Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

We are excited to announce the release ofMirth 1.6! This is a significant upgrade which includes both critical bug fixes and new features. The functionality and stability of existing connectors has been improved to fully integrate with even more third-party systems. The user interface has also been enhanced to make channel development and maintenance even easier. Additionally, this release includes NCPDP support, real-time connection monitoring and plug-in functionality.

Maybe you've heard of VMware. You know, EMC's baby, huge IPO, Bloomberg called it the hottest tech stock since Google in 2004, drove a member of our staff mad? Virtualization has clearly become an industry darling, and VMware controls 55 per cent of that market. This kind of monster success tends to paint a big ol' target on a company — and a volley of the slings and arrows that accompany outrageous fortune are already on the way.

Amarok 1.4.7 was released with improved collection backend, new streams, altered icon and bugfixes. *** The annual Desktoplinux.org Survey is under way. *** MEPIS released a KDE 4 Beta 1 live DVD using packages from Kubuntu. *** The videos from Lugradio Live are up including Ben Lambs' Conquering the Desktop with KDE 4. *** Finally, following the 10th anniversary of the free desktop last year, congratulations to another project which has gained double figures in age, but whatever did happen to those Scheme applets?

San Diego -- Mainframe programmers and sysadmins get more than just sales pitches and informational talks at SHARE this week -- they also get real-world training. I sat in on a number of educational sessions and hands-on labs at the conference, taught by engineers from IBM, Novell, and independent software vendors.

After I wrote an article on optimizing disk performance, some readers commented that tweaking settings was just part of the job. They pointed out that you can get more speed if you also compile your kernel, adjusting it optimally for your specific hardware and needs. Compiling the kernel isn't the challenge it used to be; nowadays the process is streamlined, and you don't have to do much but pick your choices and key in some commands.

In a June of 1992 posting to the linux-activists mailing list, Linus Torvalds described the original Linux scheduler noting, "the scheduler in linux is pretty simple, but does a reasonably good job at giving good IO response while not being too unfair against cpu-bound processes." A year later, Linus posted a more detailed description of the scheduler noting, "the linux scheduling algorithm is one of the simplest ones possible". Comments in the original 254 line sched.c file read, "'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). The one thing you might take a look at is the signal-handler code here."

When picking a media center solution for your PC, it tends to be a matter of compromise. There are solutions that are visually attractive, solutions that are Free/open source software, solutions that are more complete than others and solutions that integrate well with a desktop environment. In the past there have been few, if any, that have been all of these things. After an extensive beta testing period a new version of LinuxMCE, release 0704, was recently made available to the public that shows how we can indeed have our media center cake and eat it too. Read on for details of this release and future plans for KDE integration.

One of the first things many decision-makers want for any given software product is a roadmap, so they can plan around releases. However, the Linux kernel is and always has been bereft of a roadmap. To counter this, the Linux Foundation announced today that it is offering a Linux Weather Forecast to help provide some guidance to developers and organizations that need to know where the kernel is going.

The Linux Foundation has set up of the Linux Weather Forecast to monitor progress on Linux kernel projects.

Traditionally, the Linux operating system (OS) has been viewed as being too big, too slow, and without the real-time capabilities needed for mobile devices. But as 20 million Linux-based mobile handsets have shipped over the last two years it's difficult to ignore the fact that the Linux OS has quickly taken its place among the top four OS's for high-end "Smartphone" devices.

A corporation is not the person the legal fiction makes it so much as a collection of different interests. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping for a laptop. Remembering that Hewlett-Packard almost singlehandedly solved the basic problem of laser printer support for GNU/Linux, I ended up buying one of the company's laptops. Consumer reports, price, and HP's listing as one of the greener hardware manufacturers according toGreenpeace also affected my decision, but my impression of HP as a free software friendly company was a large criteria.

The Red Hat Crash Utility is a kernel-specific debugger. It is usually used for performing postmortem system analysis when the system panicked, locked up, or appears unresponsive. In this short article, Eugene Teo will give a quick overview of how you can install crash and how you can use it to get important information from the crash dump files for debugging and root-cause analysis purposes.

IBM's customer training and support group SHARE is holding a week-long seminar and conference at the Manchester Grand Hyatt here this week. SHARE dates back to 1955, and the folks gathered in San Diego include programmers, sysadmins, and IT directors who have spent decades running mainframe systems for the world's largest companies and governments. Most of the classes and labs focus on"big iron" products like the mainframe operating system MVS and the CICS transaction server, but Linux is getting strong promotion as well. IBM champions Linux for its zSeries mainframes as the industrial-strength virtualization platform, and judging by the turnout at the Linux and VM program sessions, interest is high.

This month's Open Tuesday took place last night with guest speaker Anton de Wet giving an informative talk offering tips on how to start up and succeed with an open source business, peppered with entertaining anecdotes.

Jeff Campbell (aka "Mr. Zonbu") has updated the blog chronicling his experiences with Zonbu, a mini-sized Linux-powered network computer for home users. The latest posting, based on two weeks with the device, finds Campbell happy but still full of suggestions.

Managing one site on a Web server can be tough enough, and the job is even harder if you have to host multiple client sites on a badly configured setup.

System administrators need to secure their systems while avoiding locking them down so strictly that they become useless. Bastille is a software tool that eases the process of hardening a Linux system, giving you the choice of what to lock down and what not to, depending on your security requirements. It bundles many of the tasks routinely done to securely configure a Linux system into one package.

In a surprise move, Google quietly released StarOffice in its Google Pack of free downloadable programs. StarOffice is Sun Microsystems' commercial office suite. A version of it, OpenOffice, is the most popular open-source desktop suite. StarOffice 8 was released in 2005. In eWEEK Labs' tests of StarOffice 8 at the time, the labs were pleased with the suite's word processing (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation (Impress) and database (Base) functions. In addition, the Labs had generally good results opening and creating Microsoft Office-formatted documents with StarOffice.

MySQL has defended a decision to end free community access to the latest source code for its popular database in an attempt to snag paying customers. Chief executive Marten Mickos said MySQL remains in full compliance with the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), adding the company's decision will help build a "well-funded business model" capable of producing yet more GPL software.

In the first two articles in the series, we chose to use existing tools in a non-traditional way in order to solve a problem. This time, we’re going to use an often overlooked tool exactly as it was meant to be used.