Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Another six months, another release from the Ubuntu folks. The Ubuntu 7.04 release, better known as Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, is another cutting-edge, but not bleeding-edge, release that shows what Linux is capable of on the desktop. I've been running it since the early betas, and have found that it's the best Ubuntu release yet.

DragonFlyBSD founder Matthew Dillon posted an update on his syslink protocol which he defined as, "a message based protocol that can devolve down into almost direct procedure calls when two localized resources talk to each other." The syslink API will be used to talk to both local resources on the same node as well as to remote resources on a different node. Earlier documentation further explained the networking nature of the protocol, "the Syslink protocol is used to glue the cluster mesh together. It is based on the concept of reliable packets and buffered streams. Adding a new node to the mesh is as simple as obtaining a stream connection to any node already in the mesh, or tying into a packet switch with UDP." In another email Matthew explained how various DragonFlyBSD nodes utilize Syslink to automatically establish the optimal physical route.

One of the oldest virtualization products, Win4Lin, is starting to show signs of aging. Win4Lin flourished in 2000, when competition was sparse and expensive. But seven years on, not only are there several virtualization products, but almost half a dozen are available for free. With no visible improvements over its previous version, Win4Lin Pro Desktop 4.0 is now outdated and outclassed.

The College of American Pathologists has justTransferred SNOWMED CT toInternational Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO). It is now available for use inside any of theIHTSDO Member countries if you are in the US, you can still get it fromNational Library of Medicine viaUMLSKS. However you still have to agree to the License Agreement for Use of the UMLS® Metathesaurus. It provides for some very FOSS unfriendly terms... included after the gap.

It's already been 10 days since I started my DPL term and I haven't made any formal announcement yet, so here it is. It's a bit late to comment on the elections, but let me thank all other candidates anyway, with extra sympathy for Steve McIntyre who for the second time came second by less than 10 votes and Gustavo Franco who had a platform very similar to mine yet wasn't rewarded with as many favorable votes. Also many thanks to Anthony Towns, my predecessor, and Steve McIntyre again for making the switch as comfortable as possible.

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel to The Netherlands to talk to another developer of the KDE-PIM realm. Saving both your hands and your email frustrations - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Tom Albers.

Adobe's plan to open-source its Flex Web development framework offers at least a partial open-source alternative to Microsoft's Silverlight and Extensible Application Markup Language.

Registration opened today for Ubuntu Live, the first official conference dedicated to Ubuntu. The three-day conference will be held July 22-24 in conjunction with the O'Reilly 2007 Open Source Convention, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Ore. The conference will showcase a wide-ranging program of expert-led sessions and tutorials to inform and educate the growing Ubuntu community, from power users to the simply "Ubuntu-curious," an O'Reilly spokesperson said.

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of the fourth and final test release of Fedora 7.

Airline looks to IBM's Unix-based AIX platform to handle internal finance systems, says "stability issues" a factor.

[Stability Issues, are they kidding? Talk about a talented salesperson.. Oh well, at least its not M$ - Scott]

I broke down and read Getting Things Done (GTD) in February (after letting the book sit unopened on the couch for a month). When I finished, I was determined to adopt the popular organizational method. I searched for a solid software tool to track projects and next actions, and found dozens of desktop-oriented applications to choose from. One of the GTD axioms is to collect all of your tasks, projects, and lists in one place; since I regularly use four PCs and laptops and a mobile phone, finding a GTD-aware tool that would run as a Web app was paramount. I settled on Tracks; it is open source, easy to use, and accessible from anywhere.

Novell openSUSE project has had a recent history of trouble with its update programs. Now, to make updating openSUSE more pleasant, the project is dropping its support for ZENworks and opening up YAST to community development. In an openSUSE development list management note, SUSE Project Manager Andreas Jaeger wrote, "OpenSUSE is focusing on native software management by using YAST and Libzypp, the package management library."

Carnegie Mellon University unveiled a new project Thursday designed to help people make robots from parts found at the local hardware store.

Linspire has published the release schedules for its two Linux distributions -- Linspire and Freespire -- and the overhaul of its CNR (click-and-run) software update system to support multiple Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Standard disk setup here used to include a 5GB root partition (this has been upped to 10GB for a while now). I’ve just encountered the first machine with this setup to be running out of space on / - mostly this seems to be down to /usr/share.

Pagestream is a proprietary desktop publishing program for Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and Amiga. First developed for the Atari more than two decades ago, it is produced by a small company, but has attracted a loyal and active group of users. Pagestream's strengths include an easy-to-use interface and a strong awareness of typography, but in the version 5.0.3.4 beta for GNU/Linux, users also have to contend with limited font support and apparently disabled table support.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.21 kernel, "if the goal for 2.6.20 was to be a stable release (and it was), the goal for 2.6.21 is to have just survived the big timer-related changes and some of the other surprises (just as an example: we were apparently unlucky enough to hit what looks like a previously unknown hardware errata in one of the ethernet drivers that got updated etc)."

DistroWatch.com, for years a staple of the Linux information scene for its coverage of distribution development, today posted a new "Top Ten Distributions" page. The list provides a few paragraphs of general information and history for each distro, plus a brief list of fast facts. The site was careful to indicate that its selections are "loosely listed in order of popularity on DistroWatch, which is NOT an indication of their market share or quality."

Wireless networking on Linux is entering a new era. An era of bliss and ease; where users and network administrators have abundant time for relaxing lie-abouts on sunny warm hills because their wireless systems are humming along contentedly, instead of being vexing and unreliable.

This latest update to the Linux kernel features improvements to virtualisation, power management and sound support.