Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Linux distributions are known for evolving quickly, but it looks like MEPIS is trying to set a new speed record. Yesterday, MEPIS announced the release of the feature-complete RC1 (release candidate) of SimplyMEPIS 6.5.

It seems to be a trend among some proprietary software vendors: attacking open source with lies. The latest appears in this week's Network World's Face-off, which features a slop-bucket full of self-serving hogwash by Ipswitch's Roger Greene entitled "Don't trust your network to open source."

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.

The Free Software Foundation has begun an online petition urging Apple chief executive Steve Jobs to remove protections from the iTunes Music Store. "As the largest purveyor of digital rights management [DRM] protected music, Apple carries a large part of the responsibility for the situation in which consumers now find themselves," the petition reads.

Mandriva has announced the launch of the beta program of Corporate Desktop 4.0, the brand new version of its enterprise-dedicated work station, which it punts as ergonomic, secure, comprehensive, easy to use and easy to administer.

Bug stamp-out list for March 9, 2007

Sun launches products for web infrastructure on Solaris 10. Sun Microsystems has announced a new set of products and services targeting developers, startups, and internet companies seeking to build and deploy their web infrastructure on Solaris 10.

ATI released their latest Linux drivers toward the end of February..

When you start learning the source code of an unfamiliar project, you don't have the knowledge of its structure or the meaning of specific functions, classes, and units in the project. You can use tags to browse for definitions, but it's hard to get an overall picture by just looking through every definition one by one. Cscope and SilentBob are two tools that can help you analyze unfamiliar source code. They help you find symbol definitions, determine where specific functions are used, determine which functions are called by other given functions, and search for strings and patterns throughout the code base. With them, you can save time by doing fast, targeted searches instead of grepping through source files by hand.

Red Hat Inc. plans to create a Web store to boost sales of its own open-source software and of compatible open-source products from other companies, a person familiar with the plan said on Thursday. The company plans to announce the strategy next week when it releases the first major upgrade in two years to its core Linux-based operating system, according to the source.

If, for whatever reason, you have done some digging on me you will have discovered a dark secret. Well, not quite a secret as I do not hide it, nor is it that dark, more of a information non publiée. I am involved in local politics, and my political party is the Tories. There, I have said it. I have come out of the closet. I have admitted it. I can now wander around the Free Software Magazine pages without hiding my true nature. I am free!

STMicroelectronics (ST) is sampling a pair of configurable SoCs (system-on-chip processors) powered by ARM9 cores and 600K-gate configurable logic blocks. The SPEAr (structured processor enhanced architecture) Head600 and dual-core SPEAr Plus600 run Linux, support DDR/DDR2 external memory, and target printer, fax, and POS (point-of-sales) devices.

A new report from the U.K. Office of Government Commerce about Open Source Software Trials in Government, has found that servers running Linux could combat the rising problem of e-waste because they last up to twice as long as machines running Windows.

In the battle to spread the use of GNU/Linux, it is often forgotten that education has to be the starting point. People need to be educated to the point where they come to demand decent behaviour from an operating system; companies need educated admins to keep GNU/Linux systems running.

If you've ever worked with MySQL databases, you are probably familiar with phpMyAdmin, a PHP-based tool that allows you to create and manage MySQL databases via a browser. It is an indispensable tool for anyone building a PHP/MySQL-based Web application. But while phpMyAdmin eases the task of creating and managing the back end of your Web application, it is of no help when it comes to designing a Web-based interface. To simplify creating PHP-based front ends, try phpMyEdit, an ingenious piece of software that can generate a functional Web interface in a matter of minutes -- no PHP programming skills required. Although phpMyEdit hides the complexity of generating a PHP-based interface, it still offers an easy-to-use yet powerful mechanism to customize virtually any aspect of the created front end.

On March 6, the 1001st Widget was announced by Opera Software. Widgets, which are created by Opera users, are small, powerful Web applications that add unique and useful functionality to Opera's eponymous browser.

Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards.

As of this morning, I found that ssh logins into my Debian etch boxes were monumentally slow. Using the -vvv switch it looked like the problem was down to a very long wait for gssapi-with-mic authentication. Trying with the -o GSSAPIAuthentication=no switch on the command line helped, although some boxes were also pausing for a very long time when dealing with public-key auth.

Tarus Balog and a small group of developers are determined to do for networking management systems what Linux has done for software in general. Open up the field, the OpenNMS crew says, just as the Linux devotees of Linus Torvalds said to the Windows world.

In urban San Francisco, the public works department and nonprofit organizations work together to preserve and expand tree life as part of that city's efforts to create sustainability. The city today unveiled a new Web portal and open source application that will help those agencies, and the general public, keep tabs on a growing urban forest.