Showing all newswire headlines

When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.

The ISO has taken over control of the Open XML specification and started a committee to consider harmonization with the OpenDocument Format (ODF). Wednesday was the last day that all resolutions to the new standard, called ISO/IEC 29500, were accepted, according to Brian Jones, a program manager for office at Microsoft who has been involved in the standardization process.

Nevada build 85 id the first SNV build implementing Xen 3.1.2 bits. It's well known that straight forward attempt to install SNV85 DomU at Xen 3.2 Linux Dom0 immediatelly crashes due to broken by Xen 3.2 backward compatibility.

I've been using OpenBSD for a few months now, and one of the problems I've had is the inability to find the master configuration file for .fvwmrc. I've read the man page for fvwm but didnt' read it closely enough. The answer was there all the time. I've grown quite fond of the Fvwm window manager. These days I prefer it to Fluxbox, even, and I have OpenBSD to thank for introducing me to it. (Note: I didn't have the same feeling about Twm, the default window manager in FreeBSD. Even though Fvwm is based on Twm, the former is way, way better than the latter.)

Hardware is always getting faster and with it Windows increases it's system requierments, but Linux does not. In time, this could be an important factor driving Linux's success.

An online retailer specializing in mini-ITX boards, systems, and accessories has started selling mini-ITX and pico-ITX systems pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux. Logic Supply says that as a Canonical Solution Provider partner, it has staff ready to support approved systems under the popular desktop and server Linux OS.

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

A visiting Red Hat executive has said that wariness on the part of a number of government CIOs over adopting open source is not a reflection of Australia's tech savvy, but the result of a"lack of understanding" of the software and its community.

Analyst Opinion - Last week, I was in China and witnessed the launch of the first generation Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform products based on Intel's new Atom processor. This got me thinking back to what we had before the MID and why some of those products were successful and others were not. Of course, now we can speculate who will be successful with the MID.

[I was reading it and thinking "what's wrong with this guy?" and only at the end noticed who was the author... You can sense Rob Enderle from a mile away! -J.]

I'll never forget attending the first LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco in 1999, and getting a marketing hand-out from the Abiword team that was printed on re-used office paper. Almost 10 years later, the nimble Word clone has gotten to be "as good as they come," writes Myank Sharma in a detailed Linux.com review.

Canonical, promoter of Ubuntu Linux, has plenty of momentum on the desktop. But as Canonical gears up for a server push, at least one major server vendor says it has no plans to make an Ubuntu server move. Here are the details, from The VAR Guy.

Most of what we offer in Breaking News are roundups of the day's news — a convenient place to find the most important developments and have a chuckle at the same time. It's not that often that I get to do first-hand, on-the-scene reporting, so I was somewhat surprised last week to open an email from one of Cisco's PR reps, offering the opportunity to report an announcement of interest to the Linux and Open Source community. Being the curious sort, I couldn't pass up such an opportunity.

In its push to beat Microsoft to the unified communications punch, Cisco Systems is quietly embracing Linux and promoting a new software development kit for branch offices and unified communications. Here's some unique perspective from The VAR Guy.

Over the past year, the OOXML debate launched a worldwide discussion about what an open standard should be, how it impacts the technology industry, and why open standards are important. Last week, OOXML–an XML format designed for Microsoft’s office suite–was approved as a standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). In past articles1 2, we have discussed problems with voting irregularities, the use of a fast-track process without adequate industry review, proprietary Microsoft technologies used without specification, and other problems. Now that OOXML has been approved despite these objections, let’s take a look at the standardization process and the impact that OOXML’s approval will have in the office suite space.

Watching the evolution of open source tools for video editing and manipulation over the last 10 years has been less than a thrilling experience. But are things about to change for the better in the near future? Can even the people most disenchanted with the current state of affairs feel tempted to regain a spark of hope?

Hewlett-Packard's Unix team has rolled out a fresh release of the HP-UX operating system, and has yet again fiddled with the various flavors of the software that customers can acquire. HP-UX 11i v3 Update 2 (no, seriously) features some tweaks to the kernel and elsewhere, providing what HP claims is a 20 per cent performance boost over v3's initial release. HP also claims Update 2 can double the network speed for certain workloads.

Networking goliath Cisco is now opening its Integrated Services Router (ISR)platform to become a Linux-based application server platform. The move could have wide-ranging implications, as Cisco's gear has millions of deployments that now can be leveraged to serve applications directly.

Power management on computers has three parts: selecting devices that are more power-efficient, tuning your systems to run more efficiently, and configuring systems to use less power during periods of inactivity. Servers, desktop machines, and laptops usually need different power management schemes; there isn't a one-size-fits-all.

Tomasz Bednarski (Mandriva Poland) wrote a letter to PKN president, Tomasz Schweitzer, in which he expressed his concerns about the Polish OOXML ratification process which Bednarski took part of, as a member of the technical committee 182. We publish the translation of his letter and the response from Schweitzer.

The VAR Guy was guilty of hyping Windows-based Ultra-Portables from startups like OQO a year ago, but he has drastically changed his thinking about the Ultra-Portable computer market. He thinks current market dynamics greatly favor Linux over Windows in the Ultra-Portable industry. Here’s why.