Showing all newswire headlines

Trolltech announced today that the Phonon backends, which they have been developing for inclusion in Qt, are being transferred into the KDE source code repository. Phonon is the KDE 4 API for multimedia and is also set to be part of Qt 4.4, scheduled for the end of Q1 2008. You heard it right folks, a part of Qt will be officially hosted and developed inside KDE's very own Subversion repository, from whose loins Phonon first sprung, and be freely available to all under the LGPL.

Red Hat delayed its new desktop product due to licensing issues on media playback codecs. Although the information available is unclear, it appears that the new product will be free and include legal codecs, something which has never been available before.

Pardus developers describe the Linux distribution as advanced yet easy to install and use. Let's see how well it lives up to the hype. Pardus originated in Turkey, was once based on Gentoo Linux, and is packaged with KDE. It comes in two versions: a live CD and a traditional, multilanguage installer, which I used. Its full-screen interface is uncluttered, simple, and easy to navigate and decipher. Helpful information appears on the right for every step. The installer follows the same basic recipe most installers adopt, but it also lets you choose a language --Turkish, Spanish, German, Dutch, or English

Do you really like OpenOffice.org as your office suite? Would you like to be able to use it on any computer with an Internet connection? If you answered yes to both those questions, you'll be interested in Ulteo's beta of Ulteo Online Desktop, which allows the use of OpenOffice.org over the Internet as SAAS (software as a service).

As of this last Friday, December 7th Fedora Core 6 is no more. With it goes the last release the Fedora Project had seen the split between “Community” (Extras) and Red Hat sponsored (Core). Those not intimately involved in Fedora might be interested to learn that when the merge happened it was the core packages that ended up having to follow the former “Extras” packaging guidelines and not the other way around. Yet another testament to the power of community.

It's been a long road, but Freemed-YiRC V1.00 has finally been released! Freemed-YiRC is an open source software project intended for use as a complete information system by child caring agencies.

Sun Microsystems is reaching out to scripters and developers on rivals' IDEs with enterprise tools and a migration program for its latest version of NetBeans. NetBeans 6.0, released Wednesday, targets Ruby and Ruby on Rails fans squarely with tools for code refactoring, debugging and deployment.

On today's menu we are serving up Debian going all volatile, the lowdown on cdrkit usurping cdrtools, and a simple way to use iptables rules to foil brute-force password attacks.

...New to me, anyway, though they've been around for a couple of years, and those are the sarge-volatile and the etch-volatile repositories. OK, so you're already rolling on the floor laughing at the idea of anything in Debian being labeled "volatile", and are thinking "wait, don't you mean catatonic?", but really, these are cool and good.

This three-part summary on Microsoft's main strategy in its attempt to replace its own OOXML format in place of the current ODF format as an ISO standard. Its starts from the development of ODF at OASIS to the current gridlock at ISO due to the large influx of new members. Industry Motive: To preserve a monopoly and the fight to protect a four-billion-dollar per year cash cow against those who stand for open standards, against those who want to create even playing fields, fair competition, innovation and open access for everyone to benefit.

What has happened in the year since Sun Microsystems released the source code for Java? While end users might be starting to wonder, those most involved in the building of the free Java community describe a thriving community that, after one year, is still working hard to reinvent itself. Free Java projects that existed prior to Sun's announcement on November 13, 2006, are either integrating into the OpenJDK community or continuing to provide alternatives -- but with greater resources in code.

Some people are happy with their operating systems as installed. Others like to tinker. Still others—PC Magazine readers, often enough-need to dive under the hood and make those systems run exactly the way they want. Its all about control, and Linux gives you as much control as you can handle. The configuration tools in Ubuntu Linux provide a full range of customization choices. Some are cosmetic, of course, but others dig deep into system settings.

A new service from Ulteo lets you use OpenOffice.org from a browser. It consists in a sort of remote desktop that, streamed through a java applet, that gives you control over a real openoffice instance on the Ulteo’s servers, no html, xul or javascript magic. Currently this is in beta and accepting up to 15000 testers, you just need to open a free account.

In the last article of this series, you downloaded, installed, and set up Castor. In this article, you'll learn how to convert your Java classes to XML and transform that XML back into Java code, as well as how Castor works and how to design your classes to function well with the API.

PostgreSQL is very sophisticated and powerful database server to use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, many people argue that one of the features it lacks is the memory storage engine of MySQL. This storage engine is ideal for applications that process temporary data that is updated rarely but accessed many times. These applications use databases stored in memory to decrease the number of disc operations. An example of such an application is the web-based BitTorrent tracker.

Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open-source officer, calls the dispute with ex-employees a misunderstanding. A Sun Microsystems official said the company regrets an incident that has called Sun's commitment to open source into question and is working to reach an amicable solution.

For novices, functions are one of the most intimidating features of OpenOffice.org's Calc. Newcomers quickly learn that functions are a main feature of spreadsheets, but there are almost four hundred, and many require input that assume specialized knowledge. Nor are the often circular definitions of the Function Wizard much help: You are no better off for reading that the SKEW function "returns the skewness of a distribution," for example. However, Calc includes dozens of functions that anyone can use, the most basic of which create formulas for basic arithmetic or for evaluating numbers in a range of cells.

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. Just want the details and downloads? Skip to the bottom. But you might like the story of how we got here.

Unless you buy your hardware from Chen's Backyard Bamboo and Computer Emporium, you can go cheap on software. Not long ago it used to cost the equivalent of an African country's GDP to buy a computer.

A new Linux community is now available online: MailRadar, the email community.

The Open Solutions Alliance says more open-source projects need to be built with good interoperability hooks. While commercial open-source solutions are being broadly adopted, there are obstacles slowing that adoption, particularly around interoperability, the Open Solutions Alliance has found.