Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Knowledge Tree is an open source document management system (DMS) that helps enterprise users categorize, store, index, and share documents. It offers features like metadata editing, versioning, and WebDAV access, which make it a better choice than a simple file server for sharing documents. The open source edition of the PHP-based Knowledge Tree ships under GPLv3; a commercial version with some additional features and support bundled is also available. You can run Knowledge Tree on Linux, Windows, or any platform that can run Apache, MySQL and PHP. The commercial application also has a Windows client for non-Web access to the repository.

Novell unexpectedly delays its fourth quarter and end of year financial earnings report. Novell stockholders were unpleasantly surprised on Dec. 5, when instead of hearing from Novell on how the Linux distributor had done over the last quarter and the full 2007 fiscal year, they were presented with an earnings announcement postponement instead.

Has the television writers' strike left you with hours of spare time and no way to fill it? Well, put down that book and put the running shoes back in the closet, because TED is here to help. TED is the torrent episode downloader, an open source, cross-platform tool that simplifies the tedious process of searching for torrent files. TED is not a BitTorrent client itself; rather it is a search tool for torrents that can pass along its results to your preferred BitTorrent downloader. TED is geared toward retrieving episodic television shows; it lets you search for specific episodes by season and episode number. The app ships with a database of predefined shows and a manually selected set of feeds from torrent sites that frequently carry such content.

It’s been almost seven years since I stopped buying desktops for personal computing, and since then, I am always under the impression that buying a new laptop to run Linux on is a bigger challenge that it needs to be. Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours on linux-laptop.net (and others) trying to get the most out of my hardware working under Linux. Things like proprietary drivers for video cards, network adapters and wireless, sound and modem support were virtually always making the life of the Linux geek a bit harder.

Firefox 3 should be welcome both for its many small usability improvements and for its under-the-covers Web rendering engine and security enhancements. When you first install and launch the beta of Firefox 3, the initial impression (especially for those who remember some of the earlier promises of a revamped user interface and increased Web 2.0 integration) can be a little disappointing, since it doesn't look much different from the current version of Firefox.

Despite technical difficulties with the phone lines, Linux.com's live podcast with Jeff Waugh of the GNOME Foundation and Roy Schestowitz, cofounder of the Boycott Novell site, attracted a large audience eager to discuss GNOME's involvement with the efforts to make the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) document format an ECMA standard. Hosted by Rod Amis on his Lightning Strikes show at BlogTalkRadio, and with questions from Linux.com's Editor in Chief Robin Miller and me, the discussion revealed that the two sides of the issue are closer than they have appeared in the past.

If you need to type a diacritical mark such as an acute "e" (é) -- let alone a character not found in a Western European language -- the standard English keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux users are barely ahead of those of typewriters. However, adding support for both extended characters and multiple keyboards has become much easier in the last few years. These days, you can quickly add extended character support from both GNOME and KDE, and, should either desktop fail you for any reason, you can fall back on other methods to improve your input.

It's early December 1995 and it has been a heady few days for Java. IBM and Adobe Systems have agreed to license this strange and embryonic new software that Sun Microsystems keeps telling us can be "written once and run anywhere". Two days before, Sun and Netscape had announced JavaScript that - according to the press release - was: "Analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications."

According to the The Washington Post, on Friday it reported that global measles fatalities had been reduced by two-thirds following stepped-up vaccination campaigns since 2000. Furthermore, this phenomenal success had a helping hand from open source software.

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.

Full-featured traffic analyzers for Linux systems such as ntop and vnstat are widely available, but sometimes you just want a simple program that gives you fast, basic information about the amount of traffic going in and out of the hosts on your network. Darkstat, a packet sniffer that runs as a background process, fills that role. It gathers statistics about network usage and displays them over HTTP.

We’re getting down to serious shopping time for the holidays. Lucky for you, we’ve got ideas for you and the geeks you love. And like last year, we’re giving away loot. Send an email to contest@redhat.com on one of the following topics: tell us what you’d like to read about in Red Hat Magazine in the coming year, the open source story you’ve never told, or just whatever open source topic is rattling around in your head this week. You’ll be entered to win some of the items in this year’s gift guide, including TokyoFlash’s Eclipse watch.

Thanks to newly renamed Likewise, open-source Active Directory authentication for Linux has arrived. Like it or lump it, Microsoft's Active Directory is a very popular network directory, and thus, management system. It's been possible to use AD for Linux, but it was never easy.

It's been over a year since Linspire announced a free version of the CNR (Click'N'Run) software management system for its own Linuxes -- Freespire and Linspire -- as well as others, such as Ubuntu, but the project is finally open to all as a beta.

Novell is delaying the release of its fiscal fourth quarter results due to an ongoing accounting review by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The Linux firm was scheduled to release results today for the quarter ended October 31. But slow correspondence between Novell and an accountant's least favorite pen-pal has struck them with a bout of "an abundance of caution."

How are GNU/Linux users preparing for Linus Torvalds' plan of world domination? By playing free software computer games based on the classic world conquest board game Risk. You can perfect your strategy by playing the games XFrisk, TEG, or Ksirk.

Released this week for free download, Radria is a set of open source software (OSS) tools that can be used to develop database driven websites online through a graphic user interface.

Red Hat's Messaging Real-time Grid (MRG) was launched as a beta yesterday, adding to its Enterprise Linux platform and promising speed increases of up to 100 times for certain transactions carried out by larger businesses.

Standing next to your laptop to control the slides during a presentation is not cool. Nowadays everyone uses a presentation device or their laptop's remote controller, but a presentation device can be expensive, few laptops come with a remote controller, and for those that do, Linux compatibility may be an issue. The Amora project turns your Symbian mobile phone into a Linux presentation device using Bluetooth.

The brouhaha surrounding Sun Microsystems and ex-employee Neil Wilson over governance of the OpenDS project - first reported in The Register - continued to bubble this week, not least among Reg Dev's readers. Many of you took the harsh, but arguably fair, point of view that Sun was in the right as work done during the employer's time belongs to, guess who, the employer. Others adopted the slightly provocative stance that open source developers are "chumps" because what they are really doing is unpaid open source development for companies like Sun that have the money to pay.