Showing all newswire headlines

As Downloadsquad is reporting, the Chromium source code for Google's Chrome open source browser has already been fashioned into a new version of the browser: Iron. Apparently German company SRWare developed its knock-off of Chrome for users who are concerned about Google's policies for collecting private information--a constant Achilles heel for the company. SRWare's home page is in German, but the folks at the Incomplete News Project have published a translation with details on what SRWare's version does.

KDE's Konqueror is as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. It works as both a file manager and a Web browser, and you can enhance it even further by adding new commands to its repertoire by means of service menus. The new commands appear in Konqueror's context menu when you right-click a file. Here's how to create service menus, and some specific commands that you might want to use in them.

In my last article I talked about how interest leads people to program. Then life rose up behind me like a giant Doberman pincer and bit me on my backside; so, I didn’t think of programming for over four months. However, just this week something happened that made me want to program again. I was preparing to teach some students how to use dichotomous keys to identify organisms. Suddenly, while I was staring at a simple teaching key for identifying fruit, my eyes glazed over and I had a moment of clarity. I realized that I was looking at the basis of a very simple program. It was a list of rules. Simple statements that said, “If this go here, if not go there.” In the back of my mind I could see the “either/or” options and the “goto” statements of my coding past, and I knew in my heart that I must make this key into a program!

Learn how to use Perl and the Imager module to enhance mapping applications by extracting and applying height information based on color. The end result is a third dimension of data, showing more information in the same space and opening up new methods of visualization for your map users.

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first beta of KOffice 2.0. The goal of this release is to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the digital office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements. Read on for more information or see the announcement and download it from the release notes.

This post comes hard on the heels of an important piece of news... at least two Open Source companies have become part of the Becta's official list of suppliers to the education sector. The new procurement frame work under the aegis of the OGC relaunches the supply of ICT to education. The emphasis is clear: deliver value for money to UK schools.

In today’s world the Palm does not produce the same level of excitement in developers that it used to. One of most important reasons for this is that the Palm OS itself has too many limitations, and, frankly, Windows Mobile is not exciting. Palm, the company, has been aware of this fact for years and has been promising a new Linux based OS for just as long. However, the mythical Linux based Palm has never come ... But, now there is Android.

You can monitor your computers in a wide variety of ways. Large proprietary applications make sense for large installations that can afford the expense of both the software and consultants who fine-tune the systems. Open source monitoring solutions like Nagios or OpenNMS cost nothing to acquire but still require planning and tweaking. When you need to address smaller problems with process data on a system, the process monitoring tool ps-watcher comes in handy.

Oracle announced at its OpenWorld event this week two new partnerships intended to boost the firm's cloud computing offerings. The enterprise software maker announced Monday that it has teamed with Amazon to offer enterprise customers options available via the mega-e-tailer's Elastic Compute Cloud service.

One of the most frustrating aspects of open source but commercially supported software is that it takes many orders of magnitude of freebie customers to attain a base of core customers who will pay for a glorified product with commercial-grade installation and ongoing tech support. There is always a temptation to try to monetize the vast installed base of users who are making use of the so-called development or community editions of programs. But Red Hat isn't going for it.

Despite a slowing U.S. economy, Linux vendor Red Hat continues to grow, thanks in part to uptake of its JBoss middleware solutions as well as an expanding business for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions. But it cautioned investors not to expect an immediate return from its recent moves in virtualization and from other initiatives, like Fedora.

Everyone is all ga-ga this week over the G1, the new HTC phone from T-Mobile, which is the first phone powered by Google's Android phone OS. So to temper the excitement a bit and get back to reality, I came up with a list of 5 reasons not to get the G1.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 on a headless Ubuntu 8.04 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

A year ago, 15 percent of Alfresco’s sales involved IT channel partners. This year, the open source content management company will drive 60 percent of its sales through IT channel partners. Here's how.

Intense Debate is one of the newer comment systems that aim to replace the built-in comments of the various blogging platforms. With their recent acquisition by Automattic (the makers of Wordpress) I believe the time has come to make them come to the "light side".

Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They're relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you). But do they mean much? Not really, I think.

How to replace system boards using DR for maximum uptime on Mx000 series Sun servers. Shifting gears again, today we're going to take a look at doing some hardware maintenance on Sun's (or, technically, Fujitsu's) new Mx000 series servers. At this point, I think there are only 4 variants available; the M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000.

Kudos, Red Hat: You beat financial estimates for your current quarter. Wall Street was impressed. Still, The VAR Guy was disappointed will one key data point you shared this week. Here's why.

I applaud Canonical for pushing Ubuntu beyond the desktop. But I wonder: Can Ubuntu really gain traction on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Or put more bluntly: Does the world really need another mobile operating system to compete against Apple iPhone, Google Android, Windows Mobile and all the mobile Linuxes? I applaud Canonical for pushing Ubuntu beyond the desktop — up onto servers, and down onto mobile devices. But I’m starting to wonder: Can Ubuntu really gain traction on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Or put more bluntly: Does the world really need another mobile device operating system? Frankly, I'm not sure.

You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for nearly 10 years, and has as yet modest success. Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters.