Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the largest independent Linux skills certification institute,, has announced several new affiliates in Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria.

IP Innovation LLC has just filed a patent infringement claim against Red Hat and Novell. It was filed October 9, case no. 2:2007cv00447, IP Innovation, LLC et al v. Red Hat Inc. et al, in Texas. Where else? The patent troll magnet state. The first ever patent infringement litigation involving Linux.

Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has commented on Microsofts renewed IP sabre rattling, saying that the company should "back off on its claims".

Mozilla is prepping a mobile version of Firefox, the world's most popular open-source web browser. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web," reads a blog post from VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, "and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it."

By and large, most Red Hat Linux systems will have Bash as the default shell. Bash is a darn great shell, but this article is about another equally great shell, called Z-Shell, that has most of the attributes of Bash, but in some cases goes the extra mile to give you the flexibility to customize your shell more than Bash allows. This article is somewhat advanced, but if you’re very patient, with some effort, you will do just fine. Remember to make small changes, test them, and then make more small changes, test, and repeat.

In earlier articles, I compared OpenOffice.org 2.3's and MS Office 2007's word processors and slide show programs. It seems appropriate to round off the comparison with a look at spreadsheets, the third of the core programs in any office application. I spent a couple of days testing OOo Calc and Microsoft Excel features for formatting, list-making, formulas, and formula tools. Since the range of user expertise in spreadsheets tends to be much wider than in slide shows or even word processors, I considered the programs largely from the perspective of an average user who might require a spreadsheet for home or business use.

We have k3b installed locally for users to burn CDs/DVDs/etc. This only gets used very infrequently, and it seems that something else has broken every time it does get used. This time it was a “Cannot find writer” error. I checked for the presence of cdrecord and dvd-rw-tools; all fine. Eventually it turned out to be a permissions error - that /dev/cdrom was set to be only user- and group-writable; and the user was not in the relevant group. Added them, log in & out, all well.

OpenSUSE 10.3 was released last week, and I quickly downloaded the new version to update my two openSUSE boxes. Here's a chronicle of the updates and some problems that surfaced during the process.

Last week we learned how to sanely organize our vast digital photo archives with Digikam. Today we'll look at Digikam's built-in editing tools. You'll be able to do a surprising amount of your editing work without ever leaving Digikam.

CPUs are today much more sophisticated than they were only 25 years ago. In those days, the frequency of the CPU core was at a level equivalent to that of the memory bus. Memory access was only a bit slower than register access. But this changed dramatically in the early 90s, when CPU designers increased the frequency of the CPU core but the frequency of the memory bus and the performance of RAM chips did not increase proportionally. This is not due to the fact that faster RAM could not be built, as explained in the previous section. It is possible but it is not economical. RAM as fast as current CPU cores is orders of magnitude more expensive than any dynamic RAM.

The new KOffice 2.0, sometime in the first half of next year, according to reports, will run on Linux, BSD and -- for the first time -- Windows and Macintosh platforms. For those who don't know, KOffice is the office suite meant to complement the KDE desktop environment used in many Linux and BSD distributions. Well, KOffice isn't new, per se, but it's new to non-Linux/BSD users. While I've had a hell of a time getting the typographical quotes to face in the right direction in KWord, the word-processing component of KOffice, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that, overall, KOffice is a better-written piece of software than the big dog in free office suites, OpenOffice.

Curl, the rich programming language specialist back from obscurity, is turning to open source to gain a foothold in rich internet applications (RIA).

Here's a great little article on how to work with the Free Software Community: "...With that intent in mind, let’s explore seven principles that will make your life easier when engaging free software types.

Every year, Linux enthusiasts in India's capital, New Delhi, hold a conference to help spread word of free and open source software (FOSS). This year they called their conference Freed.in, and had more talks and attendees than they've had in the past. While the event was a wonderful opportunity for the FOSS community to interact in person, discuss issues, and brainstorm solutions, attendees were overwhelmed by the number of talks jammed into a two-day schedule.

Back in the late 1990s,when the KDE and GNOME desktops were getting started, KDE had the reputation of being the most suitable choice for new GNU/Linux users, especially those migrating from Windows. Whether this generality is still true is debatable (personally, I could never see much difference between the two desktops), but KDE remains one of GNU/Linux's most popular graphical interfaces, as well as one of the most easy to learn.

A "significant portion" of development teams continue to use Linux as their primary embedded OS, a recent VDC survey finds. Additionally, the results suggest the trend will persist, "as the majority of current Linux users surveyed plan to use Linux again as their primary operating system on future [embedded] projects."

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into ODT (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents. Using odtwriter, you can generate ODF files on machines that don't have ODF-compatible word processors installed, such as those running lightweight Linux distros, or simply compose documents in a text editor and leave the task of properly formatting them to odtwriter.

Ubuntu's leader has thoughts on Microsoft CEO's latest claims that Linux and open source violate Microsoft's intellectual property.

Ubuntu-based Linspire 6.0 includes CNR service, proprietary software and Microsoft technology. It also bundles in Microsoft patent covenants following a deal with the software giant last year.

Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0.