Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

As part of its collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Red Hat yesterday opened the beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) infrastructure for public use. Unfortunately those wishing to test it will still have to whip out the credit card.

Anyone looking for a summary of the free software movement's concerns needs only to look at Richard M. Stallman's essay "Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding." Behind the modest title, the essay lists all the classic free software concerns, ranging from insisting on the term "GNU/Linux" for the operating system usually called Linux to efforts to emphasize the dangers of so-called Digital Rights Management and Trusted Computing.

One of the biggest complaints a Firefox evangelist encounters is "it doesn't act or feel like browser X." Internet Explorer users complain that Firefox doesn't look like what they're used to. Opera, Safari, and Netscape users complain that it's missing many of their favorite features. And the social networking gurus point to the powerful social networking features Flock boasts and Firefox lacks. However, all these users overlook one of the most powerful features of Firefox: support for third-party add-ons, which can make emulating the features of other browsers extremely simple.

Firefox has built-in configuration variables to deal with external printing commands. Per default, it uses the UNIX lpr command to send print jobs to the printer. This setting can be overridden..

For readers ofLinux Journal, "IP" almost certainly refers to the Internet Protocol, part of the TCP/IP suite that underpins the Internet. But to most people, if it means anything, "IP" refers to something known as "intellectual property". This widespread recognition is rather curious, because "intellectual property" does not exist.

Urbis.com, written completely in Ruby using the open source framework Ruby on Rails, is yet another social networking site, but with a twist: it was created by a writer, for writers. Urbis.com founder Steve Spurgat is not a developer, but he knew right from the start he wanted his Web site to run on open source software. "I'm drawn to the community around it."

The Taiwanese tech heavyweight Asus has introduced a $400 laptop with most of the capability of a $2,000 Sony or Fujitsu subnotebook; the convenience and usability missing from members of Intel's Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) club; and the goofiest name of the year. How does this Linux-based system stack up to other, larger systems? Surprisingly well...

openSUSE is one of the most popular free-software-only distributions, and it's jointly developed by Novell and members of the community. In the first week of November the openSUSE developers released installable live versions of the distro's latest 10.3 release, one each for KDE and GNOME desktop environments. The live versions are replicas of their install-only cousins in terms of software, and apart from a few quirks, they seem set to replace the older versions soon.

In a recent interview, Linux founder Linus Torvalds offered some of his thoughts on the progress of the Linux kernel so far and some ideas as to where development was headed for the year ahead.

Most people lock their doors and windows, use a paper shredder to protect themselves from identity theft, and install antivirus software on their computers. Yet they routinely surf the Internet without giving a second thought to whether their browser is secure and their personal information safe. Unfortunately, it's easy for someone with nefarious intentions to use a Web site to glean data from -- or introduce spyware to -- your computer. Even worse, sometimes all you have to do is randomly click on a site to have your data probed in a most unwelcome way.

In a role created for him in February this year, Red Hat's president for the Asia-Pacific region is vocal about the power of "talent attracting talent" which, he believes, is vital to growing the business. "Since I joined the company earlier this year, we've brought in some executives who are veterans. We want this leadership to attract high-profile executives, to inspire, set the direction and to talk with key clients," Messer said.

Ravi Simhambhatla's latest project employing open source has been to juice up the web site for Virgin America, the US's newest carrier, so travelers can surf smoothly and purchase tickets without waiting for pages to build. Virgin America relies heavily on the power of virginameica.com, which pulls in 80 per cent of sales, with 150,000 unique hits a day in the week and 100,000 at weekends.

Launchpad Personal Package Archive gives developers space to collaborate and publish their own software for multiple architectures running Ubuntu Linux.

LXer Feature: 25-Nov-2007

How do you release your version of Linux without actually releasing it? Just ask Google, whether by coincidence or design Walmart has started selling computers pre-installed with a version of Linux called "gOS" that is seriously Google centric and guess what? Its not a bad little distro and the computers? They're selling like hotcakes. We have some Linux gaming news, One shoppers Linux inspired assault on Black Friday, Macedonian Students start to get there Edubuntu computers and a funny take on SCO's lawsuit.

Almost a year on from the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista, only 13 percent of companies say they expect to move all desktops to the operating system, according to a survey released this week. Furthermore, adoption of Linux continues to gather pace, with a particular emphasis on the desktop emerging.

A new version of the ATI/AMD Linux display driver was released last night for both x86 and x86_64 platforms. This release is a bit special, as it includes support for Ubuntu 7.10. Moreover, starting with this version, the ATI Catalyst software suite does not support the Linux kernel 2.4, XFree86 4.3 software and workstation hardware.

Space is filling up fast for the not-for-profit Harris County Health Information Cooperative(HCHIC) sponsored, intensive, vendor-neutral Educational Conference:"Introduction to WorldVistA EHR System Administration". December 7th-9th, 2007 in Houston, Texas. 10% of the proceeds benefit the not-for-profit WorldVistA organization with the rest of the proceeds benefiting the not-for-profit HCHIC. More information and enrollment informationhere.

The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format (OOXML) as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format (ODF), the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess.

Many people have suggested that I submit some of my many aerial photos to Google Earth. I'd love to do that, but after looking at the instructions for adding photos, especially the "acceptance policy", I have to wonder if it's worth the effort, or even the Right Thing To Do. First, I have to upload photos into Paroramio, which was bought by Google earlier this year.. Since I've already uploaded 17,310 photos into my Flickr account, I'm not in the mood to do that again, least of all into a silo'd service — which Panoramio appears to be, while Flickr is not... at least not as much as Panoramio.

The Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine recently released a special edition of the Journal of Digital Imaging focused on open source. While they are published in Springer, all the articles on major open source packages in imaging informatics are open access. SIIM saw it fitting that open source articles shouldn't be locked into a proprietary publisher.