Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If you’ve ever had to install a large number of Linux systems, you are probably aware how tedious the install process can be. While tools like kickstart can help automate an installation, there are other pieces to the puzzle. There really hasn’t been a tool to unify all the ways you can install Linux–until now.

Articles about Linux and mainstream Linux news tends to be dominated by the big Linux distributions, those with large corporate backing and/or large development teams. I’m primarily talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it’s free clone CentOS, Novell/SuSe, and Ubuntu on enterprise servers and Ubuntu, Fedora, Linspire, and Mandriva on the desktop. Throw in two venerable and widely respected distributions, Debian and Slackware, and you’ve got about 90% of the industry chatter covered, maybe more.

Trolltech's Qtopia is a commonly used mobile Linux. It's used in a large number of different devices– from Sony's mylo communicator, to Motorola and Panasonic's Linux phones. While you might not have come across it in the Carphone Warehouse, it's a common platform in one of the biggest mobile markets going – China.

According to its Web site, LyX is"the first WYSIWYM document processor," coupling a familiar word processing front end to the powerful LaTeX typesetting engine. Last month's new version 1.5 release includes a revamped interface, big improvements in multilanguage support, and enhanced tools for incorporating math, tables, and outlines.

I’m actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can’t run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home. Now that Dell and Lenovo are running the distribution on some of its machines, and Novell is promoting a desktop version of Suse, the stage is set for a serious change in expectations. It was one thing when companies were using Linux quietly, on back-end systems like Web servers to cut costs or improve scaleability. This week’s LinuxWorld Expo show in San Francisco has demonstrated that open source is moving much closer to the front end than ever before, and with that begins another quiet shift, which will probably happen among departmental lines.

You may be forgiven for thinking that a tumblelog is just a blog for lazybones. While there are a lot of similarities between these two kinds of content management systems, a tumblelog is more like an online basket, which you can use to collect your thoughts and discoveries and share them with others. Unlike with blogs, tumblelog readers don't expect you to provide any commentary in the published items, so you don't actually have to"blog about" the stuff that you publish. The idea is that the post item itself implicitly expresses your opinion on it, or, to put it in a slightly different way, you let the item speak for itself.

Editors' Blog If computer game development is your thing, save your pennies and get yourself over to the Los Angeles Convention Centre.

The arch directory in the kernel source tree contains all of the architecture-specific code. There is a lot of code there, despite years of work by the development community to make things generic whenever possible. There are currently 26 different top-level architectures supported by Linux, many of which contain a number of sub-architectures. Two of those top-level architectures are i386 (the original Linux architecture) and x86_64, which is the 64-bit big brother to i386. There is quite a bit of commonality between those two architectures, and some efforts have been made to share code between them whenever possible. Even so, the source trees for the two architectures remain distinct from each other.

KDE oldies may remember this interview with Stephan Kulow from back in 2000. Well the folks at openSUSE have clearly been watching us, not only have they started their own openSUSE news site, they have also started their own interview series with a brand new interview of Stephan Kulow. Stephan has been release dude for much of the KDE 3 series and now shares the same honoured title for openSUSE.

First it was called DTV, then Democracy Player, and now it is Miro. Whatever you call it, the Mozilla-based, cross-platform, open source video player is now in public release. Miro differs from playback front ends like VLC by offering integrated content-finding and content-management tools. If you think that's a meaningless distinction, think again.

The Golden Penguin Bowl is a perennial LinuxWorld event frequented by inner-circle types and shunned by the humorless. The format is simple: two teams, the Geeks and the Nerds, answer a series of not-serious technical and movie/TV trivia questions and possibly engage in other feats of derring-do, such as a robot face-off. One team wins, the other team loses. The fans rarely riot, but you never know.

Last month, Fortune magazine ran an interesting article about how Microsoft got its groove on in the massive Chinese market by striking deals with China's government and how Microsoft's success in China appears to be coming at the expense of Linux and open-source software.

run-parts is used (on Debian systems, anyway) to run the scripts in /etc/cron.daily (hourly, weekly, etc) on the appropriate schedule. I had trouble this week with a Perl script I’d dropped into /etc/cron.daily failing to run. Ran fine from the command line, of course. Odd.

The company certified six hardware configurations to run Oracle Enterprise Linux. Certified products include those made by Compellent Technologies, Dell, Egenera, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Pillar Data Systems and Unisys. The announcement was made in conjunction with the LinuxWorld conference this week in San Francisco.community.

Red Hat Summit 2007 collected hundreds of Linux users all in one place–many of them experienced Red Hat Certified Engineers® (RHCE). And somewhere between all those smart people walking around–and our video crew shooting footage–the idea for some video tips was born. This tip is from William Bradley.

I used to think of myself as something of a rare bird -- a philosopher and software developer with a keen interest in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements. But as I discovered at last month's North American Computers and Philosophy (NA-CAP) conference in Chicago, there are many with similar interests.

Fedora and Debian make building a custom kernel and packaging it for rollout a simple process. Part 2 of the Linux kernel compilation series examines the unique steps in getting these popular distros' set up with a custom kernel.

The free electronic program guide (EPG) data that Zap2it Labs currently provides to many MythTV users is scheduled to shut down on September 1. Today MythTV users learned how much a replacement service offered by Schedules Direct (SD) will cost.

Open Tuesday this month has Obsidian Systems founder, Anton de Wet, talking on how to build a business on open source software. The Joburg based networking event for OSS enthusiasts has also moved venues.

Some of the heaviest PR lead-up to this year's West Coast LinuxWorld Conference and Expo was about Linux on laptops, and specifically Novell's SUSE Linux on Lenovo laptops.