Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Home Automation projects can always use tiny, silent PCs, and here's a new one. The little disk-less Linutop PC is around £230 and runs Xubuntu from a USB stick... "Linutop has Linux-based diskless computer. It offers has completely silent, low-power operation in year extremely small package. Its hand purpose is to surfing the Internet.

Mozilla Corp. is still wrestling with adding a security feature to Firefox that its browser rival, Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 7, uses on Windows Vista to keep malware from hijacking computers. In Vista, IE7 uses a technique Microsoft calls Protected Mode -- another name for "low rights" -- that blocks disk access to all but a temporary-files folder. The idea is that if an exploit -- a drive-by download, for instance -- attacks IE7 through a browser vulnerability, it can't install code on the PC's drive.

Open-Xchange, a provider of open source collaboration software, has inaugurated the opening of the Open-Xchange Community project and the availability of source code and development documentation for its latest AJAX-based e-mail and groupware technology.

Starting this summer, 1,154 parliamentary desks will feature Linux-based PCs.

Bivio Networks has added a high-end model to its line of Linux-based network appliances for deep packet inspection. The B7000 runs the company's Linux-based BiviOS on an interesting AMP (asymmetrical multiprocessing) architecture claimed capable of wirespeed network application processing at 10 gigabits-per-second.

In an effort to share the knowledge that is embodied in the software labs of Zend Technologies and IBM as it relates to PHP on the iSeries and System i5, and to help in the creation of a new Redbook for PHP on that platform, Zend and IBM have announced a collaborative Wiki for PHP on the iSeries.

It's free! You can tailor it to your own needs! There's a distro for every need! Sure, Linux is tempting, but getting started isn't so easy. eWEEK Labs offers advice for getting your head, and your organization, around Linux.

Large development projects can be difficult to manage. With multiple developers committing source code to one source tree, there are going to be times when code breaks and will not work. Running automated builds and tests on code can drastically reduce the time and effort developers spend fixing issues by catching them early. This process is called continuous integration. This article provides an overview of how to implement continuous integration in a PHP project using tools written in PHP.

At the core of open source is the belief that mysterious others assure the quality of an open source product. However, few actually have the skills required to do such a review. If, in the case of Wikipedia -- where there should be a lot of experts -- you still can't trust the content, the people or the quality, then how can you trust that open source works where such a review is less likely?

Linux scores yet another victory now that of South African publisher Creamer Media has migrated to the Linux based Preditor content management system.

A DVD that comes with lots of great examples of Free Culture which plays in your DVD player, with even more examples when you put it in your computer – including a GNU/Linux Live CD. The idea is simple: help to get the word out about Free Culture, including Free Software, by showing off what's already been achieved; the thing is, we need your help!

OpenOffice.org urges Dell's CEO to respond to customer demand and bundle OpenOffice.org's free software alternative to Microsoft Office with Dell's computers

I have used BigBrother and Nagios for a long time to troubleshoot network problems, and I was happy with them -- until Zabbix came along. Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for servers, network services, and network devices. It's easier to use and provides more functionality than Nagios or BigBrother.

No one would buy a car with the hood welded shut, but that is essentially what commercial software is. However, since computing began, some software has been distributed in such a way that users can change or repair it by modifying its source code--the step-by-step instructions that the computer executes when the software runs. Software distributed under a license that allows a programmer to modify the source code and freely distribute an improved version of it is called open source.

Vyatta is shipping version 2.0 of its dual-licensed, Debian Linux-based router distribution. Vyatta Subscription Edition 2.0 (VS2), optionally available with Dell hardware, aims to enable hosting facilities, Internet service providers, and enterprises to replace pricey proprietary router hardware with commodity PCs.

My first planel for South by Southwest was titled, "Open Source: Tell Me Why I Care." Four advocates discussed the reasons for using open source. Pleasantly, there was almost no Microsoft-bashing, and only a little discussion of using open source because it's socially the right thing to do. "One of the myths that keeps people away from open source is that it smells a little bit like patchouli," said one audience participant. Instead, the panel offiered hard-headed, practical reasons why using open source makes sense. The arguments will be pretty familiar to open source advocates, but they'll be compelling to anyone who's sitting on the fence, currently committed to proprietary software and worried about the risks of using open source.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Oxygen iconset is moved from playground to kdelibs, changes made throughout KDE to support the new icon names specification. The Crystal iconset is moved from kdelibs to its kdeartwork retirement home. More work on the Oxygen widget style. Security fixes in KTorrent. Initial work on "uninstall" functionality for the KDE Windows installation utility. New "Snowish" theme for the Kamion user information migration utility. Continued graphics improvements across kdegames. Improved wireless network encryption support in Solid. Further work on the Amarok 2.0 porting, with particular attention to the Music Store integration elements. KPilot is to make a surprise return for the KDE 4.0 release.

"One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. This milestone touts rewritten DVD video ripping and a refocused interface design. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors."

A branch of the Free Software Foundation known as DefectiveByDesign launched an online petition last week that calls on Apple CEO Steve Jobs to "set the ethical example" by eliminating DRM from iTunes. The petition, a response to an open letter on digital rights management Jobs wrote in February, reached its initial goal of one thousand signatures about five hours after going live.

To help protect against incorrect edits, another feature of a wiki is robust change control mechanics and auditing. This would not only include naming who changed, added or deleted what from a particular page, but often a means by which to get a change history of an article, or retrieve earlier versions of it for reviewing purposes.