Showing all newswire headlines

One of the leading PHP experts is the Netherlands-based Ivo Jansch, Technical Director and CTO of the specialist PHP and Zend company Ibuildings. Here he talks here about his initial scepticism when confronted with open source, what he views as the strengths – and weaknesses – of PHP, and how he would like to see it evolve.

I was already mourning the destruction of my Saturday, thanks to some blown deadlines, and was resigned to spending at least part of the day working. Then I made a fatal error: I read my email. There were two messages from readers that said, in essence, another article about RAID 5 was about as interesting as yet another fawning review of Ubuntu Retching Rabbit or Pooping Penguin or whatever the newest coolest release is, and RAID 5 has some serious flaws anyway, and if I really wanted to be hip and helpful I would write about RAID 10.

digiKam 0.10 is not only a port of the application to KDE 4. It also brings a few new features, including 'Timeline' applet. PolishLinux.org has a screenshot tour.

Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2008.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphic that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems, and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Instant messaging helps us connect with people online in real time. Many Linux users IM with either Pidgin (formerly Gaim) or Kopete, two applications that handle multiple IM protocols. Here are three alternatives to the top names that each focus on one of the major IM protocols, and offer some pretty cool options.

This report is an update to the risk report published in Red Hat Magazine in April 2007. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first three years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimize the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped.

OpenProj 1.0 was recently released by Projity, which offers a related commercial product called Project-On-Demand. OpenProj is written in Java and licensed under CPAL 1.0, and versions for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux can be downloaded from SourceForge.net. CPAL -- the Common Public Attribution License -- is a relatively new open source license, submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval last July. It is recognized by the Open Source Initiative as an open source license, but the FSF has not yet classified it. In spite of its approval by the OSI, I found the license difficult to parse, and recommend you have a lawyer review it so that he can advise you on what you can and cannot do with the application and the code before making a major investment of time and effort working with CPAL licensed code.

Competitors should keep a weary eye on newly minted Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose fresh face masks a certified executioner who has a plan to grow the open source leader into a billion-dollar juggernaut supplying data center infrastructure software. The 40-year-old Whitehurst left his position as COO of Delta Airlines to replace Matt Szulik and brings with him a business savvy he intends to soak into the corporate culture of Red Hat.

What's on the tips of everyone's tongues this year? Change. One change everyone should consider is making the switch from proprietary, expensive software to the world of open source and Linux.

If you haven't heard, Linux is taking a leap forward. It's becoming available at many stores as the primary operating system on several computers. Just recently I was shopping online at best buy and saw they have a $400 laptop that comes completely suited with Linux as its ONLY operating system. What caught my attention was the 4GB SSD. This technology is becoming more and more available. I know what everyone's firsts thoughts are when they scan over the 4GB Hard Drive. That's ridiculously small. I can't even fit all my operating system programs on that amount of space. But you can with Linux.

I’m in Geneva this week because I’m taking part in the Open Forum Europe conference “Standards and the Future of the Internet.” In addition, of course, the ISO/IEC OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting is taking place this week. To be clear, I’m not participating in the BRM but there is a tremendous buzz and a lot of murmurs about it. I hope that people who are taking part in the meeting will be blogging throughout the week.

[The OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting is this week, so expect a lot of coverage on it during the next two weeks - Sander]

Sean Daly was at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. While there, he interviewed Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe about Firefox 3, the Thunderbird spin-off, FOSS in general and the future of web browsing and web standards.

Microsoft's decision last week to let everyone snoop through its software secrets means vulnerabilities and exploits will almost certainly climb in the short term, security researchers said today. But the move to open the communications protocols and APIs for Microsoft Corp.'s newest and highest-profile products, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Office 2007 and others, should translate into better security for everyone in the long run, said those same researchers.

[There's what you get from Microsoft's new "openness". Just more zombies. - Sander]

VMware today inked a quartet of software deals with server giants Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens. The agreements will infuriate Microsoft which is struggling to get its own virtualisation offering onto the market. VMware said that, under the agreement – financial terms of which remain secret – its ESX 3i hypervisor will be embedded in servers produced by the four manufacturers.

A federal judge recently got so infuriated by the conduct of two highly regarded trial attorneys that he overturned a jury's $51 million verdict, then ordered the lawyers to pay the fees and costs of the opposing lawyers. He ruled that the entire trial was "frivolous" and the case filed solely to stifle competition rather than to protect a patent. Now the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed Matsch's decision to overturn the verdict.

[A bit off topic, but very interesting for anyone following the SCO saga. I'd love to see this happen to Boies Schiller & Flexner - Sander]

Linux will become the mobile operating system of choice in time but it still needs to break the proprietary hold the major players have over the mobile sector, says Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

Applications as well as users can retrieve protein and DNA sequences and data stored in flat-file databases in either EMBL or FASTA format, using SQL query language, with the EMBL/FASTA Wrapper for WebSphere Information Integrator. This technology runs on AIX, Linux, Java, and Windows platforms.

GNU/Linux systems have often come under attack for the difficulty involved with setting-up and configuring various wireless devices. Thanks to NetworkManager we now have a system that allows us to quickly and easily connect to different networks. As a result of improvements made to NetworkManager during the Fedora 8 release cycle the developers are ready to deliver some incredible new features, including ad-hoc networking, multiple active devices and internet connection sharing. To find out more we talked with Dan Williams, Fedora project member and NetworkManager developer.

Kommander, the graphical scripting tool, has been radically improved for KDE 3.5.9. While our next goal is a KDE 4 executor, then a full update we wanted to offer some new functionality for KDE 3 users. Best of all, shortly you will be able to run what was built in KDE 3 unaltered and native in KDE 4. In 3.5.9 the focus was on the executor, but new features are in the editor. That includes popup menus, KPart creation, a DatePicker widget, widget creation on the fly, embedded widgets, standard dialogs, and a lot more. There is a new plugin architecture and new plugins for database, KParts, HTTP connections and even a KHTML widget.