Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Datasound Laboratories (DSL) announced a compact "embedded controller" based on a 300MHz DM&P Vortex86SX CPU. The Icop VSX-6117 is just 3.14 x 1.96 inches, uses only 320mA at 5V, includes 128MB of soldered-on DDR2 memory and 2GB of flash storage, has a 10/100 Ethernet port, and includes EIDE and x-ISA expansion, according to the company.

Finding Linux-based calendar clients, like Evolution or Mozilla Lightning, is easy — but what about the server-side software? You'll find some great calendar servers for Linux, if you know where to look. From light-weight to heavy duty, Cosmo to Darwin, we've picked five of the best open source calendar servers for Linux for you to try.

There's a new dog in the house at Fedora, and he just might end up on your Fedora 15 desktop. Chris Lumens, Red Hat Anaconda developer, has proposed a new theme for the upcoming Fedora release built around hot dogs. He boldly states, "the Fedora user experience should feature Hot Dog themed artwork everywhere."

On January 26th of this year, KDE released version 4.6.0 of its Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. While many major versions of KDE have focused on features, 4.5 was mostly a stabilizing release, fixing thousands of bugs. The 4.6 release is all about polish. It is the icing on the cake for KDE 4, adding speed, visual enhancements, and increased hardware compatibility.

The 9th Annual Southern California Linux Expo is less than four weeks away. This Expo is shaping up to be the best SCALE ever, with five tracks of quality presenters, over 80 exhibitors, and more content than it’s ever had. The theme for SCALE 9X is “Open Source: Rising to New Heights”. Both the program and the SCALE 9x t-shirt promote this theme. You can check them both out at the SCALE 9x event page on Facebook. This year’s t-shirt will be a collector’s item!

Microsoft Research and Cambridge University's Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics have assigned the Chemistry add-in for Word project to The Outercurve Foundation. An announcement from the foundation, originally known as the CodePlex Foundation, about the assignment says the add-in will now be available as open source. The Chemistry Add-in for Word uses the XML-variant, the Chemical Markup Language (CML), to enable users to "insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas, and 2-D depictions, within Microsoft Office Word."

The WebKit-powered browsers were the big winners: Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the big loser. Internet Explorer reached a new all-time low of 56 percent, down 1.08 percentage points from last month. Though Internet Explorer 8 continues to perform well—up 1.15 points from December—defections from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to other browsers continue to dominate, with those versions losing 1.63 and 0.47 points respectively. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 made minor gains, rising to 0.50 percent share.

February has finally arrived. Later this month Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org will be officially unveiled from the Southern California Linux Expo during the talk entitled "Making Better Linux Hardware Choices" by myself and Matthew Tippett, the former ATI/AMD Linux Core Engineering Manager. Before the California Linux event, there may also be a public demonstration in Munich of this major Linux testing/benchmarking breakthrough. While the Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland software can currently be downloaded as beta, OpenBenchmarking.org is not yet publicly available nor have we said much about the project. What has been said though is that it will cause Linux benchmarking to change, it will likely cause a greater impact than Phoronix.com, may result in my editorial departure from Phoronix, and will change the way that you find Linux compatible hardware.

Recently one of our customers sent us marketing materials from one of our competitors. One thing that stuck out was the positioning that their version of a critical system component used in *NIX OpenSSH is better than the vendor-provided OpenSSH (from Red Hat, for example). As a former systems engineer responsible for many *NIX systems, this raises a red flag and here's why.

Forget Godot, we’re waiting for CentOS 6. If you hoped to have a shiny new CentOS release under the Christmas tree, you were disappointed. 2010 slipped by, still no release. Hoping to surprise your honey with CentOS 6 on Valentine’s Day? Maybe. If you’re lucky.

The new LibreOffice open-source office suite "proves that forking isn’t always the kiss of death," says this eWEEK review. New features in the Linux-ready release -- including wider document format support, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) import into Draw and Writer, enhanced presentation support, and an improved "save as" feature -- should give OpenOffice some robust competition.

Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle has announced on his blog that he, with the assistance of John Duimovich and Jason Gartner of IBM, Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse, Prof. Doug Lea of SUNY Oswego, and Adam Messinger of Oracle, has been drafting a set of OpenJDK community rules, or bye-laws, by which the community will operate. He says the draft document will soon be published for public comment.

Future distributions will use a consistent, predictable scheme to name network interfaces, using names such as "em1" and "pci2#1" instead of "eth0" and "eth1" to provide more transparency for server administrators. As various new kernels have recently been introduced, the Kernel Log will provide an overview of the most important Stable and Longterm kernel series.

The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of six new developer training courses dedicated to MeeGo and Google's open source Android operating system, both of which are based on Linux. Like Android, MeeGo is available for various mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets and netbooks – it came about as the result of the February 2010 decision to merge Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo platforms under the aegis of the Linux Foundation.

Despite earlier reports that very few if any new features would likely be seen in The Document Foundation's first LibreOffice release, the influx of new developers allowed much more work to be done. In fact, it was even released ahead of schedule. So, what kind of new goodies might one find?

Recent meetings held among major desktop Linux communities have resulted in an informal agreement regarding an architecture for a common app installer API. Developers from RedHat, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, and Mageia agreed to move forward on the architecture while a separate meeting between OpenSUSE and KDE went a step further, developing a mock-up for a universal GNU/Linux app-store....

Oracle is drafting rules it says even it can obey to run the open-source reference implementation of Java, OpenJDK. The giant's Java platform group chief architect Mark Reinhold revealed on Monday that his company has been working since November on a series of bylaws intended to govern the recently expanded OpenJDK project.

Open source has come a long, long way and video editing has not been left behind. You'll find a number of video editing tools on Linux, but none of them are both as user-friendly and create as high-quality video as OpenShot Video Editor. With this easy to use tool you can have your edited videos up on Youtube (or presented to your company/organization) in no time. With a very small learning curve, and numerous features, OpenShot will make you and your company look very good. Let's take a look at how mult-track videos can be created in OpenShot.

At the Linux.conf.au conference, an Australian-based "Lunar Numbat" project presented its plan for a Linux-based flight control computer for a lunar spacecraft. The open source flight computer will be part of the "White Label Space" entry in Google's $20 million Lunar X-Prize, to be awarded to a team that can send a working rover to the Moon and transmit back images.

In November of 2009 we reported that the Reiser4 file-system may go into the mainline Linux kernel in late 2010. We're now into 2011 with the merge window having closed earlier this month for the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and there's no sign of this open-source file-system designed to succeed the popular ReiserFS. So what gives? Well, we have another update from its lead developer.