Showing all newswire headlines

Pattern #5: Linux is not secure. There are some out there who would like for you to believe that Linux is unsafe. What better way to instill fear than to form doubt in your mind about a system’s abilities to protect your data?

Google's Picasa software is a powerful tool for managing your photo collection. It provides a simple interface for organizing your pictures, as well as some easy-to-use, yet powerful image manipulation tools. However, until recently the Windows version of Picasa has had some features that put it above the Linux version; some of these features, like Picasa Web Album integration, are at the core of the program, without which Picasa isn't very useful. With its newest release, the Linux version is being brought up to par with its Windows counterpart.

A new Australian chip small enough to be embedded into home and office equipment promises wireless audio and video transfer at up to 5 gigabits per second, ten times faster than today’s solutions at only one-tenth the cost!

[This is not FOSS related but if true, too cool to not share. - Scott]

GENEVA -- Feb 19, 2008 ' The creators of OsiriX, the advanced open-source PACS workstation DICOM viewer for the Mac OS, will for the first time show the new version of their 64-bit viewer on the new Mac Pro 8-Core workstation at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2008.

Microsoft made major concessions Thursday that should make it easier for open source software to dovetail with or even replace Microsoft products, but a major caveat means the company's legal threats remain alive and well. Microsoft announced a number of moves that could significantly improve its relationship with the open source world.

Some platforms may lose their operating system-specific functionality due to the lack of schema support from the LDAP server. This article presents a solution for some non-IBM LDAP servers to support full AIX user management functionality by providing the AIX schema for these server types and the steps to update these LDAP server types with the schema.

Menus, pop-up menus, and toolbars in Eclipse plug-in or RCP application can be tricky. No more! Eclipse V3.3 introduced a new mechanism that’s easier than ever, providing a more generic approach for configuring and adding menu items to accelerate plug-in and RCP development.

Misys has released Misys Health Connect on Sourceforge as the 'Braid' project. Ryan Bloom comments '...There are a couple of caveats. First, we know that not all of the unit tests pass, that is one of our first projects now that the code is out. Second, most of the development team is about to head to HIMSS, so we aren’t going to be quick to respond to questions until after we get back...'

[I audio interviewed Ryan and several others from Misys at SCALE 6x, expect to see it soon. As soon as I finish transcribing it. - Scott]

I don't know what took me so long. After unseating Ubuntu from the No. 1 spot on Distrowatch months ago, PCLinuxOS has shown no signs of folding in the face of all things Feisty and Gutsy. Even my co-workers (OK, co-worker, in this case the Los Angeles Daily News' City Hall reporter Rick Orlov) are telling me how great PCLinuxOS is. Even Scott Ruecker, master of LXer, has sung its praises.

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday released the source code aimed at making it easier to build media applications for x86 multicore processors. The AMD Performance Library, which is now called Framewave, is available on SourceForge.

Microsoft today made a major announcement relating to its core products and involving the degree and manner in which it will make the details of those products available to developers. At first glance, this appears to be an important decision by Microsoft indicating a greater willingness to be both open and cooperative, but the devil will be in the not yet available details.

Func had an interesting beginning. It began not in a whiteboard-lined conference room, but in a small coffeeshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Greg DeKoenigsberg, Adrian Likins, Seth Vidal, and I were discussing how to make Linux easier to manage for large install bases. That’s when we came up with the idea for Func.

The KDE PIM crew met again at Osnabrück for three days of hacking, discussing and community building. The big topics were Akonadi and KDE 4.1. The team settled on the plan to release KDE PIM with KDE 4.1 based on the traditional backends and include the first platform release of Akonadi as the future base for PIM applications in and around KDE. The meeting was kindly hosted by Intevation and supported by the KDE e.V. and KDAB. Read on for a report or see the notes on the website.

New Categories and eligibility added to previous open voting process

While it may not let you go where no man has gone before, Celestia is an amazing desktop application that lets you go anywhere in the known Universe.You can view any object in the Solar System, travel to distant stars, and even leave the Galaxy, traveling faster than the speed of light, viewing high-res images of objects millions of miles away.

[My Sister who is a teacher in L.A. uses this program in her classroom and turned me on to it, very cool. - Scott]

If you can't go to FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting next weekend in Brussels, Belgium, you can still watch live video streams from the Debian Developer Room, thanks to their video team.

How to set up OpenOffice.org to work how you want it with templates and clip art, configurations, shortcuts, and more. You’ve been thinking about it for a while. You’ve seen the PDF converter and sighed longingly; you’ve blushed before the skeptical glances of your open-source and anti-Microsoft friends who say “You’re still using Microsoft Office?” you’re looking at your budget and wondering why you would pay to get Microsoft Office 2007. And you’ve received Word 2007 files and haven’t been able to open them, so you know there’s going to be some file format issues no matter what you do. But you haven’t switched over to OpenOffice.org. Quite yet. I’m here to help.

One undeniable sign of progress among Linux distributions is the proliferation of easy-to-use, graphical package management applications. Tools like yum, Synaptic, and CNR are the rule these days rather than the exception. Mac OS X has free software fans, and a well-maintained collection of software at MacPorts, but for a long time those fans have been limited to the command line for finding, installing, and updating the offerings. Now a new utility called Porticus has arrived to present a slick GUI interface to the MacPorts collection, and it could make some converts.

MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos is surely regarded as a rainmaker among the entrepreneurial wing of the open source movement. Not only did his company pick wisely when it came to endorsing an open source technology, it also convinced a major, publicly traded entity to part with $1bn for no discernable return - despite its own challenges in making money.

Free software programmers are fond of saying that they'd prefer not to reinvent the wheel. Apparently that attitude no longer applies to desktop menus, considering all the new options springing up. A few years ago, just about the only menu choices on the main desktop environments were the ones that shipped with them, or the exhaustive Debian ones. For five years, GNOME didn't even have a menu editor.