Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft is continuing to spread FUD about Linux and scare manufacturers into paying them to use Linux. The latest company to fall into Microsoft's demands is Onkyo.

The Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) runs Linux, but getting it to run well requires some tweaking. This first article, Part 1, introduces the features and benefits of PS3 Linux, shows you how to use them effectively, and suggests the kind of trickery that might get improved performance or a more usable display.

Developers thinking of using Linux as an embedded operating system won’t want to miss the annual Embedded Linux Conference coming to Silicon Valley next month. The event boasts enlightening keynote talks by embedded Linux luminaries Andrew Morton, Tim Bird, and Henry Kingman, plus numerous technical sessions.

Firefox 3 may still be a beta, Beta 4 to be exact, but in a recent Reuters news story, Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer said of the browser, "In many ways it is much more stable than anything else out there." Is Firefox 3 Beta 4 ready for prime time? The Firefox Beta 4 Web page still declared, as of March 24, that Mozilla does "not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download this beta release, as it is intended for testing purposes only."

DCPI, a technology consulting firm based in New York City, specializes in providing custom content management solutions. DCPI uses open source software and recommends it to clients who need powerful, flexible content management solutions, but face budget challenges in a belt-tightening economy. President and founder Joe Bachana says he discovered the merits of building a business on open source first through personal experience.

NComputing has sold more than 600,000 virtual desktops in the last three years, offering an innovative way to harness what it calls “the untapped power of existing PCs.” The 5-year-old NComputing provides the software that creates a virtual desktop environment on any Windows- or Linux-based computer. The NComputing solution differs from competitors Citrix Systems, Microsoft and VMware by also including a client device that improves I/O through a patented process.

ISO’s JTC-1 directives were designed to provide a fair, consensus-based way to design standards that are portable, interoperable, and adaptable to all languages and cultures. The OOXML proposal has suffered from two basic problems: (1) voting irregularities, and (2) the use of a fast-track process for a complex, new, large specification that has not received adequate industry review. The resulting specification was driven almost exclusively by one vendor, has not achieved industry consensus, and has had thousands of issues logged against it, largely due to issues involving implementability, portability, and interoperability.

The Joomla website proclaims that, 'Joomla is one of the most powerful open source content management systems on the planet.' Sure, they're biased about their collaborative open source creation. But there's no arguing that Joomla is quickly becoming one of the top content management system platforms on the Internet.

One of the remaining gaps in the GNU/Linux desktop is an editor for producing Flash content. When viewing Flash files, users can limp along with Adobe's proprietary player or the still-incomplete although free Gnash player, but the best they can do for Flash creation is employ the limited ability of OpenOffice.org Draw to export to the format. Considering the often trivial uses to which Flash is put, this lack is not entirely lamentable, but the fact remains that nothing remotely comparable to Adobe's Flash CS3 Professional. Salasaga, which until recently was called the Flame Project, is an effort to fill this gap by providing the functionality of Adobe Captivate for producing Flash computer tutorials and animations.

Those of us who were using Linux full-time around the turn of the century will remember that the state of web browsing on Linux was a little scary then. The only real option available was the binary-only Netscape 4 client; it was buggy and old. It really seemed like the web was going to move forward without Linux, and that there was not a whole lot we could do about it.

Our database now contains over 2000 projects that are using the GPL v3. This is a large milestone for the license, and seems to still be the beginning of wider adoption. Nine months have passed since the release of the controversial license and it has already gained 2k projects. At this rate the GPL v3 is being adopted by 1000 projects every 4-5 months, and if the trend continues, the license will be used by 5000 projects by the end of the year.

"Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. We look forward to welcoming more new contributors and projects this year," begins a page listing all the projects planning to participate in this year's GSoC. Among the numerous planned participtants there are many kernel projects, including DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Git, GNU/Hurd, Linux, Minix, and NetBSD.

Etoys is one of the most interesting activities included on the OLPC XO laptops distributed during the Give One Get One program late last year, which gave North Americans a first look at the controversial laptop. The XO's unique vocabulary -- Etoys as an activity instead of application -- underscores the fact that the XO is designed as an educational tool for the classroom.

Just about every Linux distro comes with a variety of programming tools. Some automatically get installed when you install Linux, and others are available in the distro's package repositories. But, what if the development tools that come with your distro don't do the job for you? What if, for example, you want to develop software in Pascal or BASIC, and your distro's repositories don't contain tools for those languages?

A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced hisRuby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there.

We often hear from readers who want to track the development process of their favorite Linux distribution but don't know where to start. Budding Linux enthusiasts frequently ask how the release cycles work, what the version numbers mean, and what options are available for end-user testing prior to official releases. The answers to those questions differ depending on the distribution, but we are going to attempt to address those questions for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE—three of the most prominent desktop Linux distributions.

Last year AMD introduced the flagship 790 Chipset series as part of their Spider Platform for use with the Phenom processors and Radeon HD 3800 graphics. Until earlier this month when AMD introduced the 780 Series, missing was any chipset with integrated graphics capabilities supporting these first AMD quad-core processors. Now we have AMD's 780G and 780V Chipsets, which are designed to be the mainstream solutions to the 790FX, but they pack the best integrated graphics processor (IGP) ever created by the combined ATI/AMD engineering talent. Since its launch at the CeBIT trade show, the AMD 780G has received rave reviews for its vehement performance due to its graphics core that's derived from the AMD RV610. The benchmarks available on launch day were only for Microsoft Windows operating systems, but this morning we have the Radeon HD 3200 Linux results from the AMD 780G. Is this IGP a crown jewel on Linux?

The VAR Guy is in the market for a small office printer that supports Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP. Alas, most PC companies do a lousy job describing which of their printers work with Ubuntu. Which means they’re leaving easy money on the table. Here’s our resident blogger’s sad story so far.

As I look at the new PC-BSD 1.5 (Edison), I cannot help but flashing back to the days when Linux desktop was not that mature as it is today. The PC-BSD project commenced 3 years ago with user-friendliness in mind. Since then, efforts have been put into making PC-BSD desktop operating system as usable as possible for the casual desktop PC users. The challenge was pioneered by Kris Moore, the lead developer, and a few volunteers in bringing the open-sourced and BSD-licensed Unix-like FreeBSD (famed for being a very secure and stable server operating system) to the desktop of normal or casual PC users. Interestingly, this project was acquired by iXsystem, a leading provider of high-end hardware solution in October 2006.

"Free" has been a founding concept in the Linux world since before there was Linux — or GNU/Linux, if you prefer. In his history of the GNU project, Richard M. Stallman begins, "When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking."