Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Enterprise distributions are an important part of the economic success story of Linux. The creation of highly stable, highly supported distributions has brought significant revenue streams to some distributors and enabled the deployment of Linux into many "mission critical" situations. Enterprise distributions encourage the commercial world to take Linux seriously. At LinuxConf Europe, however, your editor has stumbled into a few conversations which characterized enterprise distributions as one of the bigger problems the development community has now. Then a talk by Dirk Hohndel made that point again in a different context.

A frustrated sounding Andrew Morton released the 2.6.23-rc6-mm1 kernel as"a 29MB diff against 2.6.23-rc6." Many patches are merged first into Andrew's -mm tree for testing before being pushed to Linus' mainline tree during the merge window. Andrew suggested that the -mm process wasn't working as well as it could:"It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of. I have to say that this just isn't working any more."

In July, Mozilla executives admitted that they weren't quite sure what to do with Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client, since Firefox, the popular open-source Web browser, demanded most of the company's attention. On Sept. 17, Mozilla announced that it had decided to spin Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo.

Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances makes a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. If that sounds like you, try Buddi, probably the easiest to use personal finance manager out there. Written in Java, Buddi runs on most platforms that can run the Java Runtime Environment. If you are running Debian or Ubuntu, you can download and install it from a .deb package; otherwise you can opt for a plain .jar file that will run on pretty much any Linux distro.

A new website has been launched to offer information on free, libre and open source software with particular reference to the use of ICT in the NGO sector.

I recently read a blog entry on InfoWorld.com that urged the Linux community to fork the kernel into desktop and server versions because, according to the author, all Linus Torvalds cares about is big iron. Sorry, but that's both wrong and stupid.

The GPL-licensed Pivot blogging software stands out among blogging applications because it requires no database, no extra libraries, and minimal installation effort. While it's still in an early stage of development, its flexibilty and the ease with which it can be set up make it ideal for those new to maintaining their own blogging Web sites. To use Pivot, you need a server that's running PHP 4.1.0 or higher. Unlike WordPress or Movable Type, Pivot requires no MySQL database; it stores most of its data within XML files. Pivot also strives to use no extra libraries so as to be available and usable by as many people as possible.

Watch out, here comes IBM with its Microsoft Office killer. The company is expected to announce a free set of downloadable office applications later today. Slashdot speculates that the suite will be called Loutus Symphony and will be based on OpenOffice.org. IBM's Lotus Notes 8 runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, so there is a good chance this suite will be available for Linux.

Cavium Networks has launched two families of Linux-friendly network accelerator cards. The lower-end Nitrox PX XL PCI-Express cards target security appliances, storage equipment, and service-provider infrastructure, while the higher-end Octeon XL NICPro2 PCI-X cards target L4-L7 switches, session border controllers, and ad-insertion appliances, among other applications.

Performance Technologies is sampling a Core 2 Duo-based processor module in the AdvancedMC (advanced mezzanine card, aka "AMC") form-factor. The AMC121 supports PT's own NexusWare Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) implementation, and targets packet processing and general computing applications, including IMS, wireless, softswitches, and shipboard communications.

The fact that Linux is big business for IBM should come as no surprise to those who follow Big Blue. During the last decade IBM has steadily ramped up its Linux efforts to the point where it has now become a core offering across IBM's server and software product lines. In this interview, IBM's Inna Kuznetsova spoke about her role at IBM, the challenges she faces and her view on Microsoft's patent allegations and GPL version 3.

Nautilus, the official file manager for the GNOME desktop, can help you perform tasks from browsing the filesystem to accessing Samba shares on your local network or FTP sites on the Internet -- and more. Here are a couple of tips and tools that will allow you to open a terminal window from Nautilus and resize and rotate images without opening any other program.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Continued work in Plasma, including a KMLDonkey data engine, a RSS data engine and news feed applet, and a Virtual Desktop switcher applet. More interface work for Amarok 2.0, with progress on alternate music service integration. Support for webseeding in KTorrent. Support for network access of colour palettes in KolourPaint. An Akonadi resource for the del.icio.us bookmarking service. CMake support for PyKDE4 applications. Wider logging support in KSystemLog. SVG caching optimises usage, resulting in speed gains in many applications. KTeaTime rewritten for KDE 4, KPlayer ported to KDE 4. New game based on "Deal or No Deal" arrives in playground/games. More code reorganisation in KDE SVN. KAider translation utility moves to kdereview.

Let's imagine that you set up a non-profit to recycle electronics and divert computers from going directly into landfills or otherwise being destroyed by a grinder. You look for ways to refurbish these components and possibly recombine them into functional computers that go out to areas and institutions that have difficulty obtaining computers. You might even collect some of the vintage electronics that comes through the door and hang on to this stuff because you think it's cool and somebody may want it someday.

As the Atheros driver issue continues to simmer on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list and the Linux Kernel mailing list, with debate continuing over when the license of source code can be altered or added to, Eben Moglen made a statement for the Software Freedom Law Center. He began by defending their own actions, "it might be useful to recall the first stage of this process, when OpenBSD developers were accused of misappropriating Atheros code, and SFLC investigated and proved that no such misappropriation had occurred? Wild accusations about our motives are even more silly than they are false." He went on to acknowledge, "we understand that attribution issues are critically important to free software developers; we are accustomed to the strong feelings that are involved in such situations. In the fifteen years I have spent giving free legal help to developers throughout the community, attribution disputes have been, always, the most emotionally charged."

openSUSE News is running a "Sneak Peeks at openSUSE 10.3" article which takes a look at KDE 4 in the upcoming release. In this version openSUSE will be providing a 1-CD KDE installation ISO that comes complete with some KDE 4 games, KRDC and KRFB. It also features an interview with KDE core developer Dirk Müller. He discusses KDE 4 development, plans for KDE applications developed by openSUSE, and general targets of the openSUSE KDE team in the future.

LXer Feature: 16-Sept-2007

Some of the big stories this week, SCO files for chapter 11, Microsoft pushes through another shadow update, IBM finally decides to officially support OpenOffice and Apple modifies their new iPods to not work with Linux.

Randy Dunlap sent a patch to the Linux kernel mailing list described as adding "info about various email clients and their applicability in being used to send Linux kernel patches." The first revision generated quite a bit of discussion, quickly resulting in a second version, and eventually a third version that Andrew Morton referred to as "soon to be merged". In addition to some general suggestions about emailing patches, it also offers some specific configuration suggestions for a number of popular email clients.

Modern Healthcare's Joseph Conn has aninterview about the Harris County Health Information (HCHIC) in Houston putting on aninaugural fundraiser at St. Arnold's Brewery for a city-wide EHR:'After hearing a talk by Stephen Foreman, a Robert Morris associate professor of healthcare administration and economics, Valdes said he gained the"intellectual firepower to do this now.""He gave this chat on why (proprietary) electronic medical software is not going to work and probably never will," Valdes recalled."It's a public good and not a private good. People are going at this like it is a piece of furniture when it is really like a lighthouse. What he said was, according to economic theory and practice, you need to treat it like a public good, and free and open source shifts it toward a public good."

From theClearHealth forum the announcement has just been made,ClearHealth 2.0 final has been released.. It looks like there will be more information about new features coming in the next week. Congratulations to theClearHealth team!