Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools.

The latest release includes updated and reorganised boot help screens, as well as a reorganised Control Panel that places more frequently used items into the System Tools menu – AppsAudit and Run Command have been moved to the System Tools menu, while PPI Setup and TermServer Setup have been moved to Control Panel. The AppBrowser has also been updated, integrating setdrive, and the ondemand module for the Fast Light Window Manager (flwm_ondemand) has been updated to support a combined, single ondemand directory. Shingledecker also notes that a new data structure is used for wbarconf, which replaces wbar_exclude, so any current wbar_excluded items (xwbar.lst) will need to be remade.

There are plenty of extensions you can install that allow you to create PDF file for any webpage you come across. Well, if you are using Linux (particularly Ubuntu), this PDF creation feature is already inbuilt in your system and you can use it without installing any other extensions/applications. In Ubuntu, regardless which browsers or applications you are using, as long as it supports the “Print” function, you can quickly create a PDF, postscript or SVG file of the work you are doing (or the webpage that you have come across).

Canonical is attracting hordes of new Linux users with a ready-to-go, good-looking distro. But where does a noob go when they are no longer a noob? What is there for an IT pro with little Linux experience? How about the brand-new Bodhi Linux?

Attachmate says that Novell's openSUSE project will continue to operate as it always has. With Attachmate shelling out $2.2bn acquire Novell, SUSE Linux customers and contributors to the openSUSE project are understandably nervous about what Attachmate is planning for the community development that underpins SUSE Linux.

Google is playing coy over the future of Chrome OS, its still-gestating, browser-based operating system. When the project was first revealed in July 2009, Google said that systems based on the OS would arrive in the second half of 2010 — and through this past summer, it continued to make similar promises. But last week at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, CEO Eric Schmidt said that a completed OS was still "a few months away," seeming to indicate a delay.

At last I can write this up for you, my fine readers. Today we're going to learn about using Wake-on-LAN to wake up a server remotely, and automatic shutdowns. My master plan for my backup server is to automate everything-- wake it up, run backups for all the computers in my house, and then everyone shuts down for the night. (You might want to review part 1 and part 2.)

In our last article on the BlackBerry ListField we learned how to display data in a vertically oriented list. We explored drawing text and even how to search for entries with a progressive text search. However, the UI was somewhat bland. This article extends the prior code to upgrade the UI a bit. Along the way we demonstrate a technique for subclassing the ListField to bring some more life to the application and importantly to move in the direction of building more custom functionality to help your applications stand apart from the crowd.

OSADL, which has been overseeing real-time Linux (RTL) development patches to the Linux kernel, announced a "quality assurance testing farm" where manufacturers can test a variety of RTL systems under simulated production conditions. The multi-platform test center aims to prove RTL as a capable, and more flexible, alternative to real-time operating systems (RTOSes).

Network administrators have many tasks, and auditing the network is at the top of the heap. This isn't a problem if you have a small network. But what happens when that network outgrows your ability to simply walk around and manually make note of what is up/down, what OS a device is running, or what ports are open? When this happens you need to make use of one of the de facto standard open source network auditing tools — Zenmap.

CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft, is purchasing 882 Novell patents for $450 million cash, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted Monday by Novell. The deal is part of the Attachmate acquisition of Novell, also announced Monday, and expected to close in the first quarter of next year. In the original announcement, Novell stated only that CPTN would acquire "certain intellectual property assets."

It was announced this morning that Novell has sold off some portion of its intellectual properties to CPTN Holdings, (backed by Microsoft) for $450 million. The remainder of Novell assets will be acquired by Attachmate Corporation for about $2.2 billion. This should be of no surprise as Novell staked a For Sale sign in their front yard several months ago. But this has undoubtedly left users and developers wondering what will become of openSUSE.

Earlier today we put out benchmarks of ZFS on Linux via a native kernel module that will be made publicly available to bring this Sun/Oracle file-system over to more Linux users. Now though as a bonus we happen to have new benchmarks of the latest OpenSolaris-based distributions, including OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and Augustiner-Schweinshaxe, compared to PC-BSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

Using OpenGL and GLUT, you can increase the speed of your image processing by using the power inside your system's GPU. Video games have been making full use of GPUs for years. Now, even nongraphical products (like Matlab) are starting to take advantage of the number-crunching abilities of GPUs. You can do the same.

strace is a useful little utility – installed by default on most Linux systems – which allows you to find out what a program is doing under the hood by tracing the system calls it's making. strace is a great basic debugging tool; but it's also fascinating to use even when you're not tracing a problem. It can teach you a lot about how a Linux program works.

This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more.

In the first article in this series, we commenced our historical search for design patterns in Linux and Unix by illuminating the "Full exploitation" pattern which provides a significant contribution to the strength of Unix. In this second part we will look at the first of three patterns which characterize some design decisions that didn't work out so well.

LXer Feature: 22-Nov-2010

In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..

After reading the Linux 2.6.37-rc3 release announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list, another interesting thread was found and it's about getting hardware vendors to do their initial hardware bring-up under Linux prior to any Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X support. A number of reasons are provided why hardware vendors should support their hardware first under Linux and also why they should foster open-source drivers along with its challenges.

A new and improved Debian installer awaits for Debian 6.0, but is it better than what's gone before? We take a tour of Squeeze's installer beta and find out.