Showing headlines posted by dave

Clarkson University may not be the first institute of higher learning that comes up when you're discussing sports, science, or stature, but the Potsdam, New York-based university is at the top of its class for bringing Linux learning to real-world data centers. The 3,000-student university took top honors at the first-ever TuxMasters Invitational coding competition, which awarded Clarkson both first and second place in the intercollegiate contest.

In 1995, Dr. Giovanni Orlando wrote FTLinuxCourse, a detailed training course written in HTML for some of his clients who were using Caldera OpenLinux. Last month, Orlando released the current version for free download at FTLinuxCourse.com.

Since I started using email in 1995, I've been on a (seemingly) never-ending quest for the perfect email client. I've used text-based, Web-based, and GUI email clients, on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, and have yet to find one mail user agent (MUA) that I'd consider "perfect." There are some really, really good MUAs -- such as Mutt and Mozilla Thunderbird -- but I haven't found the perfect mailer just yet. Sylpheed 2.0, however, is getting close.

If you asked most Linux users which Windows applications they want to be able to use, Microsoft Access would probably come in at the bottom of the list. However, there are also many people who consider it to be a useful and important rapid application development (RAD) tool. Now Linux users have a couple of good Access alternatives -- KDE's Kexi and OpenOffice.org Base Version 2.

The Gartner Application Development Summit began Tuesday morning with "Breakfast with the Analysts." Event director Pascal Winckel helped me locate the table where Gartner Research Vice President Mark Driver was holding forth. My official track for this conference has become the Mark Driver track, since he is the analyst talking about open source.

If you're considering adding weblogs to your workgroup's communications arsenal, you're not alone. Many organizations are experimenting with internal, and external, blogs as a way of fostering communication between co-workers and between the organization and its customers. This article focuses on using Blosxom (and its Python-based cousin PyBlosxom) to quickly and easily set up a blogging environment for your team's use.

Buffalo Linux is a relatively new GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian and the Linux-Live scripts. It includes many commonly used and essential programs on a live CD with the ability to easily install to hard disk. I ran into a few problems, but found Buffalo is worth looking into.

Workstation 5.5, due out later this year, lets one computer simultaneously run several operating systems.

Sun is 'done with the competitive rhetoric' when it comes to Linux, according the firm's chief executive

Company's venture capital arm is looking to work with four to five start-ups, helping them develop technology and find partners.

RedLinX technical manager Trevor Fraser recently topped the marks charts when he scored an almost perfect 99.25% in recent Novell CLE exams.

The BitTorrent protocol implements a hybrid client/server and P2P file transfer mechanism. BitTorrent efficiently distributes large amounts of static data, such as installation ISO images. It can replace protocols such as anonymous FTP, where client authentication is not required. Each BitTorrent client that downloads a file provides additional bandwidth for uploading the file, reducing the load on the initial source. In general BitTorrent downloads proceed more rapidly than FTP downloads.

Knoxville, Tenn.-based Aquatic has introduced AquaticPrime 1.0, an open source software licensing scheme aimed at helping shareware developers to protect their software against piracy. It’s compatible with Mac OS X v10.3 or later and works with both Cocoa and Carbon applications.

Gartner Senior Program Director Pascal Winckel, the man responsible for the Gartner Application Development Summit being held this week in Grapevine, Texas, is taking a hands-on approach at the event. He was greeting attendees at the registration desk Sunday afternoon in the Gaylord Texas Convention Center with a handshake and introduction. Monday he made a few brief welcoming remarks to the audience, some 700 strong, before introducing the two speakers who really got the ball rolling.

The recently announced openSUSE project is already attracting a lot of interest from the open source community and Novell says it is boosting the numbers of SUSE installations globally.

Despite the Oracle/Siebel news that had the potential to swamp its recent Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com had enough up its sleeve to keep the attention of its 3,000 plus attendees with the introduction of AppExchange, an application exchange platform that combines the principles of the open source distribution model with the dot com trading exchange concept.

Learn how to use mod_jk to forward requests to specific hosts when more than one Tomcat instance is running.

Hans Reiser formed Namesys and began the development of Reiserfs ten years ago. The first release of the filesystem, Reiser3, is part of the mainline 2.4 and 2.6 Linux kernels. The more recent Reiser4 is a complete redesign and reimplementation of Reiserfs, aiming to soon be merged into the mainline 2.6 Linux kernel. In this interview, Hans discusses his background and how he came to create Namesys and Reiserfs. He looks back at Reiser3, describing the advantages it had over other filesystems when it was released and its current state. He then explores the many improvements currently in Reiser4, describing the plugin architecture and its exciting potential for future semantic enhancements.

Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the application often credited with the introduction of cryptography to the masses, recently announced his intent to provide PGP-like software to ensure the privacy of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications. VoIP, or Internet telephony, enables the routing of voice conversations over IP networks (e.g. the Internet) and is currently offered for use through newer companies, such as Vonage and Lingo (and some not-so-new companies, like Verizon and Comcast). You'd be well within your rights to ask, "If VoIP isn't currently secure, how can it be offered to companies and individuals as a legitimate service? And if it is secure, why all the fuss?"

Recently, a colleague and I decided to create a Web site that would serve as an online community and resource for young musicians. Though I had some Web design experience, neither of us had the experience or knowledge to create all of the features that we wanted in our site. Luckily, we were able to turn to WordPress. With its tools we could combine static pages with dynamically updated pages, categorize site content, automate formatting of site data, manage site membership accounts, incorporate RSS feeds and podcasts, and allow for community discussion of the site's content. Best of all, we could accomplish all of this with relatively little setup effort, and once the site was up and running, we could focus almost exclusively on content and let WordPress do the rest.