Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux Phone Standards Forum has released its first complete set of specifications for mobile Linux. Comprising members such as France Telecom, Texas Instruments, ARM, and Freescale, the Lips Forum is only one of several major industry consortia that want to use Linux on handsets in a relatively unified way. Open-source-based technology already powers many consumer mobiles, but there is no agreement on a single standard that suppliers can use.

Mandriva is the only Linux maker that offers a version of its distribution packaged with and designed to run off a USB stick. True, you can install virtually any Linux distro onto an external USB device, but Mandriva Flash 2008 offers you a complete solution, including a USB stick with pre-installed version of Mandriva Linux and a CD containing a few useful tools. It's a worthwhile package, though not without room for improvement.

Access has announced a potentially enormous win in Japan for its Linux-based software stack for phones and other mobile devices. The deal could see the Access Linux Platform (ALP) serving as a common OS platform for NEC, Panasonic, and Esteemo phones sold by NTT DoCoMo and other mobile carriers.

Firefox is a great browser, but you already knew that, right? Firefox's keywords facility can be used for a neat search trick. It is best used for a directed search engine that digs specific data-for example, a Bugzilla search, IMDb search, LXR search or Marcel/wine [url=searchhttp://www.wine-searcher.com,]searchhttp://www.wine-searcher.com,[/url] and so on.

The latest version of OpenOffice.org is now available using a browser with a single click of a mouse, with no download or installation process ('no install') of the productivity suite required. This new service by Ulteo offers many benefits for users of the productivity suite, and has been well received by early beta users across Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0. This release sees increasing participation from distributions, you can download packages for Debian, Kubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE & Fedora or grab the live CDs from Kubuntu & openSUSE.

Red Hat Inc has postponed until January the launch of a new Linux software product for personal computers that would directly compete with Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system.

A Harvard study appearing in Health Affairs confirms what this Linux Medical News editorial entitled "RHIO's and the Illusion of Health IT Success" predicted in 2005:"...Electronic clinical data exchange promises substantial financial and societal benefits, but it is unclear whether and when it will become widespread. In early 2007 we surveyed 145 regional health information organizations (RHIOs), the U.S. entities working to establish data exchange. Nearly one in four was likely defunct. Only twenty efforts were of at least modest size and exchanging clinical data..." The 2005 Linux Medical News editorial gives hints as to why this might be. Kudos to the Harvard researchers for doing the heavy lifting.

Paldo Linux is a cross between a source-based and binary distribution. It installs as a binary system to provide a quick and easy desktop. Once it's running, users can either build packages from source as they would with Gentoo, or install binary packages, as is common with Debian, openSUSE, or Mandriva. Paldo's main features are an easy hard drive installer, GNOME desktop environment, and Upkg package management system. Stable version 1.12 was released last month. I found it to be one of the more interesting and promising distros to come along in a long time.

The GNOME Foundation is charged with several tasks, including serving as the official voice of the project, coordinating releases, deciding which projects fit under the GNOME umbrella, supporting events, and more. Once a year, a board of directors is chosen by the Foundation's members. This time around, there are ten candidates running for the seven available positions. This election may seem like another boring bureaucratic exercise, but its results are important: GNOME is the desktop used by a great many free software users, and it is the platform supported by the Free Software Foundation.

After releasing the multicore, multithreaded chip earlier this year, Sun plans to release the UltraSPARC T2's source code to the open-source community.

GNU Project and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman posted a message on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list titled, "real men don't attack straw men", suggesting that some comments he had made were being misrepresented. He noted, "one question particularly relevant for this list is why I don't recommend OpenBSD. It is not about what the system allows. (Any general purpose system allows doing anything at all.) It is about what the system suggests to the user." He went on to note that though he knew of no non-free software included in the base OpenBSD system, there was non-free software distributed via the ports collection, "if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it."

Sometimes when I run ls to get a directory listing, I am looking for a specific file, but I want to see the whole context where the file resides. While you can pipe the output of ls to grep, that doesn't show you the whole directory with the matched files highlighted in a different color. I create a small script to do just what I want.

Thanks to a Filipino organisation, open source software is once again stepping in to help humanity with the release of a toolkit to assist human rights organisations in monitoring human rights violations.

It's good news, bad news situation when it comes to Adobe's new Flash player for Linux. On the plus side, Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, version identifier 9.0.115.0 was made available for Linux at the same time as Mac and Windows versions. It's nice to see Linux not being treated as the little brother who only gets the older, hand-me down programs by a major software vendor. An even bigger win for Flash Player users, regardless of their operating system, is that its supports H.264.

Everex has confirmed plans to ship a UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) with a 7-inch screen, similar to competitor Asus's EEE PC. A source close to the company revealed that the device -- codenamed "Cloudbook" -- will ship with the Google Apps-oriented "gOS" Linux distribution early next year.

Nemo is the latest effort to provide a new paradigm for file managers. Its approach, at least in its first early development release, is to combine file management with calendar views. Questions remain, however, about whether the concept will scale, and whether it is an improvement on traditional file managers, or simply different.

Those who have experienced free software projects firsthand know that they depend on innovation and genrally foster it. And although this isn't a highly innovative era for the computer industry as a whole, free software is an exception--and likely to become more of one as it continues to come into its own. In fact, the very idea of free software is one of the most innovative ideas in the history of computing.

OpenOffice is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

Sysreport is a diagnostic utility. It collects information about the running system, which is used for Red Hat Support to analyze current problems with the system. While sysreport is generally considered non-invasive, diagnostic utilities should always be run with caution.