottom-up" transition, driven by the company's development staff.

After more than 18 months of planning and development, KDE 4 was released on Friday. The new version of the popular desktop environment is an ambitious revision on almost every level, from the performance and design to the applications and system tools. While it sometimes shows the influence of other desktops, most users should find something to like in the hundreds of new features. However, users' overall verdict may well depend on their tolerance for new layouts and logic.

The fork occupies an ambivalent place in the world of open source. On the one hand, it is widely perceived as the worst thing that can happen to a project, pitting hacker against hacker, and dissipating coding effort that could be more usefully applied in a united way. On the other, it is the ultimate test and guarantee of openness: if code cannot be forked, it is not truly open. Perhaps most importantly, it is the threat of the fork, hanging over projects like a digital sword of Damocles, that keeps them close to their constituencies, as free software's short history has shown time and again. The closest that the Linux kernel has come to forking, was during the famous “Linus does not scale” incident that began on 28 September1998 with the innocent question:

MODx, an open source content management system (CMS) and PHP application framework comparable to WordPress or Movable Type, recently won Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS award. The application works with either Apache or Internet Information Services (IIS) and supports almost any browser.

One of the best uses for Linux is special-purpose, tightly managed distributions for a single purpose, and Untangle has created one of the most impressive applications of this principle. The Untangle Gateway bundles together a list of applications that even seasoned sysadmins couldn't install and effectively manage in a timely manner.

The Ubuntu desktop may look a little brown and boring to first-time Linux users but beneath that conservative skin lurks a powerhouse of desktop features just waiting to come out, if you are using Compiz Fusion. Here we look at five of the better Compiz features that actually make us more productive as well as looking good. When you have multiple windows open on your desktop, all piled on top of one another, it’s hard to find what you want. With Scale you simply hit a key … and all the open windows are scaled down and tiled across the screen. Clicking on one of them brings it to the front. It’s a real time saver.

Do you have some mundane task that you have to do regularly through a Web browser? Are you a developer who wants to automatically test the interface of your latest Web application? Maybe you want to log into all of the sites you visit on a daily basis with one click. If you fall into any of these categories, you should check out the iMacros Firefox extension.