Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Andrew Morton submitted some documentation explaining the use of the "Signed-off-by" and "Acked-by" tags added when patches are submitted for conclusion into the Linux kernel. "The Signed-off-by: tag implies that the signer was involved in the development of the patch, or that he/she was in the patch's delivery path," the documentation explains, "if a person was not directly involved in the preparation or handling of a patch but wishes to signify and record their approval of it then they can arrange to have an Acked-by: line added to the patch's changelog."

Nowadays, half the free software world seems to be building Gecko-based browsers (and the other half writing plugins for them). With so many available, you might think the Kazehakase browser would hardly rate a mention. However, Kazehakase breaks away from the pack by being one of the few browser projects that is actually thinking of new features and ways to enhance old ones. From its interface to its features for bookmarks and tabs to its customization options for keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures, Kazehakase is crammed with nonstandard features. You may not want every new feature offered by Kazehakase, but chances are you'll appreciate some of them.

After upgrading to etch recently, I had a plaintive email from a user saying that some Fortran software she had downloaded now wasn’t compiling any more (when it had been previously). The error message was pretty clear that the problem was with g77 not being able to find the relevant include file - but there it was, right in the directory.

Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded Edition will permit multimedia and power management on Intel's minitablet PC platform.

We are very excited to announce the release of Mirth 1.5. This new version offers improved performance and reliability. Additionally, Mirth 1.5 delivers useful new features and bug fixes. Mirth now supports several internal databases including MySQL, Oracle, SQLServer, and PostgreSQL to better integrate with your existing systems. Mirth 1.5 also includes a more robust and responsive administration and development environment along with a new utility for managing the Mirth server configurations.

SourceForge has teamed-up with Wikispaces to integrate wikis directly into SourceForge.net. The addition of wiki functionality into the open source software repository will allow the community to mass-author the documentation needed to support its open source projects.

The Vim editor allows you to modify its behavior via scripts, and the Vim community has produced hundreds of scripts that may help you be more productive, or add functions to Vim that you've always wished it would have. Here are five that I find particularly useful.

OSBC Open source is increasingly driving enterprise development projects and installations, but big customers still rely on start-up software providers for support.

Red Hat and Symantec announced Thursday the bundling of two hosted server security offerings for small and medium-size businesses. The suites, Secure Server Host and Secure Server Host for Applications, are designed to provide pre-configured or custom configured, behavior-based intrusion protection and detection for hosted servers.

If you have multiple users sharing a single computer, you could probably use an easy way to manage their user profiles. Sabayon can help you create and set up GNOME desktop profiles and assign them to different users. It's similar to Kiosktool for KDE, but for the GNOME environment.

Fedora 7 was released last week, a little bit behind schedule, with a spate of new features, updates, and live CD installable "spins" of Fedora in KDE and GNOME flavors. I found a lot of good in this release, but a bug in the FireWire stack that attacked my external backup drive made this release just a little shy of perfect.

Uploading pictures to Flickr via its Web-based interface can be a hassle, particularly if you have dozens of shots to upload. Linux users have a better choice, though, in the form of Kflickr, a simple application for uploading shots to Flickr that will have your family photos online in no time.

Longer notebook battery life and less hard drive failures are on the way as SanDisk launches 64GB hard drives with no moving parts at Computex 2007 in Taiwan.

[Not FOSS related, just some cool new technology. - Scott]

StumbleUpon was last week bought over by eBay, for a cool $75 million. Taking this as an opportunity to stumble around on company time, James Archibald collects some of the more interesting finds.

Many years after first announcing plans for a native version of OpenOffice.org for the Mac OS X platform, the development team yesterday released the first alpha version.

OpenMoko Neo1973, an open source mobile phone similar in concept to Apple's iPhone, is expected to be launched in September this year.

TreeLine is a hybrid application that combines the features of a traditional outliner with a free-form database. As such, it offers a unique way to organize heterogeneous data, be it contact information, bookmarks, text snippets, bibliography, task lists, or something else. Moreover, using TreeLine's outlining capabilities you can easily group and manage the mixed data inside the database.

Microsoft is prepping a security software suite that will take it deep into Symantec and McAfee heartland. They won't be quaking in their boots just yet: the suite, called Stirling, hits the streets in 2009, at the earliest.

[So after letting other companies make money closing the holes in its code MS wants a slice of the pie for themselves. Why not just fix the code in the first place? Oh, that's right. There's no money in doing that. - Scott]

Camino, the Mozilla-based native Mac OS X browser, has reached version 1.5. Camino 1.5 is built on the core Gecko 1.8.1 platform, which also powers Mozilla Firefox 2 and SeaMonkey 1.1.

Welcome to issue 15 of the Red Hat Asia Pacific Newsletter.