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Opinion: I recently took a look at Microsoft's most active open-source projects and—there's no polite way to say this—they are all junk. OK Microsoft, you want to be taken seriously by open source? I know that's a rhetorical question, I don't believe for one moment that you're ready to really embrace open source. You just want to be able to confuse the market by being able to say that you're "open source friendly." What a crock. Microsoft is open-source friendly in the same way that a butcher is friendly to a cow.

OpenEMR version 2.8.3 and its companion FreeB 0.13 release are now available fromSourceForge. This release has had a heavy focus on billing improvements, and is a major upgrade.

All integrated development environments (IDEs) share similarities because they're all built for the same purpose. But they have differences, too. Some of these can be attributed to application domains, but others result from the IDE design. Getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first

Most of the ISO images and other software you grab off the Internet come with a message digest -- a cryptographic hash value that you can use to verify their integrity. While almost all Linux distributions come with utilities to read and generate digests using MD5 and SHA1 hash functions, the md5deep utilities can do that and more. md5deep computes MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, Tiger, and Whirlpool digests across Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems. It can recursively traverse directories, computing sums for files under subdirectories as well.

Most of us live our lives as consumers, and in most countries, regardless of politics, consumers drive the market. It is a rare opportunity to be a two-percenter and the majority of us will never have a chance to breathe that rarified air. It is few that will hear the tap on the door calling us to opportunity. Knock Knock Neo.

Linux mavens are usually pretty sure they'll never go back to (or start using) Windows. They may like Mac OS, but usually don't jump ship for that either. But how about the other open source Unix descendant, BSD? Dru Lavigne offers a basic primer on what's different in PC-BSD for a Linux user, and what's better. In this article, I'll compare Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn) with the (as of this writing) upcoming release of PC-BSD 1.4.

Ingres has rolled out its first software appliance using the Icebreaker open source chimera developed with start-up rPath. The database company has released the Icebreaker BI Appliance, integrating its Ingres 2006 database with rPath Linux and business intelligence tools from JasperSoft. The open source combo will, according to Ingres, reduce the cost and time in deploying data warehouses, in rolling out BI to new groups of users, and in managing and maintaining the open source middleware and application stack.

A conversation between two IT management types displayed a definite mistrust of Microsoft's sales reps during a re-licensing negotiation. Yet we're supposed to trust a cmpany with a long history of dishonest behavior and a hostile attitude toward the FOSS community with the OSI stamp of approval?

In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave us Mosaic, the first Web browser with a graphical user interface. Today, the NCSA is still innovating, creating a project that monitors how global climate change is affecting plants and wildlife, one that tracks oil spills, and another that predicts the possible effects of seismographic activity on bridges and other structures. To facilitate communication and collaboration between stations, NCSA is making use of the Web infrastructure it helped to launch almost 15 years ago, in a research program called the CyberCollaboratory. Not surprisingly, open source software is an integral part of the Web-based intiative.

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codenamed “Etch”, was released on April 8th, 2007. Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r1, codenamed “Etch” was released on August 15th, 2007. And as usual, the media distributed these news around the globe. It is so unimportant an event, that no experienced Debian user or even developer would care less about it.

This tutorial describes how to install Simple Invoices on a Debian Etch server. Simple Invoices is a web-based, basic invoicing system that lets you create and manage your invoices, export them as PDF or Excel files, email them to your customers, etc. It is intended for small businesses/organizations and home users.

My brother Willi isn't a frequent blogger. But what he is, is a teacher/instructor for M$ OS and office software. Now he explains - in German - his experiences with Vista, compares it with Linux, and comes to the conclusion that everything looks pretty 'stolen' from a user's point of view. He is using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on his Biostar barebone machine, and recently bought a HP laptop with Vista and Office.

[wjl was kind enough to translate the post for us. Check the "read more" link for the english translation. — Sander]

Ingo Molnar has just released a version 20 of his controversial CFS scheduler (currently added to 2.6.23-rc* series) for many old kernel release: “By popular demand, here is release -v20 of the CFS scheduler. It is a full backport of the latest & greatest v2.6.23-rc3 CFS code to v2.6.22.5, v2.6.21.7 and v2.6.20.16. Also, the backported CFS scheduler enables people to test suspected scheduler regressions on older codebases too, to filter out the effects of other changes.

Citrix announced Aug. 15 that it is acquiring XenSource, supplier of the Xen open source hypervisor, for $500 million. In a follow-up interview with Wes Wasson, corporate VP of worldwide marketing at Citrix, and Peter Levine, CEO of XenSource, InformationWeek learned how Citrix will try to maintain the Xen open source community, while adding to its product line.

EtherBoot isn't an application you install on your Linux desktop, but if you run computers that boot over a network -- or would like to explore network booting for either fun or profit -- it is an essential free software project. These three casual videos will introduce you to some of the people behind the Etherboot/gPXE project and some of the people and principles behind GNU/Linux networking in general. If you are not familiar with the pace and style of free or open source software development and the people who make it happen, you are about to be amazed at the fact that these are not boringly serious individuals, but fun-loving folks whose rare F2F (Face to Face) meetings are full of laughter and camaraderie.

Ubuntu and its sister Linux distributions -- including Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Edbuntu -- finds themselves in an enviable yet thankless position in the Linux universe. That the 'Buntus are the most popular choice among Linux users is without question. Ubuntu is nearly always at the top of Distrowatch.com's popularity list, its forums are busy -- make that very busy -- and also very friendly. New users are welcomed, their hands are held, and command-line fixes are offered along with gentle encourgement.

Construct a highly available Apache Web server cluster that spans multiple physical or virtual Linux® servers in 5 easy steps with Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat v2. To get the most out of this article, you should be familiar with Linux and basic networking, and you should have Apache servers already configured. Our examples are based on standard SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES10) installations, but savvy users of other distributions should be able to adapt the methods shown here.

A new book for Systems Administrators who are interested in designing and setting up a Linux thin client network has been published by Packt. Written by David Richards, Linux Thin Client Networks Design and Deployment provides enough knowledge to understand how the technology works, make decisions about deployment, and then implement a stable work environment.

Putting another hitch into a product release that has already been roundly booed by critics, Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg put out a note Wednesday saying that Palm's new Foleo has been delayed. Initially priced at $500, the Foleo is essentially a Linux-based, large-screen companion device to the Treo, allowing users to create e-mails and edit documents using a 10-inch display and a full-sized keyboard. The new device, which weighs a relatively hefty 2.5 pounds, synchs automatically with the user's Treo, and includes a battery with up to five hours of life.

I wanted to see for myself just how quickly a machine would be infected, how it would be infected, and how frequently it would be probed. Rather than putting a target machine openly on the Internet, I decided to use the Nepenthes malware collector. Nepenthes is a low interaction Honeypot, which emulates known vulnerabilities and captures worms as they attempt to infect it.