Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The next Ubuntu Linux distribution with long-term support, "Hardy Heron," Ubuntu 8.04, will be released in April 2008. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, like Red Hat with Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell with openSUSE and SUSE Linux, releases both a community version and a version for businesses or individuals who want to rely on a distribution with long-term technical support. Unlike Red Hat and Novell, though, Canonical doesn't separate the two versions with different names.

Public Service Announcement: The not-for-profit Harris County Health Information Cooperative (HCHIC) isannouncing its inaugural fund raiser at, St. Arnold's brewery September 20th, for a Houston, Texas area, county-wide or state-wide, non-proprietary EMR:"Much like a lighthouse benefits all of us, your tax-deductible contribution to HCHIC will be used for desperately needed Electronic Medical Record (EMR) unification with proven and robust non-proprietary software that will be implemented, developed and promoted in Harris County and Texas. If you cannot attend the event, your tax-deductible contribution can be sent to HCHIC 4010 Blue Bonnet, Suite 202 Houston, Tx 77025. Individual memberships starting at $100 are available as well as silver ($500), gold ($1000) and platinum ($10,000) Sponsorships. Membership and Sponsorship donations received prior to October 31st will be 'founding' memberships. Membership allows voting rights as well as access to internal communications. Current goal: $80,000. 3 year budget goal: $2 million." All implementation and development products will be FOSS licensed.

"I've long hated the non-killability of tasks accessing a dead NFS server," Matthew Wilcox said along with a prototype patch to fix the issue based on a 2002 posting by Linus Torvalds. Matthew added, "I've only added one real user of the killable concept to this patch -- try_lock_page(). However, this is enough for 'cat */*/*' to be killable with a ^C when I unplug the ethernet cord between it and the nfs server."

Discover why you need to change your applications and build environments that supply 32-bit-only kernel extensions to accommodate IBM AIX Version 6. In this article, apply two easy solutions to help you make the transition and start reaping the benefits of the simplified kernel environment.

During the many threads discussing Ingo Molnar's recently merged Completely Fair Scheduler, Roman Zippel has repeatedly questioned the complexity of the new process scheduler. In a recent posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list he offered a simpler scheduler named the 'Really Fair Scheduler' saying, "as I already tried to explain previously CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity. This patch should now make it clearer, why I could so easily skip over Ingo's long explanation of all the tricks CFS uses to keep the computational overhead low - I simply don't need them."

LinuxSecurity.com: Thanks to Anand Jahagirdar for this feature! As the variety of attacks and threats grow, you need to be prepared. In this HOWTO, get a feeling for the Fork Bombing Attack, what it is, how it works, where it comes from, how to deal with it and more.

As one of his clients told us, "Mark Radcliffe is the law when it comes to open source software." Radcliffe, an attorney at giant DLA Piper, has lurked behind some of the most important shifts in the open source world over the past few years. He helped Sun Microsystems open source the Solaris operating system, developing Sun's CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) license. He crafted SugarCRM's controversial attribution license and then did similar work for a handful of significant open source players. This year, he teamed with SocialText to push the CPAL (Common Public Attribution License) through OSI (Open Source Initiative) approval, while at the same time advising the OSI as legal counsel. And Radcliffe worked with the Free Software Foundation on v3 of the General Public License (GPL).

Opinion: The Department of Justice has declared Microsoft's antitrust settlement to be a success, and if they say so, it must be true!

Voting irregularities, it appears. The Swedish Institute of Standards (SIS) has invalidated the vote that controversially approved the OOXML standard at a meeting this week.

Gold Lasso uses an open source infrastructure to power its email marketing business. Cofounders Elie Ashery and Michael Weisel say open source is the only way to keep prices down and"truly compete in the current marketplace." And, they say, Gentoo Linux is the only way to keep their system truly secure. But finding employees who can manage a system built on Gentoo has been a challenge.

Eugene Ciurana's focus at LeapFrog Enterprises is building infrastructure for the company's Web-enabled product initiatives, but his role also has allowed Ciurana to get involved with the One Laptop Per Child organization. The OLPC's XO laptop and the open-source Sugar interface that runs on the system have drawn the attention of many in the IT community, including me.

Have you ever mistyped a web address and ended up somewhere you definitely did not want to go? You miss one letter in the URL, and instead of getting to your favorite site, you end up in the virtual red light district! In this article, Anderson Silva explains how to set up a basic web filter.

In what promises to boost video quality in desktop, mobile, and embedded devices, Adobe announced that it has added H.264 support to its popular Flash Player software. "Flash Player 9, Update 3 beta," available for download from Adobe's Labs website, supports Linux, OS X, and Windows.

Fully-functional video drivers -- ones capable of handling 3-D acceleration -- remain one of the weak points of free software. The Free Software Foundation has declared them a high-priority project. Meanwhile, some distributions and even more users have resorted to using the proprietary drivers offered as free downloads by card manufacturers. One of the main projects attempting to provide complete, free drivers is focusing on developing the Avivo driver for the R500 and R600 cards from AMD/ATI, so-called after a specification first introduced in this line of cards. According to Jerome Glisse, who coordinates the development of the driver, progress is being made in the project, and"maybe by the end of this year, we might have some 3-D acceleration."

I was looking at what my friendStephen Lewis wrote in HakPakSak a few days ago— specifically newspapers’ roles as public trusts and cornerstones of our informational infrastructure— i.e. sources of solid information and independent commentary essential to informed citizenry, democratic government, effective public policy, and well-functioning economies. What this brought up for me is the notion that human beings are themselves infrastructural; especially when they are constuctive contributors to the structure we call civilization.

Spreadsheets are labor-intensive documents. Usually, their contents is entered carefully, one sheet at a time, at an input rate far below a text document. However, like most spreadsheets, OpenOffice.org has several tools for removing some of the drudgery from input.

FileZilla is one great open source FTP client that -- up until now -- was available only for Windows. Version 3 is a ground-up rewrite that makes the application available for the first time on Linux, too.

Do-it-yourself distributions have made great strides since Linux from Scratch, or even rPath's rBuilder Online. In the last few months, users have even been able to produce custom disk images with such tools as Fedora's Revisor and Ubuntu's Reconstructor. However, one of the most elegant tools to emerge recently is Custom NimbleX, a PHP program that allows you to construct an ISO image in your browser and then download it. Custom NimbleX lacks some polish in the interface, but is so simply and well-designed functionally that it should lead many users to NimbleX itself, the distribution on which it is based.

An easy, inexpensive way to double up Ethernet interfaces to get more more bandwidth and reliability is called Ethernet bonding. While Gigabit Ethernet is all exciting and the hot new fad, you can get a lot of mileage out of using Ethernet bonding to give your existing gear a nice boost without spending much extra money. Just stuff two ordinary 10/100 Ethernet interfaces into a machine, tweak a few configuration files, and you're in business. If one fails you won't lose connectivity. It is a good cheap upgrade for your servers--you'll have several options for configuring load balancing and failover, and with the right gear you'll get an instant bandwidth boost by combining the bandwidth of the two interfaces.

The day is fast approaching when the comment and voting period for ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the draft ISO specification based upon Microsoft's Office Open XML formats, will either be approved or not. As Sept. 2 comes closer, Microsoft appears to be stuffing the ballot boxes of some countries' ISO organizations while open-source and standard organizations are firing back with furious words.