Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Podcatchers, the programs that download and aggregate your favorite podcasts, are popular on all platforms. Many are available for Linux, including iPodder and Podget. But the truth is that you don't need all that fancy stuff to harvest podcasts with Linux. BashPodder is a quick CLI-based GPLed podcatching client. It's one of the oldest ones out there, and may still be the best. It's hands-on, no-frills -- and a perfect example of how a few command-line statements can work together to do a powerful job.

The official Netscape Blog has announced that Netscape 9 is under development. Like the current Netscape Browser 8, this release will presumably be based on Mozilla Firefox. According to the announcement, Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser (lacking components like a mail client or Web page editor) and will have tight integration with the Netscape.com website, which was relaunched as a Digg-style user-driven news and current events portal last year. A subsequent post revealed that Netscape 9 will be released simultaneously for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Netscape Browser 8 is only available for Windows.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work begins on Amarok 2.0. KBlackBox becomes the latest games application to take the step into the scalable graphics arena. KTTT, a tic-tac-toe game, is ported to KDE 4. Further progress made on the knewstuff2 framework. Software RAID monitoring, along with other improvements in KSysGuard. Mailody gets support for printing HTML emails. Improved support for custom emoticons in Kopete. The sublime-integration user interface branch is merged back into the main KDevelop source tree..

Fully updated introduction to networking on Linux now covers firewalls, including the use of ipchains and iptables (netfilter), masquerading, and accounting. Other new topics include Novell (NCP/IPX) support and INN (news administration). Original material on serial connections, UUCP, routing and DNS, mail and News, SLIP and PPP, NFS, and NIS has been thoroughly updated.

Tech-heads yearning for Google to challenge Microsoft's domination of the desktop shouldn't hold their breaths, says Chris DiBona, the search giant's open source program manager.

Freeware on trial is a software consultancy service with the objective of making the user aware about available free software products and internet services. The team of consultants at freeware on trial write quality influential articles. They decipher truth from myth when it comes to developers and publishers claims about their goods. While there are quality product creators who try to make a living out of what they do best, often there are those who don't charge for their goods, or offer free versions of their products.

Encourages Development and Distribution of Thousands of Web and Desktop Widgets Enabling Myriad Applications

Inland Revenue has eschewed Microsoft Vista and will instead upgrade to Windows XP, while continuing to evaluate the merits of a switch to open source rival Linux.

Prospective leaders should be familiar with the constitution, but, just to review: there's a three week period when interested developers nominate themselves, followed by a three week period with no nominations [intended for campaigning], followed by three weeks for the election itself.

There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

Lisp is one of the oldest and best-loved programming languages around, but it gets relatively little attention from programmers despite its flexibility and power. Now the organisers of the 2007 International Lisp Conference hope to raise the language’s profile by inviting entries for their latest programming contest.

In September 1991, when Linux Torvalds (sic), a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, released 10,000 lines of code on the Internet, nobody could have believed that it would spark off a revolution.

[I know what your thinking, but at least they are writing and talking about it. - Scott]

Companies may want a solid, for-profit vendor providing support when they embrace an open source project. One shortcut to checking on a support company's qualifications is to find how many of a project's core developers, the ones who commit code to the code base, are employed by the support firm. But the history of support for the PostgreSQL database offers a cautionary tale.

A hacker using the pseudonym Xoron (real name Mehmet Ince) has disclosed on mailing lists that there are such vulnerabilities in Omegaboard, Cerulean Portal System, phpBB Tweaked, Hailboards, EclipseBB and Xero Portal. Exploits are available for some forum systems that could permit an attacker to remotely upload and execute arbitrary malicious code on affected systems.

How could Gutenberg and Caxton have known that the invention of the printing press would be a massive force for the democratisation of knowledge and central to the transformation of a feudal society into the beginnings of a recognisably modern world via the Renaissance and the Reformation? The ability of printing presses to produce a massive volume of information, especially on religion and science, helped to break the elitist monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church.

H&R Block wanted a flexible, easy- to-use document management system to capture clients' tax documents and move them digitally to its tax preparers' offices. It considered commercial products, such as FileNet and Documentum. But H&R Block CIO Marc West eventually directed the team to focus on open source options, since the cost of putting commercial options in 13,000 fields offices wouldn't fly.

IBM has published the following new technical articles, tutorials, and downloads on its DeveloperWorks and AlphaWorks websites. They cover a range of interesting (though not necessarily embedded) technical topics, primarily related to Linux and open source system development. Some require free registration.

Mac owners and Linux users hoping to run Windows Vista using virtual machine software had better own the Business or Ultimate editions of the new operating system, according to Microsoft's licensing terms. The end-user license agreements governing both the Home Basic and Home Premium editions of the OS specifically forbid users from booting the software "within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system." The blanket prohibitions don't apply to the higher-end editions of Windows Vista.

The KDE Project this week released version 3.5.6, a maintenance update to the popular free desktop for Linux and UNIX. KDE now supports 65 languages, making it available to more people than most non-free software.

A new open source advocacy group, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), is scheduled to debut February 15 at the upcoming LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York. But unlike most open source software launches and even open source association beginnings, OSA founders are unwilling to be quoted by name about their plans before their formal launch. Instead, they are only speaking to media representatives grudgingly, "on background," without attribution. The reason for this, says an OSA insider Linux.com interviewed by telephone on Friday, February 3, is that they "don't want to ruffle feathers of people we're still talking to about joining."