Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In the past, the best way to get KeePass running on Linux is to install KeePassX, which is a port over version of KeePass 1.x. To get KeePass 2.x to run in Linux, you will need to install a whole bunch of mono libraries and manually install the source file. Worst still, it might not work in the end. Luckily, that kind of days is over. Julian Taylor has released a PPA that allows you to install KeePass 2 easily (only work in Ubuntu or other debian based distro).

Back in 2006, LWN looked at the rather complicated story around the maintainership of the RPM package manager. Given the importance of this tool for any RPM-based distribution, the lack of a clear story on how it was being maintained was somewhat discouraging. Later that year, the Fedora project announced the creation of a new, community-oriented project around RPM. Since then, things have been on the quiet side, but recent events show that the RPM story has not yet run its course.

Thinking back, I was 10 years old when I saw my first real home computer. It was a dark winter's evening, sometime in the early '80s, and in the corner of a friend's bedroom sat a small CRT television screen, complete with scrolling bands of interference and a 50hz buzz. Underneath the screen was the totally underwhelming body of a Sinclair ZX80, but this didn't interest me. What did interest me was the flashing grey cursor on the screen.

Do you have an older PC that does not support booting from USB devices, and really want to boot from USB devices? You can, thanks to the Plop boot manager. This weekend, turn that aging computer into a USB-booting powerhouse.

Canonical has announced that Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud will adopt the OpenStack cloud platform over Eucalyptus. In other Ubuntu-related news, an Ubuntu 11.04-based Linux Mint 11 release candidate (RC) was announced that opts for the GNOME 2.32.1 desktop environment over both Canonical's Unity and GNOME 3.0.

O'Reilly Media announced a new Android Open Conference Oct. 9-11, in San Francisco, designed for anyone who creates, sells, or markets Android-related products. In other open source conference news, the Linux Foundation last week announced keynote speakers, including Linus Torvalds, for LinuxCon Japan, June 1-3, and Linux Expo of Southern California announced events for Software Freedom Day 2011 on Sept. 17.

GroundWork Inc., (www.groundworkopensource.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Cloud Connector for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4. An automatic, monitoring provisioning system, GroundWork Cloud Connector gives users the ability to monitor Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances right along side traditional data center infrastructures.

Common wisdom has held for years that Linux is superior to Windows when it comes to security issues. But now that open source is growing in popularity both on the consumer side (think Android phones) and the enterprise side (Linux runs the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, for example, according to Wikipedia), it's time to push past the adage and look again at the whole "which is safer" issue.

[Common wisdom..if users have any know Linux is by its design and not just its licensing and user-base is more secure, period. - Scott]

The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. Vergrößern Google has announced that Samsung and Acer will be making the first Chromebooks; instant-on, always-connected laptops that run the company's open sourced and Linux-based Chrome OS. As well as being available for purchase, Google is offering companies a subscription plan at $28 a month per user, which includes a Chromebook and online services, and a $20 a month subscription offering for educational users. UK pricing for subscriptions will be announced closer to the 15 June launch. The machines are enhanced production versions of the CR-48 notebook which Google gave away to interested parties late last year.

"NSA recommending Vista for home security is merely a reflection of the reality of monopoly in the retail space," said blogger Robert Pogson. "In the USA probably as few as 2 to 3 percent of users use GNU/Linux, so a recommendation is almost useless." Those who are serious about security "are already aware of SELinux, a product of the NSA. The NSA is merely recommending that folks move on from XP, a poor OS poorly supported by M$."

Samsung has announced the Series 5 Chromebook – a thin, 12.1 inch Chrome OS laptop. Google's Chrome OS is the company's take on a cloud-centric operating system that will compete with Windows, primarily in the mobile computing market.

Can you name your motherboard’s chipset off the top of your head? What about NIC type? If not, how would you go about finding it? Could you do it from the command line? As with a lot of Linux software, there are many ways to go about this. Some tools are built right into any Linux system, others might require a separate download. Today we’re going to cover several of the ways to view your hardware details in Linux, including the pros and cons of each.

The German government has given details of its reasons for migrating the German Foreign office from Linux and free software back to Windows and Microsoft software. The SPD (Social Democrats, the main German opposition party) submitted an initial question on "the use of open source software in the Foreign Office and other Government departments", but, according to the Green parliamentary group, the German government's response left various questions unanswered. These questions have now been addressed by Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, the German government's IT commissioner in a documentPDFGerman language.

Google is building an interactive Native Client debugger that will integrate with various popular IDEs. According to Google engineer David Springer, the company will begin with Visual Studio before moving on to Eclipse and others. "We're starting with Visual Studio because a lot of client programs are already built there," Springer said this afternoon at Google's annual developer conference in San Francisco. Part of Google's Native Client pitch is that it will allow developers to easily move their existing client applications into the browser.

You may remember a legacy company from a few years back – used to be very big in old market segments like the desktop, but never managed to make much impact in growth areas like the web or mobile.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said that only about 20 per cent of Google's employees are still using Microsoft Windows, and that all of those users are on Windows 7. He stressed, however, that he is not sure of the exact percentage.

Pinta, a "lightweight" open source raster image editor, turned 1.0 on April 27, offering Linux users another choice for simple image editing. Pinta is intended to be a clone of Paint.NET, the Windows-only raster editor written in .NET. As such, it uses Mono under the hood, but it gains the ability to run equally well on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows. Is it a replacement for GIMP or Krita? That depends on what you need to do.

Google is rumoured to be set to announce a scheme where students can get a Chrome OS toting laptop for a $20 (£12) a month contract, mimicking the way in which many people get the latest mobile phones. According to Forbes, Google will announce the deal later in the day at its Google I/O conference, and the package will include Google Apps.

Ubuntu Natty has been out for almost two weeks. If you do not like the Unity interface, nor the classic Gnome, you could install KDE and give it a spin. We have covered KDE 4 several times and it is elegant and by far the best KDE distribution. Here’s how you can install KDE in Ubuntu Natty.

Samsung and Acer will start selling the first Google Chrome OS notebooks starting June 15, priced from $349 to $499 but also available as part of monthly business/school subscriptions. The 12.1-inch Samsung Chromebook Series 5 and the 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook offer dual-core 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 processors, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 16GB solid state disk, memory card reader, a webcam, USB, Wi-Fi, and optional 3G.