Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Linux kernel uses several special capabilities of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) suite. These capabilities range from giving you shortcuts and simplifications to providing the compiler with hints for optimization. Discover some of these special GCC features and learn how to use them in the Linux kernel.

Increasingly we're seeing big business jump on the Linux bandwagon, as companies wake up to the money that can be made out of a community of developers working for free. Someone has to protect that community from being exploited, and if you're a Fedora contributor, that someone is Max Spevack. Linux Format magazine caught up with Max to ask him about the way the Fedora world is turning.

Thanks to the taglist vim plugin, vim users have access to a decent tag browser. Taglist is built on exuberant ctags so it support a large amount of languages. Unfortunately however, when the exuberant ctags people replaced their old PHP lexer with a brand new regexp-based parser the quality of parsing PHP code decreased dramatically. Ctags suddenly could not distinguish real class and function declarations from mere mentions of the words “class” and “function” in multi-line comments. This is because the ctags regular expression parses is inherently line oriented. In this article I have two patches that greatly improve PHP support in exuberant-ctags. I will also show you how you can apply these patches on a Debian-based system.

With Fedora 10 scheduled for release today, many users are thinking about how they are going to upgrade. A complete upgrade is something you do no more than twice a year, so the details are easy to forget. Also, the Fedora upgrade process, which centers on pointing to a new repository, is more complex than, say, the equivalent Debian process, in which repositories remain constant and only their contents change with a new release. But an even stronger reason for the uncertainty is that a Fedora system can be upgraded in at least four ways, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages.

Early this year Alliance Medical Center received a grant from California HealthCare Foundation to demonstrate a simple software tool to receive electronic laboratory results in the new ELINCS format. ELINCS is a messaging system intended to standardize the electronic reporting of test results from clinical laboratories into electronic health record (EHR) systems. A new "HL7-R1" format of ELINCS was adopted by HL7 this past Summer. Today Alliance Medical Center is joined by two partners in releasing a technical specification titled "Using Mirth to transform HL7 v2.x into ELINCS (HL7-R1)".

Europeana, Europe's multimedia online library opens to the public today. At http://www.europeana.eu, Internet users around the world can now access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries and cultural institutions of the EU's 27 Member States. Europeana opens up new ways of exploring Europe's heritage: anyone interested in literature, art, science, politics, history, architecture, music or cinema will have free and fast access to Europe's greatest collections and masterpieces in a single virtual library through a web portal available in all EU languages.

OpenEMR HQ, a small software startup in NE Oklahoma, announced the release of PhoneReminder for OpenEMR. PhoneReminder is add-in software to the OpenEMR medical records package that allows users to automatically notify patients by phone (voice or text message) of upcoming appointments.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) have just published the joint International Standard, ISO/IEC 29500:2008, Information technology - Document description and processing languages - Office Open XML file formats.

Anyone that uses Linux regularly is familiar with the "Google to see if it works under Linux" procedure before buying any hardware. I was thrilled when I saw the ad for a USB Atari 2600 joystick clone that had a label on the box claiming its Linux compatibility.

A while ago, I was in an Internet café at a tiny mall here in Bohol for a quick check at my Email. The place has around 40-50 desktop computers with decent tech specs and with LCD monitors. I've been there before and have noticed that most of their machines ran in Windows, while a few ran in Mac OS X. Linux was nowhere to be found. But today is different. I saw a monitor displaying brownish desktop wallpaper that made me smile. Yes, it's definitely Ubuntu. I later found out that they have installed Ubuntu in about 10 of their PC's.

Bandwidth limitation is still a problem for a lot of people who connect to the Internet. You can improve your available bandwidth by installing Squid caching proxy server on your network with configuration parameters that will increase your byte hit rate, giving you about 30-60% more bandwidth.

Close on the heels of OpenOffice.org 3.0, Sun today announced the release of StarOffice 9, it's own version of the office suite, with added support.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are the greatest geeks of us all? That question -- posed in an Australian iTnews article,The Top 10 Greatest Geeks of All Time on Monday -- sparked quite a discussion in the blogosphere last week, garnering more than 1,300 Diggs and 280 comments by Friday.

In response to growing demand from open source users, Adobe will today release a 64-bit version of its Flash 10 player for Linux. The 64-bit version will be an alpha release and will be followed by versions for other platforms at a later date.

[Yes, you read that right. 64-bit Flash for Linux first. 64-bit Windows will follow "someday" :-) - Sander]

Kraft helps you keep track of business offers and invoices and can generate PDF files to help you easily issue these routine documents to third parties. Since Kraft is a KDE application, it can draw contact information directly from your KDE address book, so you don't have to duplicate or sync your contacts in order to generate an invoice.

Mantis is that rare bug-tracking program for small projects that is neither too bloated nor too featureless. It's an excellent choice for developers who need a bug tracker that the average computer user can use. Its clean interface and numerous features make bug tracking fast and easy.

LXer Feature: 30-Oct-2008

This year was the third installment of the Technical Dutch Open Source Event (T-DOSE). Just as last year it was held at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven. Speakers included Arnoud Engelfriet (European patent attorney) and Ywein van den Brande on GPLv3 compliance, Roy Scholten (Drupal), Bas de Lange (Syllable), Jean-Paul Saman (VideoLan), Jörn Engel (logfs), Bert Boerland (Drupal), Tim Hemel (TMTTD) and many, many other speakers. Unfortunately your editor was only able to attend on Sunday, but the talks were great. Read on for more details.

I have been playing with my monitor setup again on my Dell D530 laptop. The internal monitor of the laptop is 1400x1050 pixels, but I usually use a 19" external monitor set to 1280x1024. With Etch this worked flawless but when I upgraded to Lenny this stopped working. I had to change the resolution each time I changed from external screen to internal screen and back. At the same time I also got interested in trying a dual-head setup instead of only an external monitor when one was connected. I was going to need completely different layouts depending on the external monitor. It took a while before I figured out how to do it, it took a little longer to fight GNOME into submission, but here is how to make it work.

I have now completed the first draft of the patches to add MPX support to Compiz-Fusion. These are only the first draft patches, so there are still tons of bugs to be fixed. After I fix those bugs, I’ll begin work on the Input Redirection patches for the rest of Compiz-Fusion. Below is a video of all the work done so far with IR/MPX.

Envizions has announced an "open source hybrid Linux gaming system" aimed at game developers. The EVO Smart Console is based on a 2.9GHz, 64-bit Athlon, includes its own Linux distro called Mirrors Evolution, and offers game-play, Internet access, VoIP, and HD video playback, Envizions says. Marketed with the 1950's-era tag line of the "System of Tomorrow," the EVO Smart Console will sell for as little as $250 with rebates. It will offer "cloud" based computing applications, Amiga-based games, and an Akimbo-based VOD (video on demand) service with over 10,000 titles, says Alabama-based Envisions Computer Entertainment Corp.