Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Thanks to a founding member of Free Geek Vancouver, the Green Party of Canada has quietly become the first major political party to make support for free and open source software (FOSS) part of its election platform. Like officials in the Green Party of England and Wales, deputy leader Adriane Carr sees the move as compatible with basic Green ideas, but IT consultant Neil Adair also points out the move serves the practical purpose of helping the party match the technical resources of more established parties.

I felt bad for Linux vendors after reading Peter Galli's eWeek article, which claims that Linux server sales on X86 hardware have run into a stone wall, going from a 53 percent growth rate to four percent decline over the past six quarters -- until I did a little research that easily refuted that claim.

The sound server PulseAudio is a relative newcomer to the Linux audio arena, but since it has been selected as the default setup in the next releases of at least two major distributions (Fedora and Ubuntu), it's probably time to start looking into it.

At the bottom of the Vim editor, you will find two things: the command-line buffer (where you can input commands) and the status line. In the default configuration, Vim has a simple and non-informative status line, but you can make the status line a lot more informative with simple methods.

Users of the popular Linux distribution MEPIS were getting worried about the distribution's leader, who had been rather quiet lately. Some Linux distributions -- Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Novell, for example -- have thousands of people working on them over the course of a month. Others, like MEPIS, have one developer, and users of the popular Linux desktop distribution were getting worried when Warren Woodford, MEPIS's CEO, had been laying low for the last month.

With a typical lack of fanfare the OpenBSD team today released OpenBSD 4.2 and this time around there are not only security improvements (what would you expect?) but also a good selection of speed improvements.

It's never PayPal's fault even when they are caught red handed lying to me. They do apologize though.

Have you ever had deja vu? I re-read books on occasion, because I like them, and every once in a while I’ll re-read a book that I think I’m reading for the first time. Then I’ll sit there with this twisted-up look on my face, wondering why all the words seem so familiar. Then I remember when and where I saw them last.

Not content to rely on the computing muscle supplied by Intel and AMD, HP has upped its focus on server accelerators. The hardware maker today announced a new program aimed right at incorporating things such as floating point boosters into its machines. The fresh HP Accelerator program joins a Multi-Core Optimization Program launched in June. Both efforts charge after similar goals with HP looking to improve the performance of software. Generally speaking, the Accelerator program covers hardware add-ons that can fit into HP servers and speed up specific tasks such as floating point operations. Meanwhile, the Multi-Core push centers on crafting code that can spread well across many-cored boxes.

The Xandros Linux-powered "ultra-mobile PC" (UMPC) has finally arrived. One of the most eagerly awaited laptops in some time, the tiny Asus Eee PC 4G, is now available. When the news first broke that Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asus was coming out with a less than two pounds mini-laptop for under $200 that would be running Linux, both gadget and Linux desktop fans were thrilled. Now that it's here, the Eee PC 4G's price has doubled, but early reviewers are still finding this Xandros-Linux powered laptop to be worth the price.

The Ubuntu operating system has been charged with crimes against hard drives. A number of users have complained this week about the OS (7.04/7.10) forcing drives to spin up and down at an unnatural rate due to some very aggressive power management features. According to Ubuntu wizards, however, this is a firmware/BIOS issue and not the OS's fault. A couple of user forums have started fill up with people commenting about their systems going through an unusual number of load cycles while under battery power. This excessive throttling of the hard drive could lead to quicker than expected hardware failures.

Myah OS creator Jeremiah Cheatham has issued the first preliminary release of Myah OS 3.0. The gaming- and multimedia-oriented live CD Linux offering is built with an "efficient" Xfce 4.4.1 desktop, and bundles Internet, office, graphics, development tools, and numerous other applications.

The Essential Blender from No Starch Press is both a reference and instructional guide to Blender, the open source 3-D modeling, rendering, and animation tool. It walks readers through Blender's capabilities by alternating hands-on tutorials with broader, topical chapters that discuss the key concepts and how Blender implements them. Despite a few flaws, it's a good resource for those struggling with the software.

After the descriptions in the previous sections it is clear that there are many, many opportunities for programmers to influence a program's performance, positively or negatively. And this is for memory-related operations only. We will proceed in covering the opportunities from the ground up, starting with the lowest levels of physical RAM access and L1 caches, up to and including OS functionality which influences memory handling.

There is security, and then there is Security. HP, with its new multi-level security services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now offering Common Criteria certified level security for this Linux on its server and desktops. Common Criteria is an ISO security framework standard. It is frequently required in government computing contracts. It is also, historically, difficult for open-source software to obtain, as described briefly in "Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Software Assurance" (PDF link) by David A. Wheeler, an author and software developer.

Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions.JACK: The 1-minute Profileread more

Making periodic backups is a common task. Synbak can help to simplify it. Synbak brings together several different backup methods and provides a powerful reports system that provides details about all the work it does. Synbak can use rsync over Secure Shell (SSH), Server Message Block (SMB), or Common Internet File System (CIFS) and either create tar archives or burn CDs and DVDs (quaintly called laserdiscs in a throwback to old times). It can also access and back up MySQL and Oracle databases and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. Finally, it can send you an email message with the backup details and create an HTML plus RSS Web page with the same information.

Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon has asked Steve Ballmer what it feels like to look at himself in the mirror. In an open letter to the Microsoft head honcho, posted to the web late last night, Bancilhon claims that the Nigerian government has somehow decided to install Windows on 17,000 brand new PCs already equipped with Mandriva Linux. And he questions whether Ballmer and company used dirty tricks to make it happen.

Guardian Digital reinforces their dedication to web security with completely redesigned and updated version of their popular Web and Content Filtering solution, SurfSecure.

Everyone knows they should make regular backups of their data. But hardly anyone is as diligent with backups as they should be. So in this two-part series we're going to learn some nice simple methods for making regular backups on single PCs or small networks. Part 1 covers external backup media, and bendingudev to your will so that your backup devices will have persistent names.