Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

LinuxBasic.org, an online community devoted to helping people learn to install and run Linux, has announced its second free Linux class. "An Introduction to Linux Basics" aims to instill a basic understanding about Linux for beginners who want to know more about how the system works, according to the site.

Advocates of free and open source software, myself included, like to talk about the "democratizing" effect of free software. Others, especially non-programmers, are quick to point out that the only technical people can take advantage of half of the enumerated freedoms in FOSS. The freedoms to modify and collaborate mean little if you don't know to program. Over time, I have come to the conclusion that the only good solution to this problem -- and one that I was initially quite opposed to -- is to teach everyone to program.

IBM says that its open source WebSphere Java application server is grabbing support from developers faster than any of its rivals. In a survey of Eclipse developers by US research firm Evans Data, 16 per cent said they used IBM's WebSphere Application Server Community Edition to deploy their apps, up from almost nothing a year ago.

OpenVPN is an easy-to-use open source VPN software based on SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) that offers cross-platform interoperability. The majority of OpenVPN tutorials I've found describe how users can connect to a corporate network from their laptops over insecure networks, such as the wireless network in a hotel. By contrast, the setup I'm about to describe is better suited for permanently connecting entire networks -- for example, branch offices to the headquarters of a company.

If you read almost any publication that talks about Apple from an IT point of view, you'll read a lot about Parallels Desktop for Mac, from Parallels. People talk about the kind of load Parallels puts on a system, or installing it, or whether it makes it easy to set up virtual machines, etc. But what you don't see a lot of (or enough of) is what it's like to work with Parallels, and that's what I'm going to talk about here today.

Italian POS (point-of-sale systems) specialist DA Sistemi Group, will soon obtain security approval from Visa, MasterCard, and JCB for a Linux-based PIN-entry terminal. The PINPAD DAndY Pad incorporates a security-oriented SoC (system-on-chip) and associated Linux software from Innova-Card, and targets supermarket and store counter payment transactions.

Free Software is big business. This may come as a surprise to those whose understanding of open source software development practice ends at the caffeinated hacker contributing code in the small hours from the comfort of his bedroom. But in between this, and the fact that five of the ten most reliable web hosters run their sites on the open source operating system Linux, is the story of an industry of support and bespoke development that gives the major corporations running this software the products and peace of mind they need to conduct business on a grand scale.

Red Hat is answering competitors in the Linux world with an SOA alliance that potentially unites JBoss with an open source rival. Systems integrator Bull is expanding an alliance with Red Hat by joining the JBoss community, where Bull will contribute to development of the middleware stack, and by becoming a strategic partner on the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS).

Ubuntu Multimedia Center is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with community and professional support.It is also a live cd that is ubuntu derived and also free. This system was inspired by the fact that ubuntu didn’t have much of a multimedia center.Because users would have to manually download the codecs for playing mp3’s and what not.The mail objective of this project is multimedia related programs available to users as easy as possible.

Document management systems do more than just store and retrieve files -- they also provide versioning, security, indexing, and metadata capabilities. DocMGR is a GPL-licensed Web-based document management system that supports LDAP directory service integration so that users on the network can authenticate against LDAP directly.

Web 2.0 has a lot to answer for. Why, incidentally, is it not simply Web 2? In any case, I have no quarrel with Web 2.0: what I do have a quarrel with is all the other 2dotohs that keep springing up. There is SaaS (software as a service) 2.0 for example and, most recently, Business Objects has been talking about BI 2.0.

Open source databases can save enterprises up to 60 percent over proprietary products, according to data collected by Forrester Research. Noel Yuhanna, a senior analyst at Forrester covering database management systems, estimated that average savings on the total cost of ownership are about 50 percent. The data is based on surveys and customer interviews.

In an interesting twist of irony, Oracle, which is taking aim at Linux leader Red Hat for being too expensive, is being undercut with an open source challenge to its namesake database. VoIP vendor Vonage Networks is deploying EnterpriseDB, which is built on top of the open source PostgreSQL database as an alternative to Oracle. EnterpriseDB Advanced Server adds Oracle compatibility to native PostgreSQL as well as performance improvements.

AVG has announced several new versions of their AVG antivirus offering for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD open source platforms. Avalanche will supply the AVG products to consumers and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) in Australia and New Zealand.

For some people, when Novell recently made a deal with Microsoft, they might as well have sold their soul to the devil. At the same time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been mouthing off about how Microsoft signed the pact because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."

Speaking at the JBoss World Berlin conference here, Werner Knoblich, vice president and general manager of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia) market for Red Hat, said JBoss momentum is very high in the EMEA region.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian today issued an "Open Letter to the Community from Novell," in which he defends his company's recent accord with Microsoft, and challenges recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents.

Organizing your favorite Web sites with bookmarks on Firefox can be tedious, especially when you want to keep your bookmarks synchronized across several computers at the same time. That's why I started using del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service now owned by Yahoo! Besides allowing me to access my bookmarks from any computer at any time, del.icio.us does a great job on keeping my bookmarks organized with tags instead of folders, and I can easily share my favorite Web sites with my friends.

"Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents. The agreement between our two companies puts in place a workable solution for customers for these issues, without requiring an agreement between our two companies on infringement.

If Microsoft is seeking for a courtroom collision with the world of free software, it may be disappointed. Novell's decision to accept $348m from Redmond in return for a patent agreement covering its SuSE Linux distribution won't be seen on CourtTV anytime soon, we learn. Instead it's adopting the stealthier strategy of changing the licensing terms under which Novell, which uses the community's code, receives the materials for its commercial product.