william_lorenz writes "Photos and highlights from the Ohio LinuxFest are finally online! The next event will be coming up soon, and people interested in speaking are asked to answer the Call for Presentations before May 15, 2004. The event will be hosted in October of 2004 this year, and there's even a T-shirt design contest for all the artists out there. More than 10 Linux users groups from Ohio alone were involved this past year, and people came from all over the Mid-West."

comforteagle writes "While you have a nice leisurely Sunday afternoon/evening you might want to read this fine article on easing into Subversion from CVS. Written by versioning admin Mike Mason, it talks about the philosophy and design behind Subversion (now 1.0), how it improves upon CVS, and how to get started using it."

tr0tt3r writes "There is a thriving community of people who are devoted to using Free and Open Source Software to run Medical Practices. While there are many projects that are capable of tracking patient data and scheduling functions, there has been no way to run a Doctors office using GPL software because there was no GPL Medical Billing. This is mostly due to the difficulty of handling HCFA 1500 alongside EDI formats like X12.Recently several different projects have banded together to create FreeB the first GPL medical billing system."

I confirm writes "The BBC's Bill Thompson summarises the GNU/Linux vs. Microsoft struggle as a "cold war", and in one choice quote says:"It is rather ironic that Microsoft and other closed model companies rather resemble the Stalinist or Maoist model of a command economy with complete centralised control." I'm not sure I accept Thompson's conclusions, however: "So now would be a good time to start thinking about how we persuade governments that market in software may eventually need to be regulated, just as the market in electricity, water and food is, and that that regulation may well include a statutory duty to disclose source code and allow it to be used elsewhere." "

An anonymous reader writes "This article provides an overview of the types of changes that you may need to make to a customized or specialized Linux installation in order to use it with the Linux 2.6 kernel, building upon the configuration file and administrative updates that were touched upon in the third article in this series. This article continues William von Hagen's popular series on using the new Linux 2.6 kernel, which places special emphasis on the primary issues in migrating existing drivers, applications, and embedded Linux deployments to a Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel."

LnxAddct writes "An article on CNet reports that Macromedia will start taking Linux more seriously. It will start this new initiative by making it's suite of tools run easily under WINE, then depending on the response it gets, it will port it's tools natively to Linux! Their Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, stated, 'What we've been investigating is, When will it be time to bring our tools to Linux? I think it might be happening now.' Maybe 2004 will be the year of Linux."

chromatic writes "Perl.com has just published Exegesis 7, Damian Conway's explanation of how text formatting will work Perl 6 (and now, Perl 5, thanks to his Perl6::Form module) will work. Think of it as Perl 1 for the 21st century. Also, Parrot 0.1.0, the virtual machine for Perl 6 and several other dynamic languages, released on Leap Day -- ever wanted to program in an object oriented assembly language?"

An anonymous reader writes "This is the first article I've ever read specifically about hiring open source developers, and how to judge their ability not just to code but to work with others. It's reprinted over at ITMJ [part of OSDN, as this site is] from a book by Martin Fink, the General Manager for HP's Linux Systems Division. Brings up a lot of good points, including how you need to make sure your open source people are developing things (on company time) that do the company some good, not just scratching their own itches. Fun quote: 'Discover what pseudonyms your candidate uses online. Look at the archives at SlashDot and other online locales. Does your candidate hide behind secret pseudonyms to trash other individuals? Is there passion without condemnation?'"

Howard Vanbel writes "Apparently the developers of GnomeMeeting have released the final v1.0 version of the videoconferencing/VoIP software. GnomeMeeting started as a final studies work at the Department of Computing Science and Engineering of the Universite Catholique de Louvain and after 3 years of development, GnomeMeeting 1.00 is ready! GnomeMeeting is the most advanced Open Source VoIP and videoconferencing software available - there's more info in the project FAQ."

sirshannon asks: "Frans Bouma's LLBLGen is a free, open source code generator that he licensed under the BSD license so that anyone could use it in any way, as long as they gave him some credit. Now Codease has released a product that apparently uses his code for 90% of the functionality but doesn't bother to attribute it to him. Frans lives in The Netherlands, Codease is in Singapore. What is the correct way to pursue this?"

