Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Nortel CIO Steve Bandrowczak, who joined the Canadian telecoms and network equipment vendor last July, said "more and more CIOs are looking at Linux desktop for reasons of TCO" and argued that the technology "is receiving the same level of attention today as when Linux started on servers." Nortel is Microsoft's closest partner among enterprise networking vendors in what to both of them is a key strategic area, Unified Communications. That Nortel should be looking at Linux on its own desktop machines is therefore an intriguing development

The Linux community and indeed the Open Source community in general is comprised of many different types of people. Their way of life, philosophy, age and location all vary widely with as many variations as the human face. However like the human face it can be categorized in a broad manner and stuffed into rather large boxes. This is my attempt at categorizing the face of Linux into four general areas. So take a deep breath, a pinch of salt and delve into the twisted psych of Locutus's mind. Don't forget it is all a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, then it doesn't matter.

Via is sampling a single-board computer aimed at relatively high-end network appliances based on x86 Linux. Powered by a 1GHz, 1.5GHz, or 2GHz C7 processor, and supporting up to 3.5GB of DDR2 RAM, the Network Appliance Board (NAB) 7500 sports four gigabit Ethernet ports. Suggested uses for the NAB 7500 include firewalls, VPN routers, and more. The board is compatible with "many" Linux distributions, according to Via, with Gentoo being popular.

I had the fortune this year of being able to attend 24C3, the 24th annual Chaos Computer Congress. The conference was a lot of fun–probably the first time in a long time (at least since chumby started) that I got to sit down and just hack for a couple of days on fun projects…in between going to really interesting and stimulating talks, and enjoying Berlin’s nightclub scene.

[And in between all that he manages to hack together a wifi-and-camera-controlled franken-chumby-robot on wheels. Very impressive! - Sander]

A notification is an email, page or SNMP trap that is generated when a host changes its state or when a service check has exceeded the configured thresholds. Notifications are sent via three modes of communication: e-mail, SNMP trap, and pager. These can be acknowledged via e-mail. Only e-mail and pager notifications require acknowledgement, as SNMP traps do not participate in the escalation process.

The Intel Open Source Technology Center is pleased to announce the release of version 0.1 of LatencyTOP, a tool for developers to visualize system latencies. Slow servers, Skipping audio, Jerky video --everyone knows the symptoms of latency. But to know what's really going on in the system, what's causing the latency, and how to fix it... those are difficult questions without good answers right now. LatencyTOP is a Linux tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where system latency occurs, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen. By identifying this, developers can then change the code to avoid the worst latency hiccups.

Linux, Mac, Windows: Every so often we get hit by a wave of nostalgia for those early computer games. The ones that were housed in huge consoles and cost 20c to play down at your corner cafe. Today is one of those days and so here is our pick for the day: Retroroids.

Amarok's very own my-wolf-eats-bugs department reports the immediate availability of the first Technology Preview of Amarok 2! This preview represents a snapshot of the current state of Amarok 2 development. After nearly a year of development, it is quite usable for some tasks at this stage. It does play music! The basic framework is there: collection, plasma, web services. They will give us the basis to make Amarok 2.0 the most innovative release yet. There is much more work to be done before the release of 2.0, we invite you to help us get there.

We’re only 5 days away from Walmart rolling out the Everex Cloudbook, but it looks like the FCC has beaten everyone to the dissecting punch by being the first to rip one apart for the internet to see.Technically, this is the Via Nanobook reference model that the Cloudbook is based upon but little is expected to change.

Sean Moss-Pultz was kind enough to answer a few questions with fsckin w/ linux. He’s got some pretty interesting answers to questions plaguing geeks and non-geeks alike, such as the eternal debate on which is better - Ninjas or Pirates? Keep reading for some candid responses from the CEO of the company behind the Dash Express GPS device and the in-development OpenMoko phone. Dash was recently named one of the top 10 startup companies to watch in 2008 by Wired Magazine.

While there are countless applications available to manage and view media on our computers and even some good portable solutions, getting our media to and from the television is still a challenging task for most. Neuros Technology decided to tackle this challenge in a new and exciting way. Their newest product, the Neuros OSD, is not only a media center and video recorder but is also based on Linux and has completely open source software and hardware. It's a product designed to be as versatile, open, and hackable as possible while still being easy enough to use for any living room. Whether you wish to covert your DVD's to digital files, record your favorite TV shows for your iPod, stream videos from your home network, or take it apart and rebuild it, the Neuros OSD is a low cost and versatile device that is on the forefront of the open source revolution.

GIMP is an open-source image editing program, one of the most popular image-editing programs. It is supported by a huge open-source community that is open in every aspect - development, source, sharing and participation. And what better way for me to admire GIMP than by presenting a list of some amazing, beautiful and stunning brushes?

I debated long and hard before deciding to take a stab at this article idea. Because KDE and GNOME users are so furiously loyal to their preferred desktop environment, I had to take into account that no matter how I stated my case, someone was going to come away feeling let down. Those concerns aside, I am writing this piece in hopes of sharing what each desktop offering has to provide and which of these options makes the most sense for your business.

[Get your asbestos undies ready! - Sander]

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi has confirmed his commitment of giving 50,000 laptops to Ethiopia. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature - it is model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. Nicholas Negroponte has recently said in an Interview that a Give 1 Get 1 program for Italians to donate more laptops to Ethiopia was under consideration to be launched very soon. Perhaps the program could even provide a second donated laptop by the Italian government as a donation matching encitement.

The #1 item on my Top 10 List of Linux FUD Patterns concerns its learning curve. This pattern is probably the most prevalent and primarily appeals to fear by attempting to convince you that Linux is too hard for the average person to use or that it is simply not user friendly. There are many variations of this pattern, from the straight-forward “Linux is for geeks” assault to more mature, logical arguments, such as “if Linux can do everything the fill-in-the-blank OS can do, why bother with the hassle of switching?”.

AMOR stands for Automatic Machine Object Recognition. It is a toolbox built upon Orange which allows end-users as well as computer vision scientist to do object recognition. It features most of the standard object recognition algorithms (SIFT, SVM…).It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips. Note that AMOR will only work with some window managers. Both KWin (the KDE window manager) and Metacity (a GTK2 window manager) are supported.

HP released a tool that would quickly and accurately describe how a given open source project was licensed, Over time HP will develop additional Agents that can be used to perform all sorts of useful analysis on software of all kinds.

Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year.

Breaking from the KDE 4.0 release event right now is word that Trolltech will be releasing Qt to be released under the GPLv3 license. An official announcement will be made by Trolltech regarding this GPLv2 to GPLv3 license update on Monday, January 21, 2008. Richard Stallman is pleased by this move and had stated, "I am very pleased that Trolltech has decided to make Qt available under GPLv3." This news was delivered at the KDE 4.0 release event by Haavard Nord, Trolltech co-founder & CEO.

A visitor of this site, who goes by the name “Finland Calling”, has just dropped us a helpful tip. Quick translation of the text from “The Finnish News Agency” aka STT going rounds in web already and being published in all of the major and also most of the minor newspapers tomorrow: "In the meeting between prime minister of Finland Matti Vanhanen and Bill Gates, the software giant Microsoft promised to donate tailored tools for Finnish schools. Microsoft will offer Finnish basic education and general upper secondary schools and their students free Windows live services selection."