Showing headlines posted by hkwint

LXer feature Every sysadmin has his own "can't live without" tools. Today, I'll review some tools I can't live without, and some others which just make life easier. The covered tools include command line tools, GUI tools, and even a webpage.

Diggable

[Ed: Hans wrote this very useful article. He says that plenty of other tools exist for admins out there besides the ones he uses regularly. Maybe some of them are on your list. Let us know about your most valuable utilities in the comments section. -tadelste]

We are announcing a bug squashing period, starting now, and ending 14 Dec 2005, 11:59 CET. Squashing a bug gets you a certain number of points (depending mostly on triviality and severity). At the end of the three weeks, the 25 bug squashers with the highest score shall receive a copy of my book, The Debian System [1], donated by the publisher. If this turns out to be a success, we'll lather-rinse-repeat sometime soon.

[Ed: - This is huge! Office XML will be under a RAND license, and will include a convenant 'Not to sue'. They bent under the pressure, it seems. It may be too little and too late though - hkwint ]

PARIS — Nov. 22, 2005 — Microsoft Corp. today announced it will take steps to offer the file format technology behind billions of documents to customers and the industry as an international standard.

At the 18th annual Supercomputing conference held last week at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, vendors combined forces in an effort to spread supercomputing beyond its academic and research roots.

Leading the charge was Microsoft. The software giant used the conference as a launch pad for its formal entry into the market dominated by Linux.

ALMOST 80 per cent of Australian TAFEs and universities plan to use customised, third-party or open source applications, along with commercial platforms to develop e-learning, a study shows.

Vienna's 'soft' migration to open source on the desktop is proving more popular with users than expected, according to Erwin Gillich, the head of IT at Vienna's municipal authority.

Mozilla is preparing to use an "open source marketing" drive online to promote the next generation of Firefox, its free web browser.

Through a series of online viral videos, made by volunteers who enter a competition, Mozilla is hoping to repeat the success of the last year’s campaign to promote the launch of Firefox 1.0.

With some activists claiming that the whole concept of patent pledges is misguided, ZDNet UK spoke with OSDL chief executive Stuart Cohen to find out the wider aims of the project.

One teacher's willingness to dive into free software is helping the entire school to use a network that is newer, more secure and more diverse in its application--and the students love it.

LXer Day Desk: 11-18-2005 Two days ago, Microsoft sent out a press release about a study commissioned by Security Innovations, titled “Security Innovation Finds Microsoft Windows Platform More Reliable Than Linux”. Now, from previous “Get the Facts” studies, we know, what Microsoft states in its press release, and what the report itself states, are often two different things. Lets look into this study to find out if it made big errors, and lets try to find out how Microsoft distorts the facts found in this report in their press release. Diggable

Linux has firmly stamped its authority on the supercomputing sector. The latest report from Top500, which releases a bi-annual report of the fastest computers in the world, shows Linux increasing its market share in this segment from 51.8% six months ago to 74.4%.

Open Source office suites have been in the spotlight recently with the current media frenzy about Massachusetts' decision to use the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for all documents created by state departments.
One of the office suites supporting ODF is KDE's KOffice.
KDE developer Raphael Langerhorst's talks about his experience with KOffice at home, university and in the business world, and the future of the suite.

For governments outside of the US and Europe, cost is a big motivator for using open source software - but it's not the only one.

[Ed. The seven page story features Linux succes-stories in Brazil, China and India. - hkwint]


Related Story:
Linux in Government: Essential IT Knowledge for Third World and Developing Countries

The Common Music Notation language helps you create complex musical scores and compositions, thanks to its Lisp advantages. This month, I continue our tour of notation programs for Linux with a look at the Common Music Notation system from composer/programmer Bill Schottstaedt.

One of the reasons why people switch to Firefox (also on the Linux platform) is the assumed security of the browser. Nonetheless, several vulnerabilities were found in Firefox the last few months, so the browser may be the weak spot in the security of your Linux-desktop.

Trying to address this problem, I researched two ways to make browsing under Firefox more secure: chrooting it, or making a seperate browse-only account. Both of them don't work. This article discusses why, and the possible solution.

The European Commission may bring a fresh round of competition charges against an already embattled Microsoft after it received several complaints recently about the software giant.

Legal troubles have led to the anti-patent group's hosting company pulling the plug on FFII.org

July 6th 2005 - The EU parliament finally has rejected the directive of 'in computers implemented inventions', called the software-patents directive in popular language. Of the 729 present parliament members, 648 voted against the directive, 14 witheld, and 18 voted in favour of it.

25 June 2005 -- German web fora have been agitated by online discussions and news articles about apparent interest conflicts of Klaus Heiner Lehne MEP, who, as a coordinator of the European People's Party in the Legal Affairs Committee, strongly opposed all amendments that had any limiting effect on patentability or enforcability, and actively fought in JURI as well as in Berlin and elsewhere for widest possible patentability (which also means patentability of software). It now appears that Lehne works as a Brussels lobbying consultant for multinational corporations who are the main clients of one of the leading lawfirms for patent litigation in Europe, which is also itself involved in patent lobbying and closely connected to lobbying organisations. (Quoted from ffii.org)

Taiwanese notebook giant Acer has started selling laptops loaded with the Linux operating system through its distributor and reseller channel.