Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook

A new blog,All Scrubbed Up is discussing using Ubuntu GNU/Linux as the base for a FOSS EHR network in South Africa. They are tentatively calling the projectMedical Ubuntu. Its a good idea, and I hope they follow through. -FT

There is just something weird about a community of people who promote "open" who don't want to be open with their own names and qualifications. Openness is supposed to improve quality, but if we don't know if a person in a discussion is actually qualified to talk on a subject, wouldn't you think the result would be lower quality?

[I do wish he had given a more specific example of the contrived IDs he's referring to. How are these people driving the discussions? And how does this impact the quality of FOSS? Has Enderle been smoking the poinsettias laying around the office? - dcparris]

For many Windows users who want to create PDF files, Adobe Acrobat is overkill. Acrobat has more functions and features than they'll generally use, and with a price tag of $299 ($449 for the professional edition), Acrobat costs more than many people want to spend. Luckily, Windows users can create PDFs from any application using the GPL-licensed PDFCreator. Built on top of Ghostscript, a popular free PostScript interpreter, PDFCreator is fast and configurable. For most purposes, it's a great alternative to Acrobat.

[O.k., so it's for Windows. We all know many of you still have copies of Windows around. You've all 'fessed up before. So now you can at least use a Free Software program on your Windows box to create PDFs. ;-) - dcparris]

Novell’s Linux pact with Microsoft has cost it open-source guru Jeremy Allison, who left in protest to take a position at Google.

LXer Feature: 25-Dec-2006

Here's hoping you find a penguin under your tree this year!

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1, a security and stability update for Firefox 2, has been released.

Security and Stability updates for Mozilla products based on the Gecko 1.8.0 branch have been released.

The Cocotron is an open source project which implements an Objective-C API very similar to that described by Apple Computer's Foundation and AppKit framework documentation.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the second release candidate 2.6.20-rc2 kernel, "it's a couple of days delayed, because we've been trying to figure out what is up with the rtorrent hash failures since 2.6.18.3. I don't think we've made any progress, but we've cleaned up a number of suspects in the meantime." He noted that he had been aiming to make the 2.6.20 kernel a quick, stable release, "I was really hoping to make 2.6.20 an easy release, and held back on merging some stuff during the merge window for that reason. And now we're battling something that was introduced much earlier.." He also noted that the bug in question isn't likely to affect many people, "but it's still a worrisome problem, and we've had 'top people' looking at it. And they'll continue, but xmas is coming." The bug is discussed inthis thread on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.Regarding changes in the current release candidate, Linus summarized that in addition to general stabilization, "this mainly does some driver updates (usb, sound, dri, pci hotplug) and ACPI updates (much of the latter syntactic cleanups). And arm and powerpc updates." A nice summary of what's gone into the upcoming 2.6.20 kernel can be found in theKernelNewbies Wiki which has a list including asynchronous SCSI scanning, multithreaded USB probing, HID Layer split: allows things other than USB to use the HID layer (Bluetooth), and I/O Accounting.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A new game, KSquares, is imported into KDE SVN, with KLines starting on the (now familiar) path towards scalable graphics and general improvement.

Comment of the Day - 24-Dec-2006

LXer reader, schestowitz, points out that Microsoft has one or two balance-sheet liabilities of its own:

Opening the Pandora Box? I suspect not... IBM and others would rip them.

Microsoft's Undisclosed Balance-sheet Liability

NT influenced by Unix

,----[ Quote ] (Gates:) "And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And that's no accident." In light of the recent saber rattling about Linux and patents, the "There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment" sentence is particularly interesting if these patent threats include things that are prior Unix art. "In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix" is also telling. I said before that I don't think that's the case; I think the patent stuff is talking about things like Samba and Mono, but even there the "influenced by that environment" could be important in the court of public opinion if not in actual law. `----

Read the rest

Penguin in the Pew 2.0, available through Lulu.com, both in paperback and PDF formats, is now available as a free (gratis) download from Matheteuo Christian Fellowship

Graphics software vendor Xara says its open source vector illustration project Xara LX is far from dead, even though work on it has slowed to a crawl in recent months.

Shares of Red Hat Inc. soared Friday on strong earnings results from the Linux operating system developer. But stocks of larger competitors barely budged, and some analysts saw a limited threat to Red Hat from software makers Oracle Corp. and Novell Inc.

Among the most respected vendor-neutral certifications in the industry are those from the Linux Professional Institute (LPI). LPI Level 1 certification (LPIC-1) is the junior-level certification intended to verify the very basic skills needed by a beginning administrator to work with Linux. There are two exams that you must pass, and they consist of questions that are multiple-choice as well as fill-in-the-blank -- the latter question type making the exams much more difficult than those from many other vendors. LPIC-2 certification also requires passing two exams with the same question types, but now the topics are much more advanced and you need to be a knowledgeable administrator to pass.

MEPIS LLC today announced that Beta1 of SimplyMEPIS-32 Version 6.0-4, aka SystemUpdate1, is currently available for download by MEPIS "subscribers" and is working its way onto public mirrors. Earlier versions of this KDE-based Linux desktop distribution have been well received by users.

If Oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison thought Linux purveyor Red Hat would go down easily, he was wrong.

Linux vendor Red Hat posted solid results Thursday amid rising competitive pressure from Oracle, Novell and Microsoft. During the earnings call with analysts, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik was asked about Microsoft's announcement of three joint customers with Novell this week. Old news, he said.

German software vendor SoftMaker has released SoftMaker Office 2006 for Linux and FreeBSD, an office suite for computers running Linux or FreeBSD that reads and writes all Microsoft Word and Excel files.

[Not to fear - there's still OpenOffice.org and KOffice. They're truly free. - dcparris]