Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

DSS, Inc. the leading developer of enhancements to VistA, the VA’s award winning electronic health record, announced it will open source the code for its vxVista® an enhanced version of VistA designed for the commercial market. In this major development, DSS, Inc. has effectively removed the greatest obstacle to collaboration in the VistA community by providing their enhanced version of VistA under a commercially friendly open source license that can be used to unite the VistA community.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma panels now support "drag-and-drop unhide". More improvements for scripted Plasmoids. "Weather" Plasmoid moves into kdereview for eventual move to extragear for KDE 4.2. Lots of reworking the "HTML Validator" Konqueror plugin. Start of a "BomberMan"-like game using Kapman as a base. New game themes in Bomber and KTron. Further progress on the rewrite of Kolf. Start of an effort to refactor game modules in KGoldrunner. A KIPI plugin to export photos to Facebook from KDE photo applications and much, much more.

My impressions of the Linux operating system are coloured by memories of the first time my computer-whiz friend unveiled his sort-of-new copy of Redhat Linux to me. Upon installing it we were greeted with an unceremonious command console that might as well have been written in the ancient tongue of the long-dead tribe of Gnitth Shhta Star-God worshippers. In the ten or fifteen years since that first Linux install other operating systems have shown up, like XP and OSX, that have mostly pulled my attention away from Linux.But I’ve also heard all the reports about how Linux is different nowadays. Linux still has that indie cred that I experienced all those years ago that makes it seem just a little bit more elite than its competitors, and power-nerds everywhere seem to be cajoling me into trying it. Lucky for them I have an incredibly weak will. So I’ve decided to give in to peer pressure, light me up some Linux, and trip my way through the alternative operating system carnival in the sky.

The lawsuit between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Cisco may be critical in shaping the future of the open source ecosystem, according to legal experts closely watching the saga's next stages. The FSF filed its legal complaint against Cisco last month, alleging that the networking giant violated the terms of the GPL, or General Public License (define). Experts say the lawsuit -- about which both parties have been tight-lipped -- is about more than just about protecting the code-availability tenets of the free software license. Instead, they're weighing the wider impact that a court decision could have on setting legal precedent for GPL compliance and infringement.

Recently I was asked how I get Jabber notification messages when a call is made to my VoIP number and extension. It’s only a few lines of configuration, but worth noting down for future reference. This all applies to Asterisk 1.4, on Debian Lenny

There’s been some discussion lately about promoting Linux as a gaming platform in order to win the struggle against proprietary operating systems. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it meshes well with reality. Here’s why.

A start-up has launched a browser extension aimed at turning the Internet into a friendlier place for kids aged 3-12. Available in free and subscription versions, KidZui's "KidZui" extension is said to provide a captive portal to 1.5 million pre-screened websites. KidZui previously offered its eponymous browser as a standalone application for Macs and PCs. The new browser-based version achieves feature parity, while adding support for Linux and other OS platforms supported by Firefox 3.0.

A Centre for Advanced Training in Free and Open Source Software (CATFOSS) will be opened in Kochi soon. The new centre will be a joint venture of Kerala State IT Mission and Centre for Development of Imaging Technology (C-DIT). It will be opened before 20th of this month, according to officials. The centre is intended to develop a resource pool of trained manpower for inducting free software in the information and communication wings of public sector units as well as various government departments. The absence of trained personnel in the field had been hampering the government move to introduce free software pioneered by Richard Stallmann.

Watch out Windows and Solaris, says Zemlin With the new year under way and all of the problems in the old year still largely unsolved, people in the IT sector are looking around for a little good news and some prospects for growth. There are a lot of clouds out there right now, and Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, thinks the rain is going to be good, particularly for Linux.…

A typical Linux system comes with all kinds of help documentation built-in, and a lot of users don't even know it's there. Juliet Kemp is your guide to finding man, info, and HTML help pages.

The Obama administration has made a pledge to spend $50 billion dollars on Health IT, yet it is unclear how they will come to grips with proprietary health IT software, a problem I will call the 'Some Dude' phenomenon. In my now lengthening health IT career, I have frequently come across a remarkably destructive and unfortunately abundant person called 'Some Dude'. Some Dude is the proprietary license holder of an entrenched piece of health IT software that needs to be interfaced with other software. Some Dude is entirely and in my experience usually capable of: stonewalling, obstructing, fleecing, lying, tollboothing, and ignoring any effort to interface with their proprietary software. There are few to no penalties or consequences to the proprietary license holders for such destruction. There are many real consequences and penalties for patients and practitioners by such obstruction.

Chris Mason, the founder of the Btrfs file-system, had previously stated he hoped to merge the first bits of this much-improved Linux file-system into the Linux 2.6.29 kernel. With the 2.6.29 merge window still open, earlier this week he started a new thread entitled Btrfs for mainline.

Chris shares that the Btrfs file-system is currently working against the latest kernel Git tree and not much has changed with this file-system code since early December...

Firstly, allow me to recap. A couple of days ago, I reported a presentation at the Chaos Computer Club conference in Berlin which outlined a major problem with the way Certificate Authorities handle message hashing, essentially this attack relied on well-known problems with the MD5 hash algorithm. Problems based on hash collisions, which were previously considered to be theoretical having been discovered in 2004, were now well-lodged within the domain of reality.

Juliet Kemp introduces DBAN (Darik's Boot And Nuke), a self-contained boot disk (floppy, CD, USB) that securely wipes hard disks. It is operating system independent and meets a number of government security standards; read on to learn more.

Lead kernel developer Linus Torvalds announced the official release of Linux 2.6.28 on Wednesday. The new version introduces some noteworthy changes that will put the kernel in a strong position for growth and advancement in the coming year. This latest release follows a few months after version 2.6.27, which was released in October.

Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has some free advice for IBM's Software Group: Take the Notes/Domino groupware stack open source with a community-developed programming model. The idea is to keep the Notes client and the Domino server relevant in a world becoming more accustomed to open source products.

Netbooks are popular, hugely popular in fact. Everyone from Dell through to Toshiba has joined the Eee PC goldrush. Everyone but Apple, that is. Steve Jobs has made it clear that he has no real interest in the netbook market, if recent reports are to be believed. One company that did have an interest, long before anyone else, was the British outfit Psion which launched the very first 'netBook' way back in 1999. Then things went pretty quiet from Psion, until now. Even at the height of the netbook media feeding frenzy at the start of the year, when the Eee PC dominated the headlines, Psion was keeping quiet. But now it appears that Psion is getting busy, and vocal, about how it has the trademark on the term netbook and is prepared to defend it.

Shell programming is heavily dependent on string processing. The term string is used generically to refer to any sequence of characters; typical examples of strings might be a line of input or a single argument to a command. Users enter responses to prompts, file names are generated, and commands produce output. Recurring throughout this is the need to determine whether a given string conforms to a given pattern; this process is called pattern matching. The shell has a fair amount of built-in pattern matching functionality.

If you run a lot of terminal tabs or scripts that all need to make OpenSSH connections to the same server, you can speed them all up with multiplexing: making the first one act as the master and letting the others share its TCP connection to the server. If you don't already have a config file in the .ssh directory in your home directory, create it with permissions 600: readable and writeable only by you.

Subsequent to the introduction of the Graphics Execution Manager earlier this year, Intel had introduced a new acceleration architecture. UXA, or the UMA Acceleration Architecture, was developed as a temporary solution based upon the EXA architecture but with support for the kernel-driven GEM memory management. How though does the UXA performance compare to that of EXA? In this article we have ran some benchmarking looking at the Intel graphics performance.