andrew cooke writes "A while ago I read the comments following a Slashdot book review. Someone had posted a request for books that covered a wider range of languages than Java, C, Python, etc. Well, I thought, why not review Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures? It's a classic from the underworld of functional programming - recognised as the standard reference, yet clear enough to work as an introduction to the subject for anyone with a basic functional programming background. Of course, some readers won't know what functional programming is, or what is special about pure data structures. So I hope that this review can also serve as something of an introduction to the languages that I (a software engineer paid to work with Java, C, Python, etc) choose to use in my spare time, just for the joy of coding." Read on for the rest; even if you're not planning to give up C or Perl, there are links here worth exploring.

jbradleymd writes "Javalobby members can purchase a development version of the Homepod (a wireless digital music player running JAVA on Linux) for $249 (reg $395). Register free as a javalobby member at javalobby.com A previous Slashdot post discusses the Homepod."

Ars-Fartsica writes "MozillaZine is now featuring a set of slides regarding future directions for Mozilla that were detailed at the recent Mozilla developers meeting. SVG and integration with programming languages are among the directions discussed."

Andrew Walrond writes "Rubyx the OS is created from source by rubyx the ruby script. Got it? The same small ruby script handles all subsequent package management, customised parallel and distributed user-mode package builds, and can create a live CD. For good measure, Rubyx (the os) sports an all new init and rationalised service management system written in ....can you guess?..."

Carlos Camacho writes "iDevGames, a Macintosh Game Developer's Site has started issuing small programming challenges to Mac developers. The first challenge just wrapped up and the result is two nifty apps. The source code for both apps, and all apps entered into the programming challenges, will be released as open source. The next challenge has added an extra day, so developers have 72 hours. The focus is on creating an application to demonstrate 'A* pathfinding.'"

cosyne asks: "Seeing the recent announcement about FreeS/WAN reminds me that there are many cool projects that I'm mostly unaware of (or, more often, completely oblivious to), which I only hear about when Slashdot posts a 'Developers finally giving up on this cool project' story. What projects (software or otherwise) are out there that would benefit from more involvement if only they had the publicity?"

An anonymous reader submits "The aim of the POVRay Short Code Contest SCC3 is to create an artistic work using POVRay (a free raytracing program) using only a limited number of bytes. The last round had an upper limit of 500 bytes and this round increased the challenge by reducing the maximum number of bytes to 256 (about 2 average length English sentences). This round saw some exceptional entries, an example of extreme image compression since these images can be created at any arbitrary resolution! The competition is now closed to entries and voting, which is open to the public, has started. The 51 entries can be viewed here. POVRay can be downloaded free from povray.org/."

Quique writes "The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality Team Project, a community of contributors who will serve as a gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project, and as a new way for people to begin contributing. KDE is a very attractive project, offering high quality software and is freely available. There is a lot of people who feel the urge to give something back, but stop in the middle of the way, frustrated by the steep learning curve. The aim of the project is to reduce these barriers by welcoming these potential contributors, and by offering documentation, support, and even guidance if requested. The objective is to support the new contributors, (programmers, documenters, testers, artists...). Have you ever wished to help KDE in some way, but never knew how? Keep reading!"

Andrew Leonard writes "Salon has a loooong interview with Eugene Jarvis, the creator of legendary arcade video games Defender and Robotron, up today. Jarvis talks about why he is pro-emulators, anti-Grand Theft Auto, still focused on arcade games, and deeply worried about terrorism. It's a good read, even if you have to watch a ten second ad to get access."

mbrubeck writes "After almost two years of development, the free cross-platform sound editor Audacity has released a new stable version for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. Audacity 1.2 has major improvements including professional-quality dithering and resampling, and new pitch- and speed-changing effects. Our previous stable release was announced on Slashdot in June 2002. More recently, Audacity was presented at this year's CodeCon in San Francisco."