Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Miro is an aggregator and viewing app that does it all. It's a BitTorrent client and a fully-featured podcast catcher. It's handy at finding and downloading many types of online media. Its built-in HD video player handles a large variety of file types. Miro Guide helps you find content, and the app can help sync media on multiple computers. Miro seems to have a bit of an issue with Flash Player, though.

Murmurs about Google's supposed plans to launch its own tablet soon are growing to a roar. Source code from Google and Samsung indicate that a Nexus tablet is in the works, Slashgear reports. "It seems logical that it will be a Google Nexus device consistent with the Nexus smartphone, but the problem is there's nothing unique about the Nexus smartphone," suggested Andrew Eisner, director of community and content at Retrevo.

Making a Linux distribution is easy, and lots of people have done it and continue to do it. All you have to do is get the source code and integrate the pieces you like and slap your logo on it. Making a commercial Linux distribution that makes enough money to cultivate innovation and stability in the kernel is not so easy, however. Very few companies have done it, but Red Hat is one of them – and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) marks its 10th birthday today.

ViSolve Healthcare IT offers OpenEMR consulting, customization, implementation, training and support. OpenEMR is one of the most popular open source EMR/EHR that is ONC-ATB Ambulatory EHR 2011-2012 certified. ViSolve Healthcare IT team has extensive experience with OpenEMR. As a prominent member of OpenEMR Board, ViSolve team has contributed significantly towards Meaningful Use Compliance and helped attain ONC Certification successfully.

TrueCrypt is a fully open-source tool for encrypting data. That data can be on a completely encrypted hard drive, or just an encrypted image file. Thankfully, the encryption works the same regardless of your platform, so Windows and OS X users can share encrypted files between computers. We really like to use TrueCrypt in combination with Dropbox, another cross-platform tool, to protect our data in the cloud. Pictured here is the OS X version of TrueCrypt, mounting an encrypted image as a local hard drive. Whether you are storing sensitive data or Grandma's secret recipe, TrueCrypt can keep your data private, even if it's stored on someone else's server.

One of the more interesting technical sessions last week at the UDS-Q summit was concerning the Ubuntu 12.10 plans for a system compositor, which would be based upon Wayland. While I still view it as unlikely to happen in any meaningful way for Ubuntu 12.10, other developers have since expressed their views as well...

Life is never dull here in the world of technology, but some weeks it's hard to remember that this is actually the real world, and not some epic tale of the battle between good and evil. We've seen plenty of examples of good pulling ahead in the struggle in recent weeks, of course -- but there's never any shortage of dastardly deeds being committed, either.

LXer Feature: 13-May-2012

In the LXWR this week we have all kinds of FOSS news including our own Dr. Tony Young asking how long a piece of string is, Dell announces Linux laptop designed for devs, Microsoft wants to restrict access to its OS..I know, I wasn't surprised either. Dinotrac asks for some advice, Larry the Software Guy gives an apology, Carla Schroder asks where Linux innovates or imitates as well as a Ubuntu 12.04 review. Enjoy!

For those of you who don’t already know about FAUmachine (FAU), it’s a virtual machine that allows you to install full operating systems and run them as if they were independent computers. FAUmachine is similar to VirtualBox, QEMU, and other full virtualization technologies. It is a project sponsored by the Friedrich Alexander University Computer Science Department in Germany (Erlangen-Nuremberg*). FAU is a computer simulator that is an independent virtual machine project. The CPU is based on the virtual CPU in QEMU.

A short while ago, an article appeared in Linux Journal implying Git was the be-all and end-all of source code revision control systems ("Git—Revision Control Perfected" by Henry Van Styn, August 2011). I would like to challenge that assumption and declare to the world that the real perfect version control system is here, and its name is Mercurial.

Keep Everything. Share Anything. When a company like Google uses a tagline that includes the words "share anything" for a Dropbox-like cloud file storage system, my immediate reaction is "with whom?" Google, after-all, is a company that's made its money delivering ads based on what it learns about our habits. There's been debate about this very question since Drive launched.

My jet lag is gone, I've finally come back to ground, and at last I can start to sort out my experiences at the 10th annual Linux Audio Conference, held this year at CCRMA, the Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California USA. It was the first time the event had been held in the States, and the organizers obviously intended to make a good impression. I'll cut to the spoiler right now to let you know that they succeeded, with honors.

Precise Pangolin is a big step up in many regards. The new Ubuntu OS is friendlier with legacy hardware. It's peppier and more responsive. I find it is far less sluggish on my older gear. It flies on my newest hardware. However, while its Unity interface has been improved somewhat, it's still too limited and too confining, at least for some experienced Linux users.

The developers of PHP have released updates to thwart fresh attacks against systems that use the scripting language to dynamically generate web pages. All users are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.3 or PHP 5.3.13, as appropriate, after a serious security bug in PHP-CGI-based setups was disclosed. Developers attempted to fix this long-standing, but only recently discovered, flaw in a new version on 3 May, before deciding the fix was incomplete and releasing a new set of patches on Tuesday, 8 May 8.

LXer Feature: 08-May-2012

This item is dedicated, with thanks to Gus3. Without his suggestion it never would have been written. I stress the following text involves Linux only obliquely......but I hope all my friends here on LXer will find it interesting, and perhaps, useful.

While Ubuntu developers were listening to Mark Shuttleworth talk about Ubuntu 12.10, also happening at the same time was a Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting within the Fedora / Red Hat world. A new set of features were approved today for the Spherical Cow.

Agustín Benito Bethencourt (aka "toscalix") recently joined the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. He will be presenting the KDE Community Keynote at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn. Tomaz: You are active in the KDE Community—the Promo team, KDE e.V. Board of Directors, new ideas, big ideas, helping wherever you can. It seems from your blog posts that you do free software even in your sleep. What you do in Madrid in your free time? read more

While Btrfs, XFS, and EXT4 remain the far more popular choices when it comes to Linux file-systems, there still exists projects focused upon providing ZFS file-system support under Linux...

Gimp users, rejoice! After 3.5 years of development, Gimp 2.8 has finally arrived. This version of Gimp brings a plethora of changes and improvement, making Gimp a even better image editing software than its previous version.

This time we will take a look at the power manager for the Xfce 4 desktop. This tool can be used to reduce the power output of your system, and control a few useful options.