Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Zenoss is a new open source, company-backed network management system. It manages applications as well as servers and network devices--we'll explain what that means shortly. We decided it was time to give it an honest run for its money. Wait, it is free, but still we wanted to give it a real review. This article will be a light how-to focused on our experiences and first impressions with Zenoss. Next, we'll attempt to convert a real production environment's monitoring system from Nagios to Zenoss.

When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 brings several significant improvements to the open-source office productivity suite, including easier upgrade paths for existing Microsoft Office users, improved measures to prevent security breaches, and an array of snazzy new features introduced in the suite's word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.

KDE will be participating at FOSS.IN/2007, India's premier FOSS event in Bangalore. KDE Project Day is this Wednesday 5th December. Project Day will have a complete starter course for eager contributors to jump into KDE. Speakers would showcase various avenues of contribution to KDE - artwork, documentation, translation, development, marketing et al, basics of Qt/KDE programming and the various frameworks as well as the state and future of KDE 4 and more. This is the biggest ever representation and splash by KDE on Indian soil. Read on for details including the new KDE India website.

Linux.com ran an article headlined GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement on November 23. Jeff Waugh, the press officer on the GNOME Foundation Board, was prominently mentioned in that article and in several others to which it links. So was Roy Schestowitz, who wrote a post titled Anti-symbiosis: ODF, OOXML, Mono, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org on the Boycott Novell site, where he is a regular contributor. We thought getting them together might be illuminating.

It's finally official. The long-awaited release date of KDE 4.0 will now be January 11. Originally planned for a December release the development team held the release back to "solve a couple of essential issues".

Only for the brave: The Ubuntu Linux team announced the release of Hardy Heron Alpha-1 over the weekend for testing purposes.

The Washington Post reported that global measles fatalities have been drastically reduced, with the number of African deaths dropping by 91 percent since 2000. The initiative, said to be the first to use hand-held computers in collecting data, uses open source software for data collection.

Two recently released text-to-speech extensions can transform Firefox into a talking Web browser suitable for users with visual impairments -- and anyone else who can use a speech interface to the Web. Fire Vox is designed to be a full-fledged "screen reader in a browser," usable for daily browsing even for unsighted users. CLiCk, Speak provides point-and-click screen reading, which can be helpful for partially-sighted users or sighted users who have written language difficulties (such as dyslexia).

The airline is looking to explore Web 2.0 technology and open source solutions to expand its online capabilities and business applications, according to its CIO.

LXer Feature: 02-Dec-2007

This week we have the beginnings of a book for Andy Upgrove, a couple articles about Firefox, Richard Stallman's guide to writing, South Africa, Netherlands and Korea move towards ODF support, Ten things you can do to help open source and Microsoft spreads the FUD with a Windows to Linux Security comparison.

In the spring of 1983 I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation. At that time Digital was mostly providing support for different flavors of Unix on their PDP-11 and VAX lines of computers for the telephone company and universities that were using them. However, a decision had been made to make and release a binary-only version of the Unix operating system so commercial customers could get it without having to pay the very high source-code license fee that AT&T required of them.

PatientOS version 0.21 adds major scheduling functionality. Appointment types can be defined in batches , double or any number of overbooking predefined on the schedule with all appointments defined with a custom color. Appointments can be rescheduled. Multiple resources viewed by day or week. Custom work schedules, blocking out of schedules.

The KDE Release Team has decided to release KDE 4.0 this coming January. The release was originally planned for mid-December. The KDE developers want to solve a couple of essential issues before releasing. Having solved some of those issues, among which were glitches in the visual appearance, and in Konqueror, the KDE community hopes to have a KDE 4.0 that will live up to the high expectations for it.

In the preceding sections about multi-processor handling we have seen that significant performance problems must be expected if the number of CPUs or cores is scaled up. But this scaling-up is exactly what has to be expected in the future. Processors will get more and more cores, and programs must be ever more parallel to take advantage of the increased potential of the CPU, since single-core performance will not rise as quickly as it used to.

ES is an interesting looking open source research OS created by Nintendo. It runs natively on x86 and qemu. The kernel is written in C++ it uses an ECMAScript interpreter for all of the userland and it uses Cairo for graphics and even has a port of Squeak.

Mozilla has issued a fix for a bug found in an update issued earlier this week. Officials at Mozilla said they have released an update to fix a flaw in the recently released 2.0.0.10 version of their Firefox browser. It is the first time ever Mozilla has released two versions of the open-source browser in the same week. When Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.10 Monday, it included a bug in its rendering canvas HTML elements. Canvas elements allow for dynamic, scriptable rendering of bitmap images in HTML.

I am increasingly convinced all of the arguments between Linux distributions are going to become moot very soon. If they aren't there already. Not that I have anything against diversity, mind you. I have (and will) actively support the right to create and use any Linux distribution you want. My concern is, I think the distributions are becoming so similar in their construction, and the differences between them so subtle, the whole notion of distribution superiority is completely moot.

Lawyers for plaintiffs in a case brought against Microsoft over Vista's marketing have claimed that even the software giant's marketing director was confused by the pre-launch campaign in the United States. The case involves the way Microsoft marketed PCs as "Windows Vista capable" prior to the consumer launch of the operating system in January.

[Looks like even Microsoft doesn't know which computers can actually handle a Vista upgrade - Scott]

People in South Korea speak of folks in North Korea more as lost brothers than bitter enemies. Over the years the two have made various rapprochements, but now it looks like North and South are teaming up on a whole new kind of joint project: a Korean-language Linux distribution.