(LinuxWorld) — The forum postings on last week's column about the
installation of MySQL and ODBC to gain access to the secret power of
OpenOffice.org 1.0 were a mixed bag: some good, some bad, some "so what." I
was variously described as an stupid, foolish, an incompetent sysadmin and a
writer of more fiction than fact.
I'll come clean about one thing: I am an incompetent sysadmin, and I have a
failing score on the first LPI exam to prove it. But then so are most small
businesspeople in the SOHO market. That makes my experiences a more-valuable
litmus test for SOHO users than those of some yahoo guru running gentoo.
If you dismiss the name-calling and those who suggest switching to their
distribution of choice in order to tame the problem, some valuable
information remains to be gleaned. Among other things, I found a better,
cleaner and "distribution-pure" ins... (more)
(LinuxWorld) ¡ª It's a bad itch. I've had it for years. For a short period,
back in 1988 and 1989, I had a fix for it. But that didn't last. Now, thanks
to an unlikely pair (Nick Petreley and Whil Hentzen), it's back. Let me
explain.
In the late 1980s, I used to hang out on Portal, which was sort of a
step-sister of The Well, a popular online watering hole at the time.
Remember, these were the days before easy Internet access from anywhere to
anywhere. Our rag-tag band of migrant online addicts used a flat-rate service
called PC Pursuit to connect to Portal. It made it affordabl... (more)
(LinuxWorld) -- A long and sometimes bitter thread entitled "A Modest
Proposal: We need a Patch Penguin" has been the center of attention for many
on the Linux kernel mailing list the past few weeks. (See Resources for the
URL to join the list, but beware before subscribing, it has very high
traffic.) Underlying the debates on the best methods and/or tools to improve
the kernel hacking process is a more troubling question: can Linus Torvalds
continue to successfully lead Linux development?
Rob Landley began the 300+ message thread on January 28th, when he wrote:
Okay everybody, th... (more)
(LinuxWorld) — My boss sent me to a seminar to evaluate a hot
technology that might prove useful: voice recognition. Kurzweil, a pioneer in
the black art, conducted the seminar. I concluded voice recognition was nifty
and gave impressive demo, but getting reliable, speaker-independent,
continuous-speech recognition was beyond the ken of current technology. That
was in 1980. It's still a fair summation today.
For some people, the promise of voice recognition is a siren call heard above
the noise of reality. The desire to produce text from the spoken word remains
strong. A fr... (more)
(LinuxWorld) These are tight economic times. One of the things I can't
afford to do any longer is to run out and buy the latest distribution of
Linux to hit the shelves, whether it be from Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros or Red
Hat.
Little good it would do me if I could; Susan is using the laptop and I am
down to a single computer in my home office. This is my work machine and I
prefer to leave it on the same distribution and release for long periods.
Recently I decided to put my Red Hat Network (RHN) subscription to greater
use. I normally use RHN to run up2date at least weekly so I ... (more)
Joe Barr is a freelance journalist covering Linux, open source and network security. His 'Version Control' column has been a regular feature of Linux.SYS-CON.com since its inception. As far as we know, he is the only living journalist whose works have appeared both in phrack, the legendary underground zine, and IBM Personal Systems Magazine.
Scott Sellers
Anthony Franco
Daniel Morris
Wayne Walls
Niki Acosta
Jereme Hancock
Oren Michels
Marvin Wheeler
Douglas Kim
