Showing all newswire headlines

Last week I had an interview for a new consulting gig with three technical management type people. It turned into a 90 minute technical discussion on a variety of Linux and UNIX issues. That’s fine. I usually do well in that kind of interview. At one point the discussion turned to Open Source applications in the enterprise.

This is a must listen too video keynote address to the 2006 Seattle Plone Conference by the Free Software Foundation's Eben Moglen:'...Software can prevent software from being owned. Software itself can lift the software tax. That's where we are at this moment. On that cusp. In this neighborhood, at this moment, the richest and most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the world is beginning to fail...the very engineering limits of trying to make software that you own work as well as software that the community produces are becoming apparent...'

While ATI had learned its lesson from the belated Radeon X1000 Linux support, the fglrx driver support for the X1950PRO was not added in October or even November of this year, but the drivers will finally be making their way out this month. We are fortunate enough to have these drivers in hand today, so this article will also serve as the world's first look at the Radeon X1950PRO under Linux. The X1950PRO is designed to be a midrange high-performance graphics card that sells for under $200 USD.

Futuremark, creator of the most commonly used PC benchmarking software, has announced Vista compatibility for both 3DMark05 and PCMark06.

Sysgo is offering a live online demo of its embedded Linux distributions and tools. The European embedded software vendor's "Live Experience Server" lets registrants use VNC (virtual network computer) to connect to a development host running ELinOS or ELinOS Real-Time, and pre-configured with target hardware.

Large Dutch cities supporting open source Arthur Buijs from the Dutch OpenOffice.org community just pointed me to this Dutch article. According to the article, a number of large Dutch cities including Almere, Assen, Eindhoven, Enschede, Groningen, Haarlem, Leeuwarden and Nijmegen have decided to support open source. The article says that the cities are interested in open source because Microsoft software is being perceived as expensive and the software does not not work well together with competitive products on other platforms. Here it is in dutch language..

openSUSE 10.2, formerly known as SUSE Linux 10.x, has been released with KDE 3.5.5 and KOffice 1.6 (Krita is installed by default). As well as the usual latest free and open source software, openSUSE comes with the new KDE Menu "Kickoff", integrated with the latest Kerry Beagle. Some screenshots are available on the openSUSE wiki.

Embedded Linux specialist TimeSys Corp. has a new CEO. Larry Weidmen has resigned as President/CEO, in order to pursue other interests, and TimeSys boardmember Joseph Raffa (pictured), a semiconductor industry veteran, has been appointed acting CEO by the company's board of directors, according to the company.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (code name 'sarge'). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. No new installation images will be created. Users are advised to update their system against an official Debian mirror after a new installation and update the kernel instead. Upgrading to this revision online is usually done by pointing the apt package tool.

Art production in an open source environment is more of a challenge than most people think. I know this from my experience in the Ubuntu interface design project in past few years. It has become clear to me that it is impossible to produce high quality visual content in an environment that is lacking coordination. That insight prompted me to investigate other models that could be adopted and used in the open source context. I found the commercial agency to be one of the most efficient and productive models that I can recommend for adaptation, thanks to one single factor -- art direction. Art direction assures the unity and consistency that are the main characteristics of professional artwork.

EnterpriseDB, provider of open source PostgreSQL-based products and services, announced that Dave Page, one of only seven PostgreSQL Core Team members, has joined EnterpriseDB as a senior database architect. Page is the project founder and the lead developer of pgAdmin, the premier PostgreSQL GUI, and has been a significant contributor to the packaging and development of the Windows release of PostgreSQL. Bruce Momjian, another of the seven PostgreSQL Core Team members, is also an EnterpriseDB senior database architect.

U.S.-based Technalign Inc. today announced the inaugural release of Pioneer Linux, a Ubuntu-based, desktop-oriented distribution for home and business users. The distribution is based on a 2.6.17 kernel, and, like Ubuntu's own Kubuntu, features the KDE desktop environment.

Zi Corporation says its eZiText predictive text input software and Decuma handwriting recognition software are available pre-integrated with Trolltech mobile phone stacks, including Qtopia 2.x, 4.x, and "Jupiter." Zi's products were demonstrated on Trolltech's Greenphone at the ITU Telecom World show this week in Hong Kong.

After a lot of work, we proudly announce the availability of openSUSE 10.2, formerly known as SUSE Linux 10.x As usual, we ship all the latest open source packages available at the time. But we want to give a special mention to the redesigned GNOME and KDE desktop, Firefox 2.0, ext3 as the new default file system, support for internal SD card readers, new power management and, last but not least, our improved package management. We'd like to thank you all for testing heavily, reporting bugs, giving feedback on mailing lists. Have a lot of fun!

Swiss robot vendor K-Team is shipping a third-generation model in its flagship "Khepera" line. The Khepera III, which runs Linux on an optional ARM-powered add-in card, adds floor-roving capabilities, the better to support experiments in swarm behavior, K-Team says.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 1, an early developer milestone based on the Gecko 1.9 branch, has been released. Gran Paradiso, a mountain group located in Italy, is also the project codename for Firefox 3. There are no significant user interface changes. Core layout and rendering changes include use of Cairo as the default graphics library, use of Cocoa Widgets for MAC OSX builds and new SVG elements.

Free software magazine has an in-depthinterview with Fred Trotter about the Medsphere saga, including comments by Richard Stallman:'...Medsphere is treated with the kind of respect that you would expect the top FOSS medical software company to receive. In reality, the top medical FOSS company is probably Uversa with their ClearHealth project (Note: Uversa is a friendly competitor of mine). Medsphere does not even warrant the title of top VistA company. Blue Cliff is a good example of a company that has a good reputation within the community, but gets far less attention than Medsphere. There are many other FOSS medical companies out there all of whom have contributed more than Medsphere.

Some of you may have read my friend and collegue's blog named "Blog of Helios" and visited his website lobby4linux.com enough to have understood what he has tried and is trying to accomplish with regards to Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management. Many of you probably respect this approach and support it as I do. Others may not have any idea what I'm speaking of. Allow me to background a bit:

The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the first release candidate (RC1) of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Etch. Debian-Installer is a program for installing Linux distributions. It is the official installer for Debian GNU/Linux. It is also one of two official installers available for Ubuntu; the other one is called Ubiquity (itself based on parts of debian-installer) and was introduced in Ubuntu 6.06. It was originally written for the Debian release sarge..

Gaël Duval, co-founder and former developer of Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux, has introduced the first test release of a new distribution derived from Debian and Ubuntu. Ulteo Linux sports a 2.6.15 kernel and KDE 3.5.2 desktop, and aims to introduce revolutionary concepts in managing and updating an OS and applications.