Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ten Tec is an American manufacturer of all sorts of radio equipment based in Tennessee. They make a neat little black box which attaches to any PC via a serial port. The box, called the RX-320D, is a shortwave (general coverage) receiver that works very well indeed with performance rivaling more expensive desktop receivers. If you read Ten Tec’s advertising you’d think you need Windows based software to use this radio. Think again.

The news has quickly gotten around that Dell will be bringing Ubuntu Linux to some of its consumer desktops. Analysts and Linux rivals alike think this is a good move for both Linux and Dell. The big question now is, "How important is it really?"

Linux users have a multitude of choices for personal finance applications, including GnuCash, KMyMoney, Kapital, and others, not to mention being able to run Quicken under WINE. One good alternative that runs on multiple operating systems and manages finances with ease is Moneydance.

Open source technology now has a firm foothold in the public sector, according to a new survey.

While officials for Red Hat and Novell's SUSE have welcomed the move as good for the industry, they also downplayed its competitive significance.

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

Ubuntu has been the wonder child of Linux distributions since it debuted in 2004, and it has enjoyed mostly good reviews. However, a favorably disposed reviewer found Ubuntu 7.04 to be disappointing and presented his point of view candidly in a review published today by ExtremeTech.com.

Well, that's easy to answer but, more important what is he doing? And why? Well, here is a not so quick update.

[Geek Ranch?, sounds cool to me. -Scott]

What do you do if you forget the password to your OpenOffice.org files? The simplest solution is to download OOo Password Cracker, a macro for opening protected documents in any OpenOffice.org application. Using a brute force dictionary attack, OOo Password Cracker provides a slow but reliable method of document recovery. However, the macro requires some preparation if you want to use it effectively.

In 2004, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. In 2007, Dell, a top computer manufacturer, is introducing pre-installed Ubuntu Linux on its main PC lines. The worlds of baseball and the desktop will never be the same. In both cases, people worked long and hard to reach the top. In Linux's case, the top is the recognition that it is not just a hobby operating system, and that it is not an operating system that's only for servers. With its arrival on Dell's desktops, Linux has proven that it can compete in the same league with Mac OS and Windows.

Functional Languages seem to be pushing for the title of the next cool thing. Talks and tutorials about them are starting to show up in conferences and conventions, books about them are hitting the shelves, people are even asking about talking about them in blogs and mailing lists devoted to some of the current hot languages.

The director of software for the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project believes there is a big market for the self-powered machines in the U.S., provided the user wants to perform basic computer functions. "The XO machine is quite sweet," the OLPC's Walter Bender wrote in an email to DesktopLinux.com today. "I guess the question boils down to what you want to do with the machine.

Theodore Ts'o posted an update on the ext4 filesystem [story], "I've respun the ext4 development patchset, with Amit's updated fallocate patches. I've added Dave's patch to add ia64 support to the fallocate system call, but *not* the XFS fallocate support patches. (Probably better for them to live in an xfs tree, where they can more easily tested and updated.) Yes, we haven't reached complete closure on the fallocate system call calling convention, but it's enough for us to get more testing in -mm." Jeff Garzik noted that none of this development was happening in the kernel as originally planned, "why isn't this stuff going upstream rapidly? AFAICT nothing much at all has happened upstream besides a mass renaming? The whole point of having ext4 in the kernel is to do development upstream, in the public view, getting new stuff in ASAP (even if that means changing or pulling some stuff later)."

The Recoll project team on April 26 announced the release of version 1.8.1 of its free, open-source, full text search tool for Linux desktops. Recoll is based on the "very strong" Xapian backend, which provides an easy-to-use, feature-rich, QT-based graphical interface, a team member said.

O'Brien Automotive Team is a large car dealership conglomerate based in Peoria, Ill. When the company built new headquarters recently, it needed a phone system flexible and cost-effective enough to satisfy the needs of 200 employees at the home office, and hundreds more staff at nine local dealerships in four states. After evaluating options and wrangling with incompetent vendors, O'Brien went with an open source Asterisk solution.

Toshiba's Italian channel sales and marketing operation reportedly is considering offering pre-loaded Linux in its Tecra, Satellite, Portege, and Qosmio notebook lines, according to a story published online last week in the Il Sole newspaper.

It's a relaxed entry this time, an update on some recent happenings in the Linux audio world. Without further preamble, let's take a look at some of the good things going on there.

During FISL 8.0 I caught up with PostgreSQL contributor Josh Berkus who was there to present on PostgreSQL and meet up with the local PostgreSQL community. Josh is a member of the PostgreSQL core team and works at Sun Microsystems as part of their open source database team. Over lunch, Josh shared how KDE plays an important role in the release coordination process which Josh oversees.

Open source document management application KnowledgeTree has released SOAP Web Services interfaces for the application, opening up opportunities for third party developers to integrate with the document management system.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 85 for the week of April 22nd through April 28th, 2007.