Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Sun Microsystems, a longtime participant in the Xen open-source hypervisor project, has named its Solaris-based offshoot xVM, short for x86 Virtual Machine.

Bad things can happen even to good computers. If something bad happens to a Dell PC with pre-installed Ubuntu, Dell is now providing a customized Ubuntu to make certain that everything returns to turn to tiptop shape.

"This version has a lot of corrections, and is stable at least on my machine," noted Linus Torvalds in the 0.11 Linux kernel release announcment, "I /hope/ every known bug is fixed, but no promises (and all unknown bugs are still there, probably with reinforcements ;-)". The 0.11 kernel was released on December 8th, 1991, gaining demand loading, the mkfs, fsck and fdisk utilities, improved floppy drivers, a console that could generate beeps, support for US, German, French and Finnish keyboards, and settable line-speeds for the com ports (instead of having them hard-coded to 2400bps).

Get to know a little about stack exploits in the first of two films featuring Uli Drepper. Find out how stack buffer overflows work, the vulnerabilities abused by such attacks, and a security implementation that can stop the attack before it even begins. We’re also offering up an extended version of the talk–available as a podcast–for those of you on the go. And join us next time, where we’ll hear from Uli about more exotic attacks and other types of security measures.

Runtime Revolution has released a beta version of its Hypercard-like cross-platform development tool with upgraded Linux support. Version 2.9 of the tool is the first version to offer full Linux support since version 2.6.1 was released in October 2005.

Every time you launch Thunderbird, you are greeted by a generic start page (unless you've turned that option off). Most of us don't pay much attention to it and navigate straight to the Inbox without giving it a second thought. The start screen is just a simple HTML page, which Thunderbird fetches from the address specified in the application's preferences. Knowing that, you can replace it with something more useful, such as the URL of your Web site or blog -- or you can take it a step further and turn the start screen into a tool that can help to manage your ideas, notes, to-do lists, and more.

I saw this article today about rebooting a frozen system without having to hit the power button, which looks like it might be useful. We do have this happen once in a while - usually for no readily apparent reason, and since I tend to go by the “once is an anomaly, twice in quick succession is time to investigate” rule, I confess I don’t look too hard.

Modern Health care isreporting that the Oregon RHIO planning has come to a halt:"The health plans were willing to pay, but the hospitals thought it was a more challenging venture," Gibson said. The project did not get funded because"it lacked a sustainable business model. If you look carefully at his (Witter's) business plan, sustainable operation was way off in the future. He just said in year five or beyond, there would be services that might be salable. You still had the first few years that might not be sustainable." Gibson also said that there were some concerns about what he called"adoption risk" with a system designed to find patient information using a record-locator service and a Web-based interface with participants' IT systems."You're asking doctors to break out of whatever work flow they're in and going out to a Web site," Gibson said."You have a risk that doctors might not use it. Once everybody has an EMR and once that data comes automatically into an EMR, that’s different. But that’s not what we proposed."

Downloads of Bastille Linux have always been offered through SourceForge, with Bastille-linux.org serving more as a store-front than as a primary download location. The change of ownership of the site came to light only after duty staff at the Internet Storm Centre followed up a tip that something was amiss.

It's all about updating the updater. Microsoft officials are seeking to dispel rumors the company is performing stealth updates on Windows machines. They are also pledging to be more transparent in the future to prevent such misunderstandings from happing again.

After more than two years of development, Free Pascal 2.2.0 was released this week and has sparked a resurgence in interest in a programming language many had forgotten about.

New features include, a connector for LegalCase and updated connectors for ClearHealth, OpenEMR and osCommerce, facilities to convert sales order to purchase order and/or material/service requisition so as to procure the required material/service after a sale is concluded, addition of a sample law office chart of accounts and a sample medical practice chart of accounts, addition of Australian GST tax rate and updating of Canadian GST tax rate, addition of narrow/wide display option for the various case handling screens, addition of customer, vendor, employee contact lists, and, addition of German translation for the Quotation module.

I do development work, and I require access to a console to run programs, check output, or monitor transmission packets. Up until now, I've used a terminal program in a different desktop, and use the mouse to change to that terminal. Now I've found a quicker way, by using any of three Quake-style consoles that pop up just by pressing a key.

At a mere 50MB, Damn Small Linux seems like it would be more at home in the realm of rescue disks instead of Desktop OSs. After booting up into full graphical mode, you may be hooked on this tiny distribution forever.

Individual developers can use sites like SourceForge.net to host multiple projects, but such sites are not well suited to college environments that have many student programming projects to host. DrProject is a multiple project hosting application designed for schools. It gives each project a wiki, bug tracker, and source code repository. DrProject is a fork of the Trac project, which can only host project at a time. DrProject has a different look and feel but the navigation menu is very similar to Trac's.

Viva software freedom viva! Software Freedom Day takes place this Saturday. A worldwide celebration, there are several events taking place around the country.

Hothead Games will soon be launching a new title based on the popular online Penny Arcade comic strip. Even better, the new game will be available for several platforms at its launch, including Linux. The dearth of new, popular, commercial games for Linux has long been a sore point for Linux users. For the most part, Linux gamers have been overlooked, forgotten, or ignored. What drove Hothead to include Linux as a supported platform? Joel DeYoung, Hothead Game's COO and also a founder and producer of the upcoming "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness," said, "At Hothead we have a philosophy that gamers should choose the platform they want to play a game on, rather than the publisher dictating that to them. So in general we're always going to try to get our titles on as many platforms as possible.

Developers looking to build Ajax-style rich internet applications (RIA) are pretty much spoilt for choice at the moment. There are dozens of RIA tools and frameworks littering the development landscape, from those providing minimal sets of JavaScript libraries to heavyweight contenders such as Adobe’s Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT). The Google offering, released under an Open Source licence, has quickly picked up a following by combining a wide range of useful and functional browser widgets and by using Java to drive the whole thing. Yep, that’s Java, not Javascript…

This guest column by Kim Brebach, a consultant with an Australian technology marketing group, examines the Linux phenomenon from the perspective of a marketeer wondering why it hasn't caught on more, and what it would take to move it forward.

The big names in open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, such as Compiere, get most of the publicity, but you have another choice: Nseer ERP, from the first Chinese company to open the source code to its ERP software. It offers a basic solution for small businesses. Like many other open source ERP applications, Nseer ERP is developed under Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and is based on a client-server architecture. It runs on Linux, Windows, and Unix, and supports databases such as MySQL, Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server; multiple languages (for the time being, only English and Chinese); and the IE, Firefox, and Netscape Web browsers. The latest version is v6.0.