Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Thanks to Fluendo, Linux and Solaris users on a variety of processor architectures can now purchase playback support for patent-encumbered audio and video formats. Similar support from free alternatives, whether they rely on copying Windows DLLs or use original code, all violate existing patent law. The mere existence of Fluendo's plugins needles a bevy of critics, but Fluendo is prepared to answer them all. And in an ironic twist, sales of these decoders for non-free formats are funding the development of free alternatives.

Last week, we learned some fun ways to mess with the minds of wireless freeloaders, and introduced ourselves to some methods for finding out who is on our networks. Today we're going to learn some different ways to kick unwanted visitors off networks, and how to see exactly who is lurking on our airwaves.

When you read source code, often you need to look for definitions of functions, classes, or other objects. Editors such as Emacs and Vim help you browse the code by supporting the concept of tags. You can think of tags as labels that can be jumped to.

MySQL is a database that is synonymous with ease-of-use, and most database-driven Web applications use it as their database of choice. Because of this, MySQL is used on many Web servers. While the MySQL command line tool is useful, unless you know all the ins and outs of SQL syntax, it can be time-consuming to get things done. It is for this reason that tools like phpMyAdmin have become so popular.

ActiveState Software Inc. has shipped Komodo IDE 4.0, the first unified workspace for end-to-end development of dynamic web applications.

I recently was contacted by a major Unix reseller. The company had a very simple question: with the writing on the wall for Unix growing bigger and bigger with every quarter, which Linux should they adopt?

Organisers of the recent World Social Forum, which runs parallel to the World Economic Forum, banned Microsoft software from the forum, labelling the Redmond giant an imperialist.

A call for participation was announced this week for "Ubuntu Live," billed by organizers as the first "official" conference dedicated to Ubuntu Linux. The event, set for July 22-24 in Portland, Ore., aims to give participants the knowledge needed to use Ubuntu to best advantage, organizers said.

With the stage set and the players in, the show has just got underway in New Delhi. LinuxAsia 2007 has been kicked off in style at the India Habitat Centre in the city. With a lot of 'Open' action in store, the three-day event, scheduled from 31 January to 2 February 2007, is where you are going to find the biggest of the names in the industry deliberating on the future course of action for the open source movement.

Since not all of the development for KDE 4 is in base technologies, this week features two of applications from the KDE-Edu team: Kalzium, a feature-filled chemistry reference tool, and KmPlot, a powerful equation graphing and visualization program. Read on for the details. These educational tools have received a lot of work for KDE 4. In particular, Kalzium and KmPlot developments are happening at an amazing rate.

The CSIR's Meraka institute is expected to become the new South African Linux Professional Institute affiliate now that the Shuttleworth Foundation has ended its relationship with the LPI.

The domain name system (DNS) maps human-understandable Web site addresses into numeric IP addresses. Launched in July 2006, OpenDNS adds a few free services on top of the traditional DNS to block phishing Web sites and auto-correct common misspelled URLs. And thanks to some clever traffic routing and load-balancing technology, OpenDNS can also deliver Web pages faster.

Project maintainer Ken VanDine on Jan. 28 announced the release of Foresight Linux 1.0, the first stable release of the rPath-based desktop Linux distribution after nearly two years of development. It sports a new 2.6.19.2 kernel and the GNOME desktop environment.

The X Window System is, in some sense, the kernel of our graphical desktop systems; it controls access to the hardware and ensures that applications play well together. So the capabilities provided by X matter, and that importance can only increase as free software developers work toward the creation of more complete and compelling desktop experiences. Keith Packard gave a couple of talks at linux.conf.au in Sydney on where X is going; your editor had no choice but to be there and listen.

Matt Asay just posted an excellent note connecting Open source and William James. James noted: "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas." Matt argues that that is why he likes open source -- because it works. I can't agree more.

At the Paris Solutions Linux show on Jan. 30, PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe's second-largest automobile manufacturer, and Novell announced the signing of a multiyear contract for the deployment of up to 20,000 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop installations plus 2,500 copies of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The Season of Usability, run by the OpenUsability project has kicked off with two KDE applications in the focus: BasKet Note Pads and the KDE 4 universal document viewer Okular. Usability, as one of the important focus points of the upcoming fourth major version of KDE, is also an active part of the KDE project. The Season of Usability manifests KDE's close involvement with OpenUsability.

LXer Feature: 31-Jan-2007

With KDE porting their applications to Mac and Windows the potential number of people using free software is unlimited. Imagine millions of people using Open Source Software for the first time..and getting hooked on it.

Last week, Motorola and five other cell phone manufacturers announced the official launch of the LiMo Foundation, a "global mobile Linux initiative." The foundation will work off mobile Linux in a private collaborative development environment that has its roots in open source, but isn't quite.

Mandriva, which introduced Mandriva One 2007 last October, has just released a live CD version of it, complete with a 3D desktop environment. Mandriva 2007, based on a 2.6.17 Linux kernel, uses KDE as a default desktop but also supports both the GNOME and Xfce environments.