Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Love it or hate it, the command line is here to stay. Sure, there are new options emerging like TermKit but it’s unlikely that the command line will ever really go away. Those who take the time to master it can run productivity circles around their peers, but with the astonishing assortment of CLI tools available, where do you even begin? We’ve compiled a few of the most useful tools and tricks into this guide to help new users gain some new knowledge, and old pros learn some new tricks.

The news that Oracle was proposing to donate the OpenOffice.org (OOo) code to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) came as a surprise to many, though it probably shouldn't have. Many optimistically hoped that Oracle's plan to turn OOo over to an "organization focused on serving that broad constituency [the OOo community] on a non-commercial basis" meant that it would turn to The Document Foundation (TDF), which forked OOo into LibreOffice (LO) in September 2010, as the obvious repository for the code. But, for a number of reasons, that was probably never a very likely outcome; some discussions evidently took place between Oracle and the TDF, but there seems to be enough bad blood—along with licensing differences—that another home for OOo was sought.

"Promotion of GNU/Linux is giving back, and Ubuntu has done that well," said blogger Robert Pogson. "Deals made with OEMs and providing services to businesses for servers have advanced the visibility of GNU/Linux considerably." At the same time, "Canonical does rub me the wrong way sometimes," he added.

A controversial push to establish clear-cut rules for contributing to open source projects is nearing completion. Project Harmony – no, not that Project Harmony – has spent a year collecting feedback on how to refine terms governing contributors to open source projects, and it's scheduled to wrap up this effort on June 23. Shortly thereafter, version 1.0 of the Project Harmony rules will be officially released. The idea, organizers say, is to make participation in open source projects easier.

IHS iSuppli published the results of a teardown of the 3G version of Samsung's Chrome OS-based Series 5 Chromebook -- which began shpping today for $500 -- and estimates the solidly-built notebook cost $334.32 to build. Meanwhile, an eWEEK review of the Wi-Fi only Series 5 was similarly impressed with the hardware, but questioned whether Chrome OS would find many takers.

All good things must come to an end, even on the Linux Planet. This past week we were alerted to the demise of Google's Linux search after years of activity. While one Linux asset is now gone, the future of Linux in the form of Linux 3.0, KDE and Btrfs continue to move forward.

Luxoft and Elektrobit Corp. (EB) announced a jointly developed, Linux-based reference platform for a DLNA-ready in-car media server, and also demonstrated Luxoft's Linux-based DashCore and Android-based DroidBuzz IVI software. The & wallet sized& In-Car Media Server and Internet Hotspot is based on a 456MHz ARM9 processor, and offers 64MB SDRAM and 128MB flash, plus Ethernet, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G connectivity, says Luxoft.

In Part One of Scale Fail, I discussed some of the major issues which prevent web sites and applications from scaling. As was said there, most scalability issues are really management issues. The first article covered a few of the chronic bad decisions — or "anti-patterns" — which companies suffer from, including compulsive trendiness, lack of metrics, "barn door troubleshooting", and single-process programming. In Part Two, we'll explore some more general failures of technology management which lead to downtime.

"Bachelors are not the only ones who can use GNU/Linux desktops," blogger Robert Pogson pointed out. "I have had students from grade 1 to 12 use it just fine. None of them needed to configure the clock..." Trenholme's article, in fact, "is an example of the trolls who visit my blog with some obscure problem never seen by other humans."

As expected, Python 2.7.2 and Python 3.1.4 have been released by the Python developers. Both releases contain the security fixes to stop redirection errors that were included in May's Python 2.5.6 and last week's Python 2.6.7 "security fixes only" releases, but these are general maintenance releases and therefore contain many more fixes and corrections – although only Python 2.7.2 is a current production version.

The VPN is very often critical to working within a company. With working from home being such a popular draw to many industries, it is still necessary to be able to access company folders and hardware that exists within the LAN. When outside of that LAN, one of the best ways to gain that access is with the help of a VPN. Many VPN solutions are costly, and/or challenging to set up and manage. Fortunately, for the open source/Linux community, there is a solution that is actually quite simple to set up, configure, and manage. OpenVPN is that solution and here you will learn how to set up the server end of that system.

It was just over 100 days ago that OpenBenchmarking.org and Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland launched from the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Los Angeles. Now that these major releases have been available to the public for over three months, and Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad will be released in just a couple of days, here's some overview statistics of where our open and collaborative testing platform is at today.

LXer Feature: 12-Jun-2011

For the LXWR this week we have the parting of Linux and Mono, a FOSS hacker reverse-engineers Skype, Larry The Free Software Guy gives us his top 10 Linux Lists as well as our own Carla Schroder talks about Ubuntu's contributions to Linux. And last but not least we have yet another doozy of a piece by Ken Hess that Caitlyn Martin just couldn't stop herself from responding too. Enjoy!

So I finally gave in and joined the craze that is Minecraft. It is a highly addictive game, so I would highly recommend against playing it while you have stuff to do, though you get 25% off while it is in beta, so go buy it (not an affiliate link, just love the game). A couple people that I work with love the game, and I love servers, so I figured we should set up our own server! I grabbed some hardware (A Dell GX620 with a Pentium D and 4GB of RAM), and got started. Here's how you can set up your own server, along with some tips I've found to make life much easier.

Thomas Thwaite, designer and technologist, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin. Thomas is perhaps best known through his Toaster Project. The Toaster Project was an attempt to build a toaster from raw, self-mined materials. The project exposed the complexity of seemingly simple and everyday technology. It leaves us to wonder how technology will change our lives in the future, and shows how we all need others to get even simple products. William Carlson contacted Thomas to ask him about his projects, his views on technology and what makes him tick. Read the full interview on the Desktop Summit website.

A Just-in-Time compiler promises to provide fast network packet filtering. The Wi-Fi stack now supports the Wake-on-Wireless-LAN standard, and unprivileged users are allowed to "ping". New and improved drivers enhance the kernel's support of network components by Ralink and Realtek.

Like most Linux fans, Slashdot blogger and Windows fan hairyfeet didn't care about the kernel's numbering -- but for different reasons. "Frankly I don't care if he calls it Shaka Zulu; I'll just be ever so happy when Torvalds retires or is fired," he said. "Here it is 2011 and you still have a mess thanks to Torvalds treating the kernel like his personal play toy."

Fabrice Bellard, creator of the multiple architecture emulator QEMU and FFmpeg, amongst other open source projects, has unleashed his Javascript powered PC emulator. In its current state, it boots a stripped down, text mode Linux implementation and runs within a modern browser. Interesting curio or a potentially useful tool?

Dear all digiKam fans and users! digiKam team is proud to announce the 6th digiKam Software Collection 2.0.0 beta release! With this release, digiKam include a lots of bugs fixes to progress in stability for future production use. digiKam include since 2.0.0-beta5 a new tool to export on RajCe web service.

This article full of examples will show you various ways to test services secured using sec-wall, a feature-packed high performance security proxy. We'll be using cURL, a popular Linux command line tool and PycURL - a Python interface to cURL. As of version 1.0, sec-wall supports HTTP Basic auth, digest auth, custom HTTP headers, XPath-based authentication, WS-Security & SSL/TLS client certificates and each of the options is being shown below.