Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Following its installation, Ubuntu is rife with potential but lacks a number of highly desirable Linux applications. An informative online article gives step-by-step instructions on how to use Automatix2 to install Skype, Opera, the Macromedia Flash plugin for Firefox, Google Earth, Picasa, VMware Player, Adobe Reader, DVD support, and more.

Red Hat Magazine - Best of November 2006

Wakey, wakey, let's look at the facts, shall we? I've heard from several people in the last day that Novell's support for Open XML in OpenOffice.org 2 represents a fork in the code. Ah... no, I don't think so. What Novell is actually doing is its throwing its support behind the Open XML/ODF Translator project. This project is under the BSD open-source license. These translators can then be used to read and write to Microsoft's Open XML format.

Mozilla announced today that Firefox browser fans are underwriting four 30-second videos to air on U.S. primetime TV this month. The ads were produced by Firefox fans in response to this year's "Firefox Flicks Video" campaign, which resulted in approximately 300 homemade clips about the browser.

Following the release of the of the 2.6.19 kernel, Andrew Morton offered a list of patches in his -mm tree, summarizing for each his plans as to whether or not they will be pushed to Linus for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.20 kernel. Andrew's summaries were generally terse, often as simple as "shall merge" or "shall hold in -mm". Many patches were noted as having been forwarded on to the appropriate subsystem maintainer for further review. As per the current kernel development model, all major changes to find their way into 2.6.20 should be merged by the time 2.6.20-rc1 is released in mid-December, two weeks after 2.6.19 was released.

European governments have long complained about their dependence on Microsoft's software, but their rhetoric has not turned into a mass migration away from Windows. During the past few years, Europe's elected officials have made a lot of noise about ambitious projects to switch to open source software, including big migrations of government PCs in France, Germany, Spain and Norway.

Inkululeko Technologies will this week make the first public release of tuXlab, a GNU/Linux operating system for schools used by the Shuttleworth Foundation to provide low-cost Linux computer laboratories around South Africa.

Omni Technology and Illinois-based R Cubed Technologies announced they have signed an agreement to distribute Multiplied SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktops in North America. The PCs will come pre-loaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and the Linux Desktop Multiplier, powered by Userful. The Linux Desktop Multiplier allows up to ten users to be connected to a single desktop computer.

LiveCDs are the coolest things since microbrews. (Funny how certain “innovative” proprietary software companies never manage to come up with neat stuff like this.) The latest entry in my Cool LiveCDs List is BeleniX, which is OpenSolaris + KDE and XFCE. Solaris can be a bit of a booger to install. BeleniX lets you try it out without installing it to a hard drive, and it also comes with a nice utility for a hard drive installation. Solaris has a lot of advanced stuff you don’t find anywhere else, like DTrace and the ZFS filesystem. This here article which I wrote my own self, and now shamelessly tout, has some good links for getting up and running: Tip of the Trade: BeleniX

After seven years of work, the LinuxBIOS project is on the brink of making a free BIOS a standard option for computers. Serious obstacles remain, including a lack of resources and resistance from some proprietary chipset manufacturers and OEMs, but the advantages of LinuxBIOS indicate that its availability to the average computer buyer may be only months away.

NetBeans Community offers Developers Tools Designed to Fuel the Build Out of Next Generation Web Applications and Integrated Support For Building Native Applications

Cooperation Aimed at Driving Open Source Adoption.

After testing Kubuntu on an office machine Ian Gilfillan takes the next step and installs the latest version, Edgy Eft, on his laptop. Despite a couple of hardware obstacles, he is impressed by the result.

erracotta is planning to open source its Java Virtual Machine (JVM) clustering software. Open source software companies like Spring, Geronimo, Tomcat and others support this move. “Terracotta’s move will have a positive impact on the Java open source community,” said Jeff Genender, CTO and chief architect of Savoir Technologies and active committer and Project Management Committee (PMC) member for Apache Geronimo.

Red Hat announced that European Open Source deployment specialist, Sirius Corporation, has become a Red Hat Advanced Partner. By partnering with Sirius Corporation, Red Hat is further extending its outreach to organisations looking to implement integrated, enterprise-class Open Source solutions. Sirius Corporation brings with it a reputation as a top-tier Open Source implementation specialist, responsible for some of the largest and most complex deployments of Open Source technologies in the UK.

Novell, Inc. has announced preliminary financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year ended Oct. 31, 2006. These financial results are preliminary because Novell, during the third fiscal quarter, began a self- initiated, voluntary review of the company's historical stock-based compensation practices and related potential accounting impact.

It is difficult to find a better case of bad timing than Novell's announcement this week that it would be implementing support for Microsoft's OpenXML format in its (Novell's) version of OpenOffice.org.

Aplix Corporation announced today it has formed a strategic alliance with MontaVista Software Inc. to integrate MontaVista's Mobilinux products with its middleware framework on Mobile Linux. Also, Aplix made an equity investment in MontaVista Software.

Two weeks ago I wrote a letter protesting Novell's patent agreement with Microsoft and made it available for other people to sign. I expected 200-300 signatures for this rather technical matter about patents and licensing, but there are 2700 signatures as I write this, and the number keeps increasing. Many of the signers attached notes directed at Novell, filled with emotion. Obviously, the Free Software community feels very strongly about this issue.

Getting Things Done is a set of practices for making people more effective in work and life. If you are looking for a task manager based on the GTD system, you have several to choose from: MonkeyGTD, ThinkingRock, d3, and even GTDGmail. These are all fine applications, but if you need something more lightweight and user-friendly, take a closer look at TaskStep, a personal task manager that implements some of the essential GTD principles.