Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Trolltech-sponsored development continues on Phonon backends. Support for saving to remote URL's in Gwenview. A "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the train clock bla in Plasma. "Switch Tabs on Hover" can now be disabled, and other refinements in Kickoff for KDE 4.0. Work on a debugger (with a SpeedCrunch-inspired interface) for KHTML. Work to support the most recent release of the Flash (version 9) multimedia plugin in Konqueror...

If you've been running Linux long enough to have upgraded your system more than once, you probably have several Linux kernels lurking around your system. If you discover that a certain application no longer works for you, you can go back to a previous kernel to try to run your program. GRUB, the boot loader found in most Linux distributions, lets you choose among operating systems and kernels installed on your box. Many people, however, fear that messing with GRUB may ruin their system, because of its many esoteric options, and configuration file text that often contains no help comments. QGRUBEditor can help you view and edit the GRUB boot loader from a graphical user interface.

Find out more about Nipper, an open source network devices security auditing tool, and why companies can benefit from it.

I'm a little old to believe in Santa Claus, but then again, there are some things I believe in that are even more far-fetched than Saint Nick. We'll get back to that later. It was 2:30 in the morning and I had been working for a friend, delivering some computers and helping those who received them get them set up. It had been a long night and I stopped by my "boss's house to drop off the company van and get into my own truck to go home. I was surprised to see the lights on and knowing that everyone should be in bed, I walked quietly to the front door and slowly turned the knob. It's ok, I almost live there anyway and I have a key. I work pretty close to my "boss".

College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. To help bridge the gap, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed an OOP language to create computer animations using 3-D models, called Alice.

As the open-source movement gains momentum, patent companies are suing.

ARAHUAY, Peru - Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

LXer Feature: 23-Dec-2007

It looks like people are starting to get their hands on some OLPC's and the reviews have started coming in too. We also have a review of Carla Schroder's new book, KOffice takes a stand against OOXML, screenshots of the BBS's new iPlayer and Damn Small Linux 4.2, Open Source alternatives to Adobe, how to make a holiday slideshow and one of our readers has a Debian adventure of their own.

A report generator to visualize query results with gnuplot has been added. Exception handling has been improved. The Snellen Chart has been reactivated. KVK handling has officially been included. More hooks and an improved example hook script were added. Demographics handling has been extended to now really support multiple names, addresses, comm channels, and external IDs. Furthermore, there are lots of GUI-accessible configuration options that were always there in the backend but didn't have a frontend to them. File format handling in document management has seen improvements.

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 23-24 February 2008. FOSDEM is a European meeting of free software developers, to listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software. We are looking for people to give a talk in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom.

[ Planning to be there to cover the event for LXer - hkwint ]

The next big frontier for Big Linux Build-out will be at a back end that's as close as anyone can get the front lines of big video production. That is, to consumers who are now also producers. And the parties in the best position to pioneer that frontier aren't in Seattle or Mountain view. They're in your home town.

Audio and video content are increasingly important components of the World Wide Web, which some of us remember, initially, as a text-only experience. Users of free software need not be told that the multimedia aspect of the net can be hard to access without recourse to proprietary tools. So the decisions which are made regarding multimedia support in the next version of the HTML specification are of more than passing interest. A current dispute over the recommended codecs for HTML5 shows just how hard maintaining an interoperable web may be.

Netgear has introduced five Linux-based networked attached storage (NAS) products. Targeted at "prosumers" and small to medium-sized businesses, Netgear's ReadyNAS NV+ systems offer higher capacities than previous Infrant models, and come in 1.5TB (terabyte), 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB versions, as well as a 4TB rackmount version.

The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two. Three years ago, McKesson's Acute Care Solutions offered its hospital and doctors' office applications to run under IBM's mainframe AIX or other larger server Unix. But customers were bringing smaller Intel-based servers into their hospitals and doctors offices. A small doctor's group had little use for an eight or 12-way Unix server, but a two-way Intel or AMD server was about right.

Researchers from Google have documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash content which leave tens of thousands websites susceptible to attacks that steal the personal details of visitors. The security bugs reside in Flash applets, the ubiquitous building blocks for movies and graphics that animate sites across the web. Also known as SWF files, they are vulnerable to attacks in which malicious strings are injected into the legitimate code through a technique known as cross-site scripting, or XSS. Currently there are no patches for the vulnerabilities, which are found in sites operated by financial institutions, government agencies and other organizations.

Sometimes putting together a best-of-the-year list is like pulling teeth. There simply isn't enough big news to fill the list out. That was not a problem for desktop Linux in 2007. This year was one of the most eventful years in desktop Linux's short history. While Mac OS X remains the most successful of all the Unix/open-source-based operating systems, the Linux desktop made great strides forward in both the office and in homes.

OggConvert is a simple, GUI-based video transcoder that outputs only to the free Theora and Dirac formats. It couldn't be any easier to use, and it's the quickest way to get a feel for the still-new Dirac codec. No need to tweak pages of arcane settings -- just drag, drop, and watch. You can download OggConvert as source code, or as a prepackaged binary for Debian, Fedora, SUSE, or Ubuntu. The latest release is version 0.3. OggConvert is written in Python, and uses GStreamer to perform its media conversion work.

Red Hat announced outstanding financial results for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 30. How outstanding? The Linux company's revenue for the quarter jumped to $135.4 million. That is an increase of 28 percent from the equivalent 2006 quarter and 6 percent from the second quarter of this year. Drilling down, Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions represented the bulk of Red Hat's income. The company's total RHEL income was $115.7 million. That brings RHEL's income up 30 percent year-over-year and 6 percent sequentially.

On Dec. 20, the Samba Group and the Software Freedom Law Center announced a deal with Microsoft that places all of Microsoft's network protocols needed for programs to work with Windows Server into the hands of the newly formed Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. The PFIF is a U.S.-based nonprofit corporation. It will make Microsoft's server network protocol documentation available to open-source developers such as The Samba Group, which creates programs for Windows Server interoperability, and private companies. This information is provided under an NDA (nondisclosure agreement) and developers must agree to the NDA before gaining access to the documentation.

In 2007, much of the open-source action happened outside the corridors of the usual corporate suspects. For years, the center of open-source software, at least from a commercial perspective, was with companies such as Red Hat, Novell, MySQL, and a number of smaller players. Those companies continued grinding away at their collaborative programming projects and support-centric businesses, but more unusual for the year were the new arrivals.