alll about linux

When Tony Losey came to the 3Sixty Group in 2003 he saw that, like many small companies, the manufacturing firm didn’t have much in the way of advanced systems. It was running an old ERP system on machines that dated back to 1992, there was no company intranet and executives had pushed the company’s Web site, a key business driver, to an outside hosting provider.

The organisation didn’t have a lot of money to throw at IT. But Losey, who took over as head of the one-person IT department, zeroed in on open source as the key to keeping the company competitive as it grew quickly through acquisition. It’s a direction that an increasing number of small and mid-sized firms are taking as Linux and open source become battle-tested and are finding mainstream acceptance among larger corporations. >>>>>

A lot of managers are afraid to use Open Source Software, because it doesn’t come with any support. Of course that isn’t true. It is a classical piece of FUD. And then again, how much is support worth?

source: thebeez.vnunetblogs.com

The Mozilla Foundation has added some welcome improvements to the browser as it nears the finish line. Version 2.0 looks to be a must-upgrade for Firefox users, but it doesn’t dazzle with innovation.

eWEEK Labs’ tests of Firefox 2.0 Release Candidate 1 show that the new browser will be a worthwhile upgrade—with welcome usability enhancements and improved security controls—but anyone hoping that it would set the Web on fire with innovative new features will probably be a little disappointed.

With the release of Firefox 2.0 RC1, the Mozilla Foundation is providing a look at what will most likely be the shipping version of the popular open-source Web browser.

Firefox 2.0 RC1 has added a few new features and capabilities since our review of Beta 1. The most noticeable of these changes is a new default interface theme, which has tool bar icons that glow when the mouse hovers over them.

More Here

For general knowledge on what IPv6 has to offer the following article is not a bad one.

In the olden days, it was possible to skate over understanding the binary math behind IPv4 addresses by memorizing the various classes and their address ranges. That won’t work for IPv6. Get yourself an IP address calculator and learn how work out the conversions and calculations, or IPv6 will forever remain a mystery. ipv6calc is an excellent one that runs on Linux/Unix. A bit of Googling will uncover an abundance of Web-based IP calculators and converters.

IPv6 Address Types
Increasing the IP address pool was one of the major forces behind developing IPv6. It uses a 128-bit address, meaning that we have a maximum of 2¹²⁸ addresses available, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or enough to give multiple IP addresses to every grain of sand on the planet. So our friendly old 32-bit IPv4 dotted-quads don’t do the job anymore; these newfangled IPs require eight 16-bit hexadecimal colon-delimited blocks. So not only are they longer, they use numbers and letters. At first glance, those mondo IPv6 addresses look like impenetrable secret code: continue reading

Voice recognition has been a dream of many for the last 10 years. It’s an illusive goal because interpreting speech is very complicated and takes a lot of computing power. Past solutions used a “train the system” model for interpretation. Users had to endure lengthy sessions of talking to the machine, before they can enjoy any real level of reliable speech recognition.

Wizzard Software has introduced the WizzScribe SI conversational voice recognition engine. It converts speech directly to text, independently of the speaker. It doesn’t require any training of the system. The technology, pioneered by IBM, is aimed at developers that want to integrate speech recognition into their applications. Corporate users can deploy it internally to bring voice recognition, to their business processes. >>>>>

The Free Software Foundation has moved to clarify what it says is inaccurate information being presented about the second discussion draft of the next version of the GNU General Public License. >>>>>
Related:

• Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process
• Linux: Linus Praises the GPLv2

Linuxlookup.com is reporting on Mandriva’s introduction to its brand new product: Mandriva Linux 2007. This new version of the operating system was designed to be an even better fit for the needs and expectations all users, from the beginner to the SOHO user.

New Features include:

• kernel 2.6.17
• GCC 4.1
• GNOME 2.16
• KDE 3.5.4
• glibc 2.4
• Xen 3.0
• Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.7
• OpenOffice.org 2.0.3

More on Mandriva Linux 2007

What do most people have in common? They watch TV! In fact, if you’re like most people you probably watch TV a lot. For this you need a pleasant and effective way to know in advance what’s on TV, at what time and on which channel. This is a very common need, and different people use different solutions: the newspaper, a TV magazine or even some fancy applications running in their satellite decoder. You’re different though, you use Linux. Therefore there’s no reason why you should get your TV schedule the way everybody does. And you’ll be happy to know that there is an easy way to set up your Linux box to do just that.

XMLTV
XMLTV is a great project. Just look at the name, “XML-TV”, it’s like a combination of one of the most geeky technologies and one of the most common things on Earth. In a way, it brings your imagination close to that fantasy shared among all computer enthusiasts: the use of domotics and intelligent appliances to automate everything you need in your house. But let’s keep our feet on the ground, XMLTV is only going to do one thing for you, it’ll bring you the TV schedule, and it’s not going to make you coffee right? With that in mind, let’s have a closer look at it.

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There are numerous audio players designed especially for GNOME. Single GnomeFiles repository lists over 60 of them. However, the problem lays in quality rather than quantity. Recently I’ve been looking for an audio player that would resemble the famous Windows player called Foobar 2000. I have found a lot of clones, and just a few original applications. Mesk audio player was among the latter.

Installation

In my first attempt, I tried to get the latest sources of Mesk through SVN. Unfortunately, while writing this report I could not connect to their repository ‘mackaye.nicfit.net’ (update: it’s up and running now). I downloaded the stable 0.2.1 version (code-named Meat Puppets) instead. I copied the file to a location where I usually store program sources (so that I can easily uninstall them) and then unpacked it with:

Complete Review + Screenshots.