Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Akademy 2007 draws to a close. Dolphin embedded as the file management view in Konqueror. Plasma continues to mature, with new data engines for Tasks and Bluetooth, and EBN and Task Manager Plasmoids making an introduction. Further progress in Javascript bindings through QtScript; import of Kimono (C#) classes. More basic functionality added to Kollagame, a game development IDE. Initial work in the KWin/Xinerama and 2d Projection for Marble Summer of Code projects, with continued progress in the Icon Cache, KOrganizer Theming, KRDC and Music Notation projects...

Today I tried to help a Mac user save some pictures to a DVD. There were more than 1GB of photos, so it made more sense to use a DVD than two CDs. Unfortunately, Mac OS X thinks that you need to make movies when you insert a blank DVD disc -- it has no idea that you want to save data to it. What you, the user, want to do does not matter. All that matters is that you do what Apple says a computer should do. This is "the Apple way," and some people find it enjoyable.

Today Guardian Digital announces the launch of the next generation of EnGarde Secure Linux, the first secure pure open source platform for managing the threats of the Internet in enterprise-class environments.

Hit-a-Hint (HaH) is a Firefox plugin that aims to create a faster Web surfing experience by letting you use the keyboard to click links.

With little fanfare, Nokia released the latest upgrade for its N800 Internet tablets this weekend. Known officially as Internet Tablet OS 2007 Edition version 4.2007.26-8 and to open source patrons as Maemo 3.2, the new download features long-awaited changes to the Linux kernel, improved battery life, and some flashy updates to the application software -- including the popular Skype softphone.

Despite Microsoft's attempt to dissociate itself from GPLv3 software, Novell is embracing the new licence.

As its name implies, Mail Notification is a utility for keeping track of incoming mail and reading it in a popup window without activating your mail reader or moving other open applications. Simple to configure and easy to use, it is especially useful for watching multiple mailboxes.

As market watchers have predicted, Sony has dropped the price of its Playstation 3 console by US$100 ahead of the E3 expo in Santa Monica this week. The cut was widely expected but some had thought Sony may wait until closer to the holiday shopping season. The price cut has taken the PS3 60GB down to US$499 while a new 80GB model will fill the previous US$599 slot.

[Considering that it comes with Yellow Dog Linux on it I thought it would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Redmond says it's not a party to the new license. And those Suse Linux coupons won't get you any support guarantees.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the official release of the 2.6.22 kernel, "it's out there now (or at least in the process of mirroring out - if you don't see everything, give it a bit of time)." He summarized the changes since 2.6.22-rc7]: "Not a whole lot of changes since -rc7: some small architecture changes (ppc, mips, blackfin), and most of those are defconfig updates. Various driver fixes: new PCI ID's along with some ide, ata and networking fixes (for example - the magic wireless libertas ioctl's got removed, they may be re-added later, hopefully in a more generic form, but in the meantime this doesn't make a release with new interfaces that aren't universally liked)."

LXer Feature: 08-Jul-2007

The big stories this week include Microsoft's attempts to distance itself from the effects of the GPLv3, Part 2 of Carla Schroder's Adventures in Digital Photography, using Live Linux distro's for online banking, Massachusetts decides that XML is ok and the BSA ups the ante on getting people to "Blow The Whistle". All this and more await you in this weeks LXer Roundup.

As some of you may already know, I've been in the process of setting up a new server to host my sites. My old VPS just can't handle the load anymore. Since I'm not really making a lot of money off the sites (Maybe $100 a month, if that), my budget is definitely tight. Here's how I setup a server, capable of supporting over 4,000 static requests per second, and over 1,000 PhP requests for second (Using a Joomla installation with SEF enabled). Oh, and I only spent $800 on hardware, and $50 a month for a datacenter with 100mbit up link to the internet (billed on monthly transfer). The server is great for hosting a few sites (lets say up to 20 or so), but could be setup to serve thousands of sites. So, here's how I did it.

New U.S. regulations went into effect today that could change how vendors of devices with software-defined radios (SDR) use open-source software. The new rules could impact manufacturers of mobile phones, WiFi cards, and other devices that use SDR technologies.

Nokia has released updated firmware for its Linux-based N800 Internet Tablet. The fourth Tablet OS 2007 release this year -- "4.2007.26-8" -- brings a Skype client, Flash 9 player, and support for 8GB SD memory cards, while Nokia's own VoIP service beta installer has been removed.

Are Microsoft’s patent lawyers playing possum? Or are they really as clueless about what makes open-source software tick as they seem?

Ingo Molnar released version 19 of his CFS scheduler patchset, first released back in April. He noted: "The biggest user-visible change in -v19 is reworked sleeper fairness: it's similar in behavior to -v18 but works more consistently across nice levels. Fork-happy workloads (like kernel builds) should behave better as well. There are also a handful of speedups: unsigned math, 32-bit speedups, O(1) task pickup, debloating and other micro-optimizations."

By this time, you should have guessed that running KDE takes a large chunk of machine resources. Really old machines will run this latest version of KDE quite slowly. I chose it for the FreeBSD beginner because it’s a good safe place to start, with so many built-in tools. One of the most important ones up to now has been KPPP — the dialup tool. In this lesson we are going to learn how to dialup without KPPP. With that, about the only reason to keep using KDE is simply that you like it.

By his own description, Dirk Riehle is a major fan of open source software. Riehle, leader of the open source research group at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California, spends countless hours theorizing about the economics of this emerging software trend. He’s the author of The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software, a scholarly article that describes significant shifts in the software business. Datamation spoke with him about how these shifts are shaping the pay levels of open source developers.

Akaza Research announces that it has completed a comprehensive onsite training for the Kemri-Wellcome Research Programme for using the OpenClinica Enterprise platform for its clinical research activities in Kenya.

Recently Joseph Conn wrote an excellent article on VistA. A Modern Healthcare reader replied with a comment titledAntiquated system slowing EHR transformation which essentially argued that VistA was holding health IT back... because its old. Thankfully Modern Healthcare has also published my replyVistA: You say 'antiquated;' I say 'proven'. I offer more thoughts on the subject over atGPLMedicine.org in my post'antiquated' vs 'proven' -Trotter