Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It's going to happen. Some time in 2008, SCO will finally stop thrashing on the floor and die. Will it be Novell draining it dry of its last financial resources in the U.S. District Court in Utah? Or, will it be the bankruptcy court in Delaware divvying up the last bits and pieces of the once-proud Unix company?

Intel said on Thursday it will drop out of the One Laptop Per Child project and resign from the board after the project's board demanded the chipmaker stop supporting other efforts in emerging markets.

We’re all swamped with information: emails, documents, pictures and the hundreds of websites we visit every week. There are two ways to deal with the data overload: Get organised and file everything in its right pace. Or you can use GNOME Do, a desktop launcher for Ubuntu in the style of Launchy for Windows and Katapult for KDE, which acts as your humble servant and finds exactly what you’re looking for when you’re looking for it. Sounds too good to be true? GNOME Do is still in the early stages of development but is already showing signs of becoming a desktop essential.

Terracotta makes a Java clustering solution that it calls "drop-in" technology. Terracotta is unique, says Amit Pandey, chief executive officer, because it makes a way to offload temporary but important information that has traditionally been stored in expensive databases. In an effort to increase interest in the product, about a year ago Terracotta decided to open its source code and start giving the product away. According to Pandey, since Terracotta's entrance into the community, "we've seen only goodness."

That was fast. Only two months ago, Good OS, a startup Linux distributor, exploded on the scene with gOS 1.0, an Ubuntu-based desktop Linux with dedicated links to Google applications. Now, the company has announced that it will release the next version, gOS 2.0, Rocket, at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas on Jan. 7.

You might have missed the news just before the holidays that Microsoft has become slightly more open with respect to its networking protocols. Late last year, they announced a way for third parties to license their core file sharing protocols through an independent organization called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation.

Netscape, the Web browser that opened up not only the Web, but the entire Internet to mass use, is dead. It died after a long decline caused by its murderer, Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It was only 15 years ago that only a handful of nerds knew about the Internet and the Web. Even after CIX (Commercial Internet Exchange) opened up the Internet for business in 1991, only the kinds of people who now use Linux were using the Internet.

No operating system, no not even Linux, is ever completely secure. So it is that the Debian Project released on Dec. 27 its second update to Debian 4.0, Etch, with an eye to improved security. While not a new release as such, Debian's core features and functionality remain unchanged, this new security rollup includes multiple fixes that have been released over the last few months. For example, this release includes numerous repairs to the Linux kernel.

Abdel Benamrouche announced that he has updated the original 0.01 Linux kernel to compile with GCC-4.x, allowing it to run on emulators such as QEMU and Bochs. After applying his series of small patches, Abdel explains that the 0.01 kernel can be built on a system running the 2.6 Linux kernel. He added that he's successfully ported bach-3.2, portions of coreutils-6.9, dietlibc-0.31 (instead of glibc), bin86-0.16.17, make-3.81, ncurses-2.0.7, and vim-7.1 all to run on his modified 0.01 kernel.

Marc Fribush, a former "Microsoft guy," is a telecommunications industry entrepreneur who discovered the benefits of open source when he launched a turnkey SAAS telephony business based on Asterisk. "It's really powerful stuff," Fribush says.

Last week I came acrossGodwin's Law. Many of you may already be familiar with it. For those of you who aren't, Godwin's Law, according to wikipedia, states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Whenever people discuss software that they would like to see ported to Linux, they mention desktop publishing (DTP) applications like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. But Linux already supports an application aimed at DTP users. Scribus is an open-source page layout program that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Is it a viable alternative to proprietary products for professional production work? For nearly a decade, starting in the mid '90s, my primary responsibility at work was editing and laying out graphics and text in documents. QuarkXpress was the first page layout program I used, followed quickly by various versions of Aldus (and later Adobe) PageMaker. A few years ago, I started to work with Adobe's successor to PageMaker, InDesign.

Not long after Linux.com reviewed Roelof Temmingh's powerful online data mining tool Paterva Evolution a few months ago, Temmingh was forced to remove the application from the Paterva Web site because of complaints that some of the methods he used to harvest data were violating the terms of service (TOS) of the services from which the information was gathered. Recently, Temmingh released a completely redesigned version of the tool -- now called Maltego -- and has made it available again as a free-as-in-beer download.

Via CRN we learn that according to Novell’s recent 10-K annual report, the Linux vendor received $355.6 million (R2.5 billion) from Microsoft in terms of the companies’ agreement on interoperability signed in 2006. No wonder Novell execs are feeling pleased with themselves.

Ajax developers are turning away from commercial development tools and opting for free, open source alternatives. That's according to a recent Ajaxian poll that asked developers which Ajax tools they used either in development or in production.

This year a combination of travel and snow storms influenced me to stay at home on New Year's Eve. I had returned to my home from a night out in Boston the evening before, and after battling a snow storm while returning home I did not feel like going out again. A fire in the fireplace and my favorite beverage in my hands was all I wanted on the last night of 2007.

The beginning of the year is traditionally a time to look back, and, for the brave of heart, to make a few predictions looking forward. Lacking the requisite bravery, I'll just quote something that the Economist wrote recently: "Rejoice: the embrace of “openness” by firms that have grown fat on closed, proprietary technology is something we’ll see more of in 2008." Now, had this "fearless prediction" been made a year ago, I would have been impressed, because 2007 has turned out to be the year when everyone, it seems, wants to be open.

Thanks to the OpenPrinting Database and the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), printer support on GNU/Linux is much easier than it was at the turn of the millennium. However, one area in which support still lags is in the detection of ink levels in inkjet printers. Chances are that an ink level utility will be available only if you have a Canon, Epson, or Hewlett-Packard printer -- and even then, only if you're lucky. If you have an Epson Stylus, you may be able to use Mtink, while for other printers by these manufacturers, your best bet is one of the graphical displays for the Libinklevel library.

Watching an extended flame war between Richard Stallman and Theo de Raadt is an interesting experience. The realization that one can sit back and watch without having to really care about the result brings a sense of profound tranquility and relief. Along the way, one gets to learn things like how mean Theo can be, or that Richard does not use a web browser. It all seems like good fun. Even so, when the discussion reaches levels like this:..

I've known Bruce Steinberg since we met online, so long ago I don't remember. I'm guessing it might have been back when SCO was still a leading Unix company and Bruce was its VP of Marketing Communications. Or it might have been through Usenet, or some other pre-Web online service.