Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Terra Soft has claimed a fairly unique platform in the Linux community: Power Architecture computers, among which is Sony's PlayStation 3. More than a game box, the PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux runs as a low-cost home and office personal computer and Cell Broadband Engine development workstation. Linux ran on the PS2, but it was definitely a geek-only option. For the PS3, the geek factor was removed.

Open source software, once considered the realm of idealists and risk-takers, is increasingly finding its way into the corporate IT toolkit. For Grant Swinbourne, general manager of Online Channels at Jetstar Airways, the decision to use an open source content management system, Joomla!, saved his company software licensing costs close to $100,000 and "hundreds of hours" in contract negotiations and budget approvals.

African media workers and free software developers will have an opportunity to exchange ideas on the ways free software can be used in media production at a workshop to be held in Ghana in April.

BOSS Linux is a single-CD Debian-based distribution primarily designed for an Indian language user, though everything from the installer to the desktop defaults to English. BOSS 1.1, which was released last month by the Indian government-sponsored National Resource Center for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS), includes several utilities and desktop enhancements, such as a document converter and the 3-D desktop Beryl, which make it a very usable distro, despite a few rough edges.

In recognition of Human Rights Day, we searched the net to find some examples of open source software being used to preserve human rights and fight against abuse. We describe a few of the applications that we came across, as well as the organisations that use them.

At its annual BrainShare users conference today, Novell rolled out a slate of new SuSE Linux products and talked up a new, two-fold corporate strategy devised in the wake of its controversial pact with Microsoft--but not without skepticism, and even vehement opposition, among some who traveled to Salt Lake City this week.

Novell will soon release a major upgrade to its SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 line. The enhancements, announced at the company's annual "BrainShare" tradeshow, will be rolled out in the form of the operating system's first service pack: SP1.

Government agencies are no strangers to open source, according to an FCW.com piece published today. At first blush, we imagined part of the attraction lies in cost savings, just like it does for many businesses investigating open source; however, FCW.com points out we’re wrong.

Government agencies are no strangers to open source, according to an FCW.com piece published today. At first blush, we imagined part of the attraction lies in cost savings, just like it does for many businesses investigating open source; however, FCW.com points out we’re wrong.

The availability of open source Linux operatings systems and software is putting pressure on suppliers of branded commercial embedded Linux products to differentiate their offerings from what is available royalty-free, according to market researcher Venture Development Corporation (VDC).

As Debian moves inexorably (glacially?) toward "Etch," its next release, ARM support keeps improving. Debian hacker Martin Michlmayr reports that Release Candidate 2 of the Etch installer, available now, adds support for Intel's ARM-based XScale I/O processors (IOPs), and for several IOP-based devices.

The One Laptop Per Child program reported today that after 303 builds, it finally has a satisfactory version of its Red Hat Linux-based Sugar operating system that is considered stable, according to OLPC president for software and content Walter Bender. "After a final few bugs that had hidden in corners were driven into the light, we issued Stable Build 303 along with Q2B76 firmware this week," Bender said in his weekly email report.

Johns Hopkins emergency medicine specialists have developed a tool to help hospitals prepare for disasters with the potential to overwhelm services. The Electronic Mass Casualty Assessment & Planning Scenarios computer program calculates the impact of such crises as a flu epidemic, bioterrorist attack, flood or plane crash, accounting for such elements as numbers of victims, wind direction, available medical resources, bacterial incubation periods and bomb size.

With all the bugfixes how history, the GNOME project team last week released v2.18 of its popular desktop environment. For the first time, GNOME ships with a bundle of online games, chess with a 3D look, and Sudoku crossword puzzles.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser may have the lion's share of the general market, but when it comes to security types, Mozilla's Firefox open source browser is an even contender, according to a security survey released Monday.

Aimed at new users, the Fedora Project's Fedora Desktop User Guide (FDUG) attempts to address some worthwhile questions: What does its audience want to do? What does the audience need to know to accomplish those tasks? What explanations and layout will help them absorb the information they need as easily and as quickly as possible? FDUG does a reasonable job of anticipating audience need, covering topics from logging in and basic desktop features to descriptions of setting up mail and managing photos and sharing directories. However, its presentation of information fails to answer the other questions implicit in technical writing, and suffers in both text and design from a lack of consistency.

Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing. The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007 .

Robert Knight, lead maintainer of Konsole has launched a Konsole Usage Survey. 28 questions are waiting for your answers. Use this chance to give useful feedback about a vital and often-used base application of KDE to enable Robert to make Konsole the best console application for KDE 4.

Many times a simple screencast showing how to do something by using a series of screenshots in sequence in a video can explain what paragraph after paragraph of words cannot. Linux and a few open source applications make the job of creating such screencasts easy.

If you need to convert word processor documents to and from Microsoft's OpenXML format, you have at least two choices. A new utility from Novell work as an OpenOffice.org extension, while a separate project makes an add-in for Microsoft Word. One is clearly better than the other.