Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

French robotics specialist Gostai has announced that its advanced Urbi robotics operating system is now available as open source. The robotics platform is compatible with Linux, Windows and several real-time operating systems and uses a new orchestration script language called urbiscript that natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Note: The Urbi community portal is located here.

System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.

In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students' presentations. Here are seven tools that your students can use find and or create sounds for their multimedia presentations.

[I am working on my Education degree and came across this. Its aimed at Teachers but I thought royalty free stuff would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

If you've been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it's now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

Recent discussions around the so-called “Open Core” model for open source have been remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, because not content with one burst of feverish blogging and counterblogging, people came back for more, responding to a separate post about business models with yet more arguments and counter-arguments on the subject of Open Core. Secondly – and perhaps more remarkably – those discussions ultimately led to an entirely fresh thought: that we are about to enter a new phase in open source business, one that places community and collaboration at its heart.

I've been working as a freelancer for almost a year now, and I cannot help noticing how free software helps making this possible. Working in an international setting, most of the work is done from my home office. This requires techniques to get the work done. Small motivational "rewards" (or really fun customer assignments so that one forgets lunch...) The other half is the communication with the customers itself. This is where free software enters the picture.

Much of the focus of desktop Linux, and regrettably even Linux in the data center, is a slow and steady migration away from the command line towards GUI tools and interfaces. While this is great news for the Linux and open source community at large, many basic Unix skills get overlooked by new users. Back when I was first indoctrinated into the mysteries of Unix, the guru I studied under scoffed at my reliance on the tools available in Mandrake to build a LAMP server. "Why don't you build it like you know what you're doing?" He would ask. "Why don't you build it with OpenBSD?"

A version of Flash is being built using Java, two years after Adobe Systems opened the player's closed formats to external inspection. Programmer Joa Ebert has demonstrated a Java build of Flash executing SWF. The player is apparently called JITB, and it was recently unveiled at an event in San Francisco.

The days of DIY system administration are rapidly coming to a close. Why? Because the open source tools available are just too good not to use. Presenting Bcfg2, Cfengine, Chef and Puppet. This summer the USENIX 2010 conference in Boston hosted the first Configuration Management Summit on automating system administration using open source configuration management tools. The summit brought together developers, power users and new adopters.

Google is now allowing developers to upload applications to the as-yet-un-open Chrome Web Store, an online gallery of web applications and web extensions for the company's Chrome browser and its upcoming Chrome OS operating system. "Developers can now start uploading apps and experiment with packaging them, installing them in Chrome...and integrating our payments and user authentication infrastructure," the company said in a blog post.

The Linux kernel has potentially been at risk from a flaw that has been present in Linux since 2003, according to a new finding from security researcher Invisible Things Lab. And while the flaw has now been patched in the mainline Linux kernel, it's not clear yet if all Linux distros have implemented the patch -- potentially leaving them open to exploitation by attackers.

One of the things about the Android platform that appeals to many in the Linux community is the fact that it's based extensively on open source, Oracle lawsuits notwithstanding. The primary way to write applications for an Android-based phone is still Java. Google provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) with all the documentation, libraries and tools you need. There's even an add-on for the open-source Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to help you along.

Back in July we reported on the 0 A.D. game going open-source, an OpenGL real-time strategy title that had been in development for nearly a decade but hadn't yet had a stable release so the decision was made to take the game open-source in hopes of spurring new development efforts. Well, just a little over a month after that announcement, the first alpha release of 0 A.D. is now available.

The Linux community had two birthdays to celebrate recently. Debian GNU/Linux turned 17 on August 16 and openSUSE has been providing an excellent desktop Linux for five years.

After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.

Missing file? If so, apt-file, a tool that searches online repositories for a specific file, may be the answer. Occasionally, when building a package from source, disaster strikes and the whole process grinds to a halt due to a missing file. Fortunately, this is increasingly uncommon due to the maturity of Linux package management and the ubiquity of Autoconf configuration scripts. However, some software projects don't use Autoconf, either because the maintainers prefer another solution such as CMake or because the program is too small to make setting up a configure script worthwhile.

Quick – answer me this: How much swap space is in use on your system right now? How big is the cache on your CPU? What kernel modules are currently loaded? How many total drives and partitions are you running? If you’re running Linux, all these questions (and a whole lot more) can be answered one easy way: take a look in /proc. It’s a goldmine of system information, just waiting to be retrieved by users, administrators, and scripts. In this guide we’ll take a trip through /proc to see just what valuable system information you’ve been missing out on.

Plenty of people are worried that the Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal has too many exceptions. The recording industry is worried that it doesn't have enough. In a letter sent today to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the RIAA and other music trade groups expressed their concern that the riddled-with-gaping-loopholes policy framework nevertheless might put a damper on ISP attempts to find and filter piratical material flowing through the Internet's tubes. Failure to allow for this sort of behavior would lead to an Internet of "chaos."

The second day of the 2010 Linux Storage and Filesystem Summit was held on August 9 in Boston. Those who have not yet read the coverage from day 1 may want to start there. This day's topics were, in general, more detailed and technical and less amenable to summarization here. Nonetheless, your editor will try his best.

Adam Leventhal, another one of the three Sun engineers who developed DTrace, is leaving Oracle. Bryan Cantrill, another member of the team, left Oracle in July. This leaves only one of the original DTrace team – Mike Shapiro – still with Oracle. Shapiro is one of the signatories of the leaked memo which announced the closing of the OpenSolaris project.