Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Little Linux wall wart computers have a thousand and one uses. But what if you accidentally brick your little plug server? No worries, for Akkana Peck shows us how to un-brick them.

Yesterday, HP held a press conference where the company finally announced its plans for WebOS, its newly acquired operating system that happens to be based on Linux. The company is putting WebOS in a new tablet to compete with Apple's iPad, but WebOS is headed far beyond that, including becoming part of the brains behind HP's market-leading printers. That's yet another promising new market for a Linux-based OS, but HP's announcements are producing some desktop predictions that seem a bit lofty.

There are two great questions in life that people struggle to answer. The first is why we're here, and the second is why there are so many different Linux distributions. A Linux distribution, for the uninitiated, is the stack of software, configuration tools and desktop environments, all bound to the Linux kernel, that go together to make the entire operating system, which most of us call Linux.

I attended HP’s press conference this morning and Linux again took center stage as a major technology leader revealed the details of its mobile device strategy. HP announced two new WebOS phones and more importantly an impressive new tablet that is a clear contender against the iPad. While I don’t for one second underestimate Apple, that was not the most interesting part of the event for me.

Despite the appearance of updated roadmaps from the MeeGo developers, the future of MeeGo is shrouded in doubt. Both the Handset and "Netbook UX" (User eXperience) versions of MeeGo seem to be in trouble, according to reports.

With a little over two weeks left before the first-of-the-year Linux expo, the ninth annual Southern California Linux Expo is shaping up to set the tone for an outstanding Linux year in 2011.

To oldtime Linux server admins it seems quaint that in this new millennium, the year 2011 in the 21st century, there are still a considerable number of IT managers and staffers who think the world begins and ends with Microsoft Windows, with all the lardy, vulnerable application stack that goes with it, and the horrible customer-hostile pricing and End-User Licensing Agreements (EULA). The best thing I can say about a Windows IT infrastructure is you're paying top dollar for something that sort of works OK. Though it is without peer at fueling the World Wide Botnet.

There is only a month to go before the first KDE and Qt conference in India opens. The event will be headlined by three keynotes speakers talking on the effects of technology on culture, the law and what makes our community tick. Talks and workshops have been announced and registration is open for anyone planning to attend. Read on for details. read more

Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. His frank linux.conf.au 2011 keynote took a rather different tack than Vint Cerf's talk did the day before. According to Geoff, Vint is "a professional optimist." Geoff was not even slightly optimistic; he sees a difficult period coming for the net; unless things happen impossibly quickly, the open net that we often take for granted may be gone forevermore.

Systems software maker Novell has announced today a special deal for customers building clusters with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. If you cluster servers with the company's High Availability Extensions, you get those extensions for free.

Last week, I covered OfflineIMAP to sync IMAP for use with Mutt or other applications. Continuing with that theme, I want to talk about another tool I use with Mutt to handle the opposite problem -- actually pushing mail to an SMTP server. Let's take a look at msmtp.

PCLinuxOS has suffered from its share of issues over the years. With difficulties ranging from personnel shake-ups to hosting problems, it seems developing and managing a Linux distribution can be challenging work. Perhaps sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth.

I recently spent some time getting one of my long term projects built. For quite some time I've had an old desktop computer serve as my printer server. As this machine is kind of loud, I've turned it off when not using it. This led to some client machines not appreciating the printer becoming available at the wrong time.

oogle Chrome developer Evan Martin has open sourced the custom-designed build system Google uses to port its browser across platforms, claiming that it is considerably faster than anything else available. Martin calls the system Ninja because it "strikes quickly." According to Martin's Ninja manual, Google previously used a customized system based on the old GNU Make build-automation system, and while this needed 10 seconds to start building the open source Chromium browser after a file change was made, Ninja takes under a second.

In less than three weeks the Southern California Linux Expo will be hosting their annual Linux conference in Los Angeles for a ninth year. There will also be SCALE University, an open-source cloud day, and various activities for the openSUSE, Fedora, and PostgreSQL projects. It's also where OpenBenchmarking.org is making its debut alongside Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" during my conference speech.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has announced that it is moving to an all Linux based trading platform when it relocates to Johannesburg. The JSE currently operates out of London and runs on the TradElect platform which is based on Microsoft .Net and SQL Server 2000. It plans to move to MilleniumIT's Millennium Exchange platform by the first half of 2012.

If you caught the Super Bowl over the weekend, and paid attention to the advertisements--which always go for a pretty penny--you no doubt saw Motorola's ad for its Android tablet, and other ads featuring the open source Android mobile OS. Aside from the notable fact that a Linux-based operating system was right there in between ads for cars and colas, it was also clear that big companies mean business in competing with Apple's iPad tablet with Android-based offerings. That doesn't mean the first-generation Android tablets are necessarily competitive, though. In fact, there are criticisms of them rolling in.

On 20 October 2004, the first version of a new and unknown project called Ubuntu was released. It was called the Warty Warthog. The only thing that most Linux users knew about Ubuntu was that it was based on Debian and bankrolled by some millionaire they had never heard of. Little did anyone know that said millionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, would invest so significantly in a much needed aspect of open source – the user experience. I'm not going to talk about how Ubuntu was formed, the impact it's had on Linux or the growth of the project and community; much of that has already been said.

The Linux/FOSS world offers a wealth of excellent Linux-based groupware server choices, suitable for small shops to giant enterprises. Eric Geier rounds up six to get you started.

The Debian Project announced a stable version 6.0, code-named & Squeeze,& available for the first time in a preview FreeBSD version as well as the usual GNU/Linux implementation. Debian 6.0 also offers a faster, dependency-based boot system, streamlines installation procedures, and splits off non-open source firmware from the kernel for separate download, permitting completely & free& installations.