Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

VectorLinux, a lightweight, fast Linux distribution for the x86 platform, just released its new version 5.8 this week. This user-friendly distribution makes the average computer user's life easy by supplying office software, Web browsing, photo editing, and archiving on top of a fast, clean Xfce window manager.

Virtualisation software specialist VMware has posted a pre-release version of 'Fusion', the Mac version of its desktop virtualisation software. The public availability of the beta release was accompanied by VMware competitor Parallels' posting of a update to its own Mac virtualisation tool.

Red Hat shares jumped more than 12 percent in after-hours trading Thursday after the Linux distributor posted financial results that topped analysts’ estimates. Excluding one-time items, the company posted a profit of $29.6 million, or $0.14 per share, compared to $22.7 million in the year-ago quarter after adjusting for stock compensation and tax expenses. Analysts polled on Thomson Financial estimated the software company would report earnings per share of $0.12 and revenues of $104.16 million versus $73.11 million in the year-ago quarter.

Bitsim is shipping an evaluation and development board that targets 2D graphics-intensive embedded applications, such as instrumentation and gaming devices. The "Badger" board is based on an ARM9 processor and Altera Cyclone II FPGA (field-programmable gate array), and apparently is accelerated by Bitsim's "Badge" softcore processor.

Genealogy is a burgeoning hobby and to help the home genealogist, a whole range of software is available. Much of it is commercial but here I’ll look at one of the most popular free software options—GRAMPS. Charting your family history needn’t mean compromising on licensing.

Running a Microsoft Windows NT server these days is a brave (or, perhaps, stupid) thing to do: Support for the product has finished, and as far as Microsoft is concerned, the product should be put in a rest home for retired software. Windows Server 2000 is also getting long in the tooth, and in a few years it too will reach the end of its support lifecycle and be looking for its rocking chair and slippers.

Neuros Audio's tiny Linux-based DVR (digital video recorder) has lots of potential, if community enthusiasm continues, according to a review at LinuxLookup.com. The "Open Source Device" (OSD) is already capable enough for users simply wishing to record or transcode TV for playback on hand-held devices, the reviewer says.

As 2006 winds to a close, the editors of LinuxDevices.com have assembled a retrospective aimed at highlighting major trends and events in the world of embedded Linux. Of the approximately 1,200 stories we published this year, these were the most important, in our opinion.

Linux seller's net income drops, but revenue rises; executives say competition from Oracle hasn't taken customers away.

"There is no doubt in my mind, that ASP.NET is the most powerful and versatile platform for web applications at the moment."

[I am in the process of learning how to use ASP.NET at work, so far just getting the .NET framework downloaded and other dependent software in order to run it has been the challenge. I'll let you know how it goes - Scott]

The project team for Linux Mint, one of the first "customized" Ubuntu distributions, this week released its 2.1 version, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, the GNOME desktop environment, and an expanded set of browser plugins and multimedia tools.

A group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service has developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run.

BadVista is the latest in a series of activist campaigns launched by the Free Software Foundation (FSF)in the last eight months. It follows the highly successfulDefective By Designcampaign against so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, and an unnamed effort to encourage the activist media to make free software part of their agenda. Released on December 15, the campaign currently takes the form of a blog site coordinated by John Sullivan, a program administrator at the FSF. The site features a logo with its name over a quartered flag reminiscent of the Windows logo, but in black and with what appears to be a skull in one corner. So far, the contents is mostly the announcement of the site, an explanation of its purpose, and a news aggregate about the problems and limitations of Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Everybody knows that the media world is undergoing extraordinary changes from the digitization of content and the growth of digital platforms like the Internet. Predicting who will win and who will lose in this transformation has been both a parlor game and a game of high-stakes finance for everyone involved. While there has been lots of speculation as to what might happen to different companies, what hasn't been talked about as much is, what will happen to media industry people?

Many small businesses have avoided Linux for a variety of reasons: not enough applications, complexity of installation or that it requires too much technical know-how to run. The technology has matured over many years, which raises the question: how valid are these considerations today? Drew Robb reports.

Alek Komarnitsky's controllable Christmas lights started out as a hoax, but now Komarnitsky is using Linux to power the controllable Christmas lights for real in order to bring attention to celiac disease.

Just as the year in open source was cruising to a finish in 2006 -- all gussied up in a neat bow for the year, November arrived with a splash to re-draw the whole map.

After four successful years of revolutionizing how content is shared in the real world, Lawrence Lessig, founding chairman of Creative Commons, announced his retirement as chairman of the board last week. Lessig passed the CC torch to Joi Ito, a venture capitalist from Japan.

David Nielsen has started a pledge drive to fund nouveau development. (nouveau is a project to produce complete and free open source drivers for NVidia video cards.) This pledge drive does not have the official support of the nouveau developers, but what a wonderful idea to be able to present them with $10,000 to support their work! If you would like to use the hardware you’ve already paid for under terms that respect your freedom and choice, consider pledging $10 to this effort. (I’ll discuss the pragmatics and politics of free drivers more in a subsequent weblog soon.)

Small businesses with small budgets can save a lot of money by deploying open-source software — at least in theory. The Linux operating system and office productivity software such as OpenOffice can be downloaded free. That sounds a lot better than paying $200 (£101.49) for each system's OS and $300-500 more for an Office suite.