Showing all newswire headlines

Take even greater advantage of the synergistic processing elements (SPEs) of the Sony PS3 in this installment of Programming high-performance applications on the Cell BE processor. Part 2 looks in depth at the Cell Broadband Engine processor's SPEs and how they work at the lowest level, while Part 1 showed how to install Linux on the PS3 and explored a short example program.

The FudCon videos from Boston 2007 are now ready for torrent download at: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

ESB Research Note by RedMonk Puts Open Source, Proprietary Approaches in Context for Would-Be Adopters

Ian Murdock, the chief technology officer of the recently formed Linux Foundation (created from the merger of ODL and the Free Standards Group) is set to address a group of Microsoft employees on February 20.

‘Whinky’ To Unveil Unparalleled Home Automation With Complete Voice Recognition Smart House

A joint KDE and Gnome meeting is taking place in Spain next month called Guademy. The objectives are to create new projects and initiatives of collaboration between both Desktops and allow new developers to get started. Aaron Seigo will give an update on KDE 4 and Albert Astals Cid will talk about Okular. Meanwhile in India Pradeepto Bhattacharya of KDE India will be talking at FOSS MEET in NIT Calicut about KDE 4 and why you should develop with Qt.

KDE was once again well represented at the 2007 Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 5x), demonstrating to show-goers why it is the most popular Linux desktop. There were talks, demonstrations from KDE developers and and thank yous in return. Read on for the full report.

Last year, PlanetOut.com was looking at a total revamp of its Solaris-based infrastructure. The company hired a new director of technology operations, Tom Cignarella, to deal with a glut of old hardware and an "immature operating environment" that hadn't kept up with best practices. After a 50% server consolidation, Cignarella needed a reliable networking monitoring application. He found one in an open source product that fit the bill perfectly.

Learn how to write and run simple Flapjax programs in several modes, including a compiled form suitable for deployment.

On 23 January of this year, in response to censoring the highly information-packed website Uruknet, I sent an e-mail to Google News urging it to keep its internet search engine open.

The same day, I received a format reply:

Thank you for your note about Google News. This is an automated response to let you know that we appreciate your interest and feedback. Please note that this email address is no longer active. There was no follow-up from Google News.

Slackware Linux is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. Late last year the project marked 13 years of non-stop development with the release of Slackware 11.0. The distribution is best known for its no-frills, minimum customizations approach to applications like KDE. It's also notorious for its reluctance to switch to new version of several popular applications like Apache or GCC. No surprise then, that its package management system has seen little change over the years and is still available in just one flavor -- vanilla.

The Mono Project on Feb. 20 announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.

Free advice is worth every penny as someone once famously said. For years, I have been guilty of replacing the word 'advice' with the word 'software' as every attempt I made to get Linux to work properly ended, if not in tears, at least in immoderate language and the dog fleeing the room in terror to avoid low-flying Mandrake CDs.

How much money can a large enterprise save by migrating to open source from proprietary? In Novell's case, it's millions of dollars. During an address at the recent Linuxworld OpenSolutions Summit here, Debra Anderson CIO of Novell, detailed how Novell has transitioned to open source from proprietary for its own operations. It's an effort that is still ongoing.

Although I concentrate mainly on development these days, in previous lives I was involved in internal control and network management in a City financial institution and I like to keep up to date with networking and network security especially as I believe that networking technology represents a long-neglected opportunity for developers.

For years, the lightweight Xfce has been a popular desktop environment for Linux distributions running on older hardware, thanks to its lower demand on resources as compared to KDE and GNOME; it's an ideal desktop for machines with less than 256MB of memory. Until recently, however, using Xfce was a little laborious, but with its latest release last month, Xfce is a much more usable desktop environment.

Usually, representatives of national bodies can go about their business without too much fear of being molested by multinationals pushing their favorite standards. But when the economic stakes are high enough, standards committee members can become the subject of more attention than they wish, and to feel like citizens of Iowa during a presidential year.

OpenLogic maintains a library of several hundred certified open source projects that it integrates into customers' computer configurations. "The pace of adoption [of open source] will pick up, not slow down," said CEO Steve Grandchamp. "We are already at the end of proprietary code. This is why we are seeing a need for complimentary business."

Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property.

Sony Ericsson has invited rival phone vendors to become shareholders in its UIQ Technology subsidiary. UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ user interface framework and application suite for use with Symbian OS. Sony Ericsson believes additional shareholders will increase UIQ's independence within the market and would also lower the operating cost of UIQ technology.