Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The "niceness" of a process is a numeric hint to the kernel about how the process should be treated in relation to other processes contending for the CPU. The strange name is derived from the fact that it determines how nice you are going to be to other users of the system. A high nice value means a low priority for your process: you are going to be nice. A low or negative value means high priority: you are not very nice. The range of allowable niceness values is -20 to +19.

I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.

It's not that you can't run WoW (World of Warcraft) on Linux. With the latest CrossOver Office beta, you can do exactly that. Indeed, Lynch found that running World of Warcraft "ran so well that I began to get distracted from writing this review and started to get sucked into the world of Azeroth. I kept playing and didn't even realize that I was running WoW in a window on my KDE desktop in PCLinuxOS."

Ninety-five percent of cable television subscribers watch The Weather Channel, and TWC's Weather.com Web site, which provides current local weather information to every city in the United States, draws more than 30 million visitors each month. TWC's customers are local cable television facilities and individual Web site users. To manage those customers effectively, TWC chose an open source customer relationship management (CRM) application called Centric.

Hoping to level the playing field with Microsoft SharePoint and perhaps make a little open source cheddar, Dutch software outfit O3 is releasing its O3Spaces back office suite for OpenOffice and StarOffice. While it is far from offering all of the features of SharePoint (MOSS) 2007, it is definitely something that that open source and hybrid Microsoft/open source shops should consider for document management.

While the vast majority of recent Mac modifications have dealt with the headless Mac Mini, the Toolman decided to go a different route with his gutted 17-inch Apple Studio Display. As with most mods, he simply had too many enticing parts lying around without a proper home, and chose to combine them using whatever it took, resulting in a Mac-ish clone at worst, and a sweet all-in-one computer at best.

The Asian Institute of Technology will soon be home to an open source centre of excellence for "Linux on the Desktop" following the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations University. This will be the first centre of excellence of its kind funded by the UNU outside of Greater China.

ARM is now the third most popular architecture among Debian Linux users who run "popularity-contest," a Debian utility that anonymously collects user system data. ARM rose from seventh to third in nine months, largely thanks to Linksys's NSLU2, says NSLU2-Linux project lead Rod Whitby.

According to Unisys experts, 2007 will be the year that open source software attains the architectural backing and distribution channels needed to gain acceptance from enterprise customers as a front-rank vehicle for deploying enterprise applications to drive business growth and innovation at a lower cost per transaction.

Chinese government-owned TEM (telecommunications equipment manufacturer) and handset vendor Datang Mobile has joined the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and will participate in the Mobile Linux Initiative (MLI) to improve the Linux kernel for mobile phones. Datang markets 3G infrastructure equipment and handset designs in China and globally.

The stable Flash Player plugin for Linux is crusty old version 7 -- trailing more than two calendar years, two major revisions, and one corporate buyout behind the Windows and Mac offerings. But now Adobe has finally unveiled a beta release of Flash Player 9 for Linux. Was it worth the wait? And should you install it now, or hold off a little longer for the official, stable product instead?

The One Laptop Per Child project yesterday received its first shipment of the low-cost Linux laptops that are intended for children in emerging-economy nations, project member Chris Blizzard reports on his blog.

Nominations close at the end of November for the first South African E-Commerce Awards. Members of the public are invited to nominate their favourite South African e-commerce websites.

Motorola is shipping the first model in its Scpl ("scalpel") line of Linux-based phones set to replace the ubiquitous Razr. The Motofone F3, available today in India, is an extremely low-end phone featuring an "electronic paper" display, breakthrough battery life, and usability features for the illiterate.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds proclaimed, "friends don't let friends use '-W'," in a thread discussing GCC's handling of warnings.

Translate.org.za scooped up the African ICT Achiever 2006 Award for "Top civil society/NGO to bridge the digital divide in Africa" for their work in overcoming South Africa's languages barriers.

SCALE, (Southern California Linux Exposition) has recently released acall for papers for its healthcare day. Generally we are interested in seeing solid presentations of the application of Free and Open Source Software to the healthcare environment. If you are doing something innovative that the world needs to know about, this is your opportunity! Read on for more information regarding the type of topics that would be welcome!Fred Trotter

Murphy's Law dictates that you can always count on Bad Things happening. That probably explains why the software world has so many different recovery utilities for accidentally (or purposely) deleted files. These vary in ease of use, though typically "easy" is not a word that applies. Except for a pair of excellent data recovery tools, TestDisk and PhotoRec. (That's "rec" as in "recovery," not "wreck".)

Samba is an open source project that allows Windows users to connect to a Linux server from which to share data. If you are looking for a simple, affordable home file server, or need more disk space on your office network, a Linux server with Samba is the way to go. Linux along with Samba offers a stable, secure environment that is available at no cost, along with features such as remote administration, immunity to Windows viruses, and the ability to run on low-end machines. Here's how you can set up a simple Samba server on Slackware for SOHO use.

LXer Feature: 29-Nov-2006

Recently, LXer asked you: Which Linux distribution is the best? SuSE Linux came along several times. I have tried to work with SuSE Linux, but I only had bad experiences. Nonetheless, I'm not sure if it's SuSE / Novell who I should blame, there are more factors. I am only an amateur / hobbyist, so I could be the one to blame. On the other hand, I have experience with Open/Net/FreeBSD, Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu, Knoppix, a lot of it with Gentoo, and I hold an LPIC 1, so you can't say I don't have experience. I don't know anyone else in my neighbourhood who's good with SuSE, so there's no hands-on support. Moreover, I ran Suse on Microsoft Virtual PC (R), so we could also blame Microsoft (as usual). Or didn't I try hard enough? Fact is, I am dissastified with SuSE to such a level, I won't use it for the coming few months probably.