Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LXer Feature: 14-Jan-2007

An Interview with Kenneth Hensley, the creator of the "Unofficial PuppyLinux Guide".

The search abilities of Web sites like Google and Wikipedia have given ordinary citizens intelligence-gathering capabilities that in some ways rival those of clandestine government agencies. The power of wikis and search engines lie in the massively collaborative effort that the technologies enable.

Mozilla Firefox has a Herculean following; I am sure, no would differ. Once you get your hands on something like that it's only human to feel wanting for more. No wonder, everyone is all game to accessorize their firefox. In the last feature, we glanced at some of the extensions for the same. Today's yet another mix-bag of extensions combining your feedback, suggestions, and our research.

Serbian government has announced that it will sign a letter of intent with one of the top open source software companies.

Rapid growth of COSS reflects the expansion of open source based business. In two years COSS has evolved into an international network of 100 organisations. In terms of active involvement of companies COSS is the leading European open source centre. COSS has attracted main Finnish and international OSS players and smaller innovative companies to join forces in order to improve the business ecosystem. The COSS members include major international companies such as Nokia, Novell, IBM, HP as well as Finnish open source companies such as Plenware, Nomovok, Movial, and Flander.

..Through the certified ethical hacker certification, it arms the system administrator with the critical information to identify, counter and defend the corporate network against harmful agents or intrusion.

A free port of 3D death match game Quake 2 is on the cards after a programmer married the game's source code with the Iyonix's graphics acceleration. The alpha-quality RISC OS port, produced by Dave Brown, uses the OpenGL-compatible IyonixMesa library - which employs the 3D features in the Castle Iyonix's PCI GeForce graphics cards. Dave uploaded his efforts to the Internet earlier today, complete with source code and a pre-built version using the GCCSDK.

PayPal spokesperson Sara Bettencourt explains that the added security measure will help enhance user protection, although it is "by no means a silver bullet that is going to stop fraud." The introduction of the new security system by PayPal highlights the growing concern about data-phishing scams that have surfaced as a problem for PayPal users.

[Looks like you are not alone Darren - Scott]

Who needs Internet Explorer 7 when you can just wait for Internet Explorer 8? According to ActiveWin, Microsoft has already been working diligently on Internet Explorer 7's successor, and there are no plans for the team to stop for a service pack. The Internet Explorer development team will supposedly have the next version ready to go out the door within the next two years.

Predictions, as they say, are hard - especially when they involve the future. It's easy to get them wrong and look like a total fool. Your editor, however, has long since gotten over his fear of coming across as a total idiot in front of large numbers of people; when you have already tipped your hand, there is no point in holding back any longer. So here's a few things which, in your editor's view, might just come to pass in 2007. As always, these predictions come with no warranty whatsoever.

Contract for water utility project down the drain, Philadelphia officials have neutered an agreement to use software custom built by Oracle for the city's antiquated water utility billing system.

This entry is a little off my regular beat, but its substance is of great importance to all users of Linux audio software. To get straight to the point, it's about money and two projects in real need of significant financial support, theArdour hard disk recorder/digital audio workstation and theHydrogen rhythm programmer/drum machine. Both projects are well along in their development cycles, both have achieved great status not only in the Linux audio software world but on OSX as well, and both need financing for their planned evolution. Ardour and Hydrogen are two of Linux's finest programs for musicians, rivalling their commercial counterparts and providing libre alternatives to the intense vendor lock-in typical of the Win/Mac sound and music software worlds. These are truly important projects, and they deserve your support and financial backing.

Rumors have been rampant in recent days that Fleury had decided to quit Red Hat. The Linux software developer bought JBoss, which was based in Atlanta, last year for $350 million. JBoss, a developer of middleware, operates as a Red Hat subsidiary. Fleury reports directly to Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s chairman and chief executive officer. His title is senior vice president and general manager of the JBoss division.

Can I be honest with you? The Linux desktop isn't always the right desktop. It is the right one for me 99 percent of the time, but even for me, there are times when I turn to another desktop. Still, for me, Linux is head and shoulders above any variety of Windows, and still a head above Mac OS X. For others, though, it's a different story. One such story is told by a gentleman named Andy in our articles section.

Oracle recently issued the first upgrade to its free SQL Developer tool, a step it hopes will win further adherents to its easiest-to-use tool. Last March, Oracle supplemented its command line tools with the new offering to introduce a more graphical environment for developing Oracle applications.

A mobile device design specialist in Bangalore, India has announced one of the first hardware reference designs based on Freescale's currently-sampling i.MX27 processor. IWave's "iW-Rainbow-G3" design supports Linux 2.6, and targets video-centric mobile devices such as hard drive-equipped, D1-capable portable media players.

The book begins with several chapters about creating, using and managing a relational database. Westman focuses on using the open source database software MySQL, although he discusses using PostgreSQL as an alternative. For those with database experience -- even a library catalog database -- this won't be totally foreign. Many tables and drawings in the book illustrate the MySQL database structure.

Avi Kivity suggested that combining KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine, with the dyntick patch could improve overall KVM performance. He noted that it would likely improve performance of both the host by"avoiding expensive vmexits due to useless timer interrupts," as well as on the guest by"reducing the load on the host when the guest is idling (currently an idle guest consumes a few percent cpu)". Ingo Molnar pointed out that KVM with his -rt kernel already works with dynticks enabled on both the host and the guest,"using the dynticks code from the -rt kernel makes the overhead of an idle guest go down by a factor of 10-15". Ingo added that he hopes the dyntick patch will be ready to be merged into the upcoming mainline 2.6.21 kernel.

Competition between Yahoo and its competitors has been pretty fierce at times, and any number of onlookers have compared it to a war or a fight. Now it appears as if Yahoo has thrown the cyber equivalent of a "low blow": The company may be trying to trick users into abandoning Firefox and Google.

Two talkfests for your diary, Here's a long range heads-up on a couple of conferences that should tickle the interest of many developers.