Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ordinarily, the only place you see these programs are in laptops and the methods should work on laptops, and there are many places to go for information on the specialized laptop tweaks and GNOME and KDE laptop configuration options. But in an age of global warming and increasing costs per KWh, saving power on workstations by putting them to sleep when not in active use is a good idea, too.

Novell South Africa's Stafford Masie is leaving the Linux vendor to head up the local Google operation, reports ITWeb. Masie has led the Soth African Novell office for the past four years and has been a key figure in the Linux strategy adopted by Novell globally.

I am a Linux user, and I recently got an eMachines laptop. Since I'm Uruguayan, my mother tongue is Spanish, and that presented a problem: laptops usually have an American-style keyboard, and Spanish (as well as Portuguese, French, German, and other languages) requires some special keys that aren't on American keyboards. Here's how you can get international characters on your American keyboard -- and as a bonus, we'll see how you can enable the special"media" or"Internet" keys on some keyboards that aren't supported by Linux out of the box.

A recent story entitled, "Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die" didn't cover Linux or open-source companies. That got me to thinking. So here, without further adieu, is my list of five Linux companies that died before their time.

"After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml. This is the second stable 2.4 kernel released since Willy became the 2.4 kernel maintainer nearly a year ago in August of 2006. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface.

The 2007 business meeting of the IMIA Open Source Working Group will take place as follows: Sunday, 19 August 2007, from 5:30 - 7:30pm Venue: Room P3, Brisbane Convention Centre, Australia (in conjunction with medinfo2007) Agenda to be advised later. Apologies to colleagues who won't be at medinfo2007. All queries to imia.oswg[at]gmail.com Updates and agenda will be posted on the IMIA OSWG website atwww.chirad.info/imiaoswg

Membership marks the latest in a series of commitments to build interoperability with industry leaders

The open source collaborative software platform, Mindquarry, earlier this week launched the beta of its hosted collaborative service, Mindquarry GO.

Fuzz testing, which uses random input to test software for bugs, has been the biggest thing to happen in IT security in quite awhile. Now you can quickly and easily direct your own fuzz testing ops, thanks to a cool little program called zzuf.

Linux company DcData and telephony solutions providers BizCall have entered a strategic partnership in order to provide IP Telephony and VOIP services to the Kwazulu Natal market, forming BizCall KZN.

In 1999, a scientist wanted to look at some data from soil samples collected on Mars in 1975 by the Viking lander. He wanted to test a theory about detecting the existence of Martian bacteria and microbes–in other words, finding life on Mars. The scientist thought he would find what he needed on a NASA website somewhere, but it wasn’t that easy. The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes that stored the data were found, they were “in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died.” Someone finally found a ream of paper printouts propping a door open and humanity’s understanding of the universe expanded a bit more. The tragic sense that would have accompanied the loss of this knowledge is echoed in accounts of the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, and probably why book-burnings are seen as a sure sign that a society is unhealthy

The openSUSE team on July 20 released version 10.3 Alpha 6. In addition to extensive upgrades, this is the first alpha containing the new refactored libzypp software management library, with some "rough edges," says the team. Targets include x86, x86-64 and PowerPC. It's been about six weeks since the openSUSE team released Alpha 5, featuring kernel version 2.6.22.rc4 and a choice between GNOME and KDE desktops. Novell is shooting for completion of v10.3 for general release in October, the team stated.

Red Hat graphic designers are no strangers to the pains of proprietary formats. Over the years, many have lost photographs, archived projects, and important portfolio work when formats have been changed. They’ve been forced to upgrade before they’re ready, too. That’s why they’re interested in open source design tools, like Inkscape and Scribus, which are becoming more popular and widely used. And when Red Hat offered to create a logo, t-shirt, and poster to raise awareness for ODF, it wasn’t hard to motivate Red Hat designers to get involved.

Hoping to inspire people to write code that can run on its multi-core processors, Intel has open sourced one of its development packages. Users of all shapes and sizes can now download the code for Intel's Threading Building Blocks (TBB) – a C++ template library that caters to the design of parallel code. By open-sourcing this product under the GPLv2 (General Public License), Intel expects more developers – particularly those playing with Linux – will give parallel programming a go. This is a self-serving effort in that Intel desperately needs an influx of parallel code in the coming years, so that software will run well across multi-core chips.

Bob Beck announced the creation of the OpenBSD Foundation with three directors including himself, Kjell Wooding, and Ken Westerback. "The OpenBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today it has completed its organization as a Canadian federal non-profit corporation and is ready for public interaction,"

Space enthusiast and engineer Paul Wooster wants to open the source code for outer space, because, he says, it should be easier for everyone who wants to contribute to human activities in space to do so, not just people with advanced degrees in rocketry. To that end, Wooster has established DevelopSpace, a community based on open source philosophies, designed to attract anyone interested in sharing their skills in order to make more space exploration possible.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) shocked the world today by approving a "badgeware" style license. Members of the OSI board, speaking here at OSCON, announced that Socialtext's Common Public Attribution License (CPAL) received its blessing this morning. The license proves similar to non-OSI approved badgeware or attribution licenses used by numerous open source companies. Some leaders of the OSI have been attacking companies such as Sugar CRM and CentricCRM for claiming to be "open source" companies despite relying on the unapproved attribution licenses.

Ubuntu gets buzz like mad. Ubuntu is the next wave in Linux. Ubuntu is led by Mark Shuttleworth, a world-famous, charismatic person who buzzes around the world in his private jet, bringing the GNU/Linux gospel to the masses. And Ubuntu has now held its first Ubuntu Live conference, which was a decent first effort but nowhere near as polished as Red Hat's annual get-togethers.

Levelstar used embedded Linux to create a PDA (personal digital assistant) for visually impaired users. The "Icon" has a custom hardware design with built-in 30GB hard drive, WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB, and comes with a full complement of "life managing software,"

In a recent lkml thread, the idea of getting the entire Linux kernel history into a git repository was discussed. Linus Torvalds noted, "I actually tried to get something like this together back in the BK days and early in the SCO saga. It was pretty painful to try to find all the historic trees and patches - they're all in different format, and some of them are unreliable." He added, "I've been thinking about trying to re-create some really old history into git, but it's still a lot of work.. And obviously not very useful, just interesting from an archaeological standpoint." Much information on early Linux kernels is gathered at oldlinux.org, and Linus already has the full 2.5.0 to 2.6.12-rc2 history imported from BitKeeper available in git.