Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Microsoft is applying for a patent for an operating system that starts out crippled. You must pay to do things like take the throttle off network speed, disk access, install drivers, install software, and more. Trust me, I rarely even visit Groklaw, even if this is my second consecutive blog entry with a link to a Groklaw article. MyVarLinux.org readers posted the article,A Brave New Modular World, and I had to share it.

Set to launch in June, Jazz aims to modernize development tools for programming teams that are geographically spread out.

Welcome to this year's 2nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Anthony Towns was interviewed by Liz Tay onwhether Dunc Tank was a failure or success. Joey Schulze reported that the alpha port has caught up and is fitter than before since it now has two working build daemon.

Elive is a live CD Linux distribution based on Debian that uses the Enlightenment window manager. Elive aims to provide an aesthetically pleasing environment with a full suite of desktop applications that runs efficiently on older systems. Its developers aren't finished yet, but they've come a long way with Elive since the release of 0.3 more than a year ago. This CD shows how beautiful distributions can become without being bloated.

Development manager Adrian Schroeter on Jan. 29 announced the release of a live DVD edition of openSUSE 10.2, featuring a spiffy new 2.6.20-rc4 kernel plus the latest KDE, GNOME, and Xfce desktop environments.

Open source database vendor MySQL AB is preparing itself for an initial public offering, and could even be ready to go public before the end of the year, according to its CEO Marten Mickos.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could access your Writer documents from any computer connected to the Internet and work with them as if they were on your local machine -- especially if this could be done transparently with just a couple of mouse clicks? To be able to do this, you don't have to install a full-blown document management solution or use a third-party file storage service. All you need is an FTP server and an OOo Basic macro.

Most server administrators know that the MySQL relational data base management system (RDBMS) is a highly flexible piece of software and comes with a wide range of startup options that can be used to modify its behavior. What most don't know, however, is that the standard MySQL client comes with an equally large number of startup options, some of which are extremely useful in daily MySQL interaction. While these options are not "secret" per se, they remain largely unused, even though they can significantly ease the process of server interaction.

As long as there has been the Internet, there have been tools to help keep it running well. More times than not, those tools are the ones associated with Linux. Much of web development is based upon the system of LAMP development, which consists of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This system makes up better than two-thirds of all Internet servers.

Despite being distributed across the globe, and communications being largely conducted online, open source projects can benefit immensely from direct human contact, says one of the fathers of Debian Linux.

At next week's RSA Conference in San Francisco, the open source Bandit and Eclipse Higgins projects will demonstrate their latest development: a reference application that showcases open source identity services that interoperate with the Microsoft Windows CardSpace identity management system, which ships with the Vista operating system.

Jens Axboe has been involved with Linux since 1993. 30 years old, he lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, and works as a Linux Kernel developer for Oracle. His block layer rewrite launched the 2.5 kernel development branch, a layer he continues to maintain and improve. Interested in most anything dealing with IO, he has introduced several new IO schedulers to the kernel, including the default CFQ, or Complete Fair Queuing scheduler.

It's been five years since Drupal, the popular GPLed Web development framework, has had a major version release. The new Drupal 5, which debuted in earlier this month, was eight months in development and incorporates more than 1,000 patches from nearly half as many contributors. It also features overhauls and updates in system performance, usability, user interface, and theming.

3Com Corp. today unveiled a new open-source approach to its networking products centered on a Linux-based module that fits into its Router 6000 family and will support multivendor applications for security, voice over IP and other functions. The strategy, called Open Service Networking (OSN), will allow service providers and integrators to create customized services for business users, said Andrew Bronson, product manager for OSN routers at 3Com.

Last summer, I wrote aboutlocal Ruby events and theRubyConf*MI event that was (at that time) just announced. Since then, I've taken some time to write about regional conferences, and to encourage people to check out theRuby Central grant program.

"The Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development," Greg Kroah-Hartman posted in an open offer on the lkml, for all types of devices"from USB toys to PCI video devices to high-speed networking cards." He explains,"all that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if necessary, that can be done." He added,"if your company is worried about NDA issues surrounding your device's specifications, we have arranged a program with OSDL/TLF's Tech Board to provide the legal framework where a company can interact with a member of the kernel community in order to properly assure that all needed NDA requirements are fulfilled."

South Africa will not be host to Linuxworld this year, or possibly ever again, after conference organisers Exhibitions for Africa cancelled the show citing high licensing costs.

Denx Software Engineering has updated its free embedded Linux distribution and development tool suite. "Embedded Linux Development Kit" (ELDK) Release 4.1 is based on a 2.6.19.2 Linux kernel and Denx's freely licensed U-Boot 1.2 bootloader, and features support for the Xenomai 2.3 real-time extensions.

Want some frustration? Buy a piece of hardware with “Linux support” and try to use it on anything besides x86 GNU/Linux. If you’re fortunate enough to choose a device for which there exists free drivers, you’ll have much more luck. Often, recompiling is all that’s necessary–and if you use a modern distribution, you may not even have to compile it yourself.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Apache primary developer Brian Behlendorf and Creative Commons' Lawrence Lessig will head the list of speakers at the first Digital Freedom Expo to be held at UWC in April.