Showing all newswire headlines

The schedules for all three days of sessions at the So Cal Linux Expo have been posted to the SCALE web site. All the commercial booths are full and several non-profit groups were added as well. Enlightenment, rarely seen at conferences will be showcasing the work going into E17. This is your opportunity to learn about the desktop that first defined the term "eye candy". Also added were OpenMoko, Damn Small Linux and for the first time ever OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD will each have a booth on the Expo floor.

[If any LXer Readers are going, look for me on Saturday and Sunday reporting on the event for LXer. - Scott]

In the latest Ubuntu weekly newsletter the Ubuntu folks announced the release of the Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Course. The modular course should take two days to complete all 10 of the lessons offered, but it is possible to cover topics and lessons independently of each other, learning whatever is of interest.

Last week we looked at the tempest over the "phone home" script in Fonality's trixbox CE (Community Edition). The problem has been resolved: A workaround was publicized right away, a fix released within a few days, and the current trixbox CE releases incorporate the fix. I said I would talk to the folks at Fonality, so here we are. I spoke to Chris Lyman, the CEO of Fonality, and Kerry Garrison, the trixbox Community Director, and their security engineers to get their perspective on these events. I also talked to my own little herd of helpful gurus, because while this incident is relatively minor, it's a useful lesson in sorting out conflicting information. The Open Source world is even freer with opinions than it is with code, so sometimes it takes a bit of work to sort things out.

Opus Healthcare provides Web-based software solutions for doctors, nurses, therapists, and healthcare support staff. Recently, Opus moved from Unix on Hewlett-Packard hardware to a mixture of different Linux distributions on Intel. Opus CEO and co-founder Tim Rhoads says it has been a "bottom-up" transition, driven by the company's development staff.

When a number of their coworkers toil away from the office using computers, mobile phones or other electronic equipment, those who do not telecommute are more likely to be dissatisfied with their job and leave the company...

Last week we took a look at the advantages of managed Ethernet switches over dumb switches. Today we are going to run through a batch of networking chores that become easier when they're handled by a smart switch: controlling bad users, QoS, and link aggregation for fat bandwidth on the cheap.

After more than 18 months of planning and development, KDE 4 was released on Friday. The new version of the popular desktop environment is an ambitious revision on almost every level, from the performance and design to the applications and system tools. While it sometimes shows the influence of other desktops, most users should find something to like in the hundreds of new features. However, users' overall verdict may well depend on their tolerance for new layouts and logic.

For quite a while, Java applications have been considered the last choice in meeting one's application needs. Given the offerings I struggled with through the years, I am guilty of such discrimination myself. I would have rather gone without an application than be forced to use a java app. Much has changed.

This highly streamlined text doesn't have a "Who Should Read this Book" section but I guess it should be obvious that anyone who designs websites for a living needs to read it. "High Performance Web Sites" is literally a list of 14 steps (one chapter per step) on techniques you can use to get your web pages to load more quickly and generally improve the performance of your sites on the web. The author has the qualifications to write such a book with authority. He's responsible for performance management at Yahoo! You'd have to assume he knows what he's talking about.

The fork occupies an ambivalent place in the world of open source. On the one hand, it is widely perceived as the worst thing that can happen to a project, pitting hacker against hacker, and dissipating coding effort that could be more usefully applied in a united way. On the other, it is the ultimate test and guarantee of openness: if code cannot be forked, it is not truly open. Perhaps most importantly, it is the threat of the fork, hanging over projects like a digital sword of Damocles, that keeps them close to their constituencies, as free software's short history has shown time and again. The closest that the Linux kernel has come to forking, was during the famous “Linus does not scale” incident that began on 28 September1998 with the innocent question:

MODx, an open source content management system (CMS) and PHP application framework comparable to WordPress or Movable Type, recently won Packt Publishing's Most Promising Open Source CMS award. The application works with either Apache or Internet Information Services (IIS) and supports almost any browser.

One of the best uses for Linux is special-purpose, tightly managed distributions for a single purpose, and Untangle has created one of the most impressive applications of this principle. The Untangle Gateway bundles together a list of applications that even seasoned sysadmins couldn't install and effectively manage in a timely manner.

With the growing popularity of refurbished PCs with Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and so on, Microsoft has tossed their hat into the ring as well. While some people have rolled their eyes at the very idea, I see nothing wrong with it.

The Ubuntu desktop may look a little brown and boring to first-time Linux users but beneath that conservative skin lurks a powerhouse of desktop features just waiting to come out, if you are using Compiz Fusion. Here we look at five of the better Compiz features that actually make us more productive as well as looking good. When you have multiple windows open on your desktop, all piled on top of one another, it’s hard to find what you want. With Scale you simply hit a key … and all the open windows are scaled down and tiled across the screen. Clicking on one of them brings it to the front. It’s a real time saver.

Regulators in the EU today announced that they are opening two new investigations against Microsoft, this time focusing not on peripheral functionalities such as media players, but on the core of Microsoft's business: its operating and office suite software. Both investigations focus on the benefits that Microsoft gains by combining features, such as search and Windows Live, into its operating system. But the investigations will also look into whether Microsoft has failed to adequately open OOXML, or to take adequate measures to ensure that Office is "sufficiently interoperable" with competing products

Recently the BBC had a bit of a wake up call regarding numbers and how many Linux users were really out there. Why does any of this matter? It has to do with something the BBC provides called the iPlayer.

Do you have some mundane task that you have to do regularly through a Web browser? Are you a developer who wants to automatically test the interface of your latest Web application? Maybe you want to log into all of the sites you visit on a daily basis with one click. If you fall into any of these categories, you should check out the iMacros Firefox extension.

Ever since the dawn of commercial software, piracy has been a problem without a realistic solution that meets the needs of both the software vendor and the end user. Due to the overall negative reaction from many end users with regard to DRM, a number of open source advocates have pointed out that if software companies simply adopted one of the many open source licenses, the need to concern themselves with anti-piracy efforts becomes completely unneeded. But making this kind of business model switch requires more than simply switching licensing models. There are revenue streams to be concerned here.

I have borrowed a headline from an earlier posting by Shane Schick to discuss something I saw this week. McAfee filed a report last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission that made a few statements about risks associated with their use of some Open Source software. These statements received quite a bit of media attention.

KDE 4.0.0 has been released on January 11th, after a number of delays; the months preceding the release, the KDE developers tried very hard to downplay expectations. KDE 4.0.0 was just the first release in the KDE 4 series, and such, should not be seen as the best possible representation of the KDE 4.0.0 vision. So, when I installed KDE 4.0.0 on my Ubuntu Gutsy installation last Friday, I knew what to expect: KDE 4 Developer Release 1. Read on for a few quick first impressions.