Showing all newswire headlines

ReviewLinux.Com takes a look at the new Mandriva Powerpack 2007. This Linux distro is impressive but will it handle itself when up against the likes of the upcoming Ubuntu 6.10 or even Red Hat's development playmate Fedora Core 6? We guess at ReviewLinux.Com that time will tell. Come and visit our screentour and commentary

I don't know if the folks at Xiph.org can live day-in and day-out using only the free Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, and Theora codecs, but the rest of us routinely run into consumer devices that don't recognize and support them. But with a little help from Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) and MP3FS, you cross one incompatibility off that list. MP3FS lets you mount a directory hierarchy of FLAC audio files and transparently present them as MP3s to software and hardware devices alike.

People often talk about a software project's bus factor -- the number of people on your project that need to get hit by a bus to leave you with no one familiar with your codebase. In the open source world, the disappearance of even one developer can herald the death of your project -- if you don't prepare in advance.

Last weekend marked the Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus, Ohio, where 1,000 attendees gathered once again to share knowledge and fellowship about their favorite operating system. Buckeye reporter Ian Hodge attended the conference and filed this review.

A week ahead of the European Parliament's vote on the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), the three major groups of MEPs that had been opposing the EPLA have unexpectedly reached a compromise agreement that means they will instead vote for the proposal.

Keeping track of your to-do items and tasks should be simple, but often the software that people use for those purposes is anything but. Many such applications are also calendars, reminders, appointment managers, and more -- in other words, overkill. By contrast, todo.txt and Tux ToDo try to keep it simple. They take different approaches -- one's a command-line tool and the other is graphical -- but do the same thing: make managing your many tasks simpler.

The GNU telephony project reports that GPL-licensed implementations of two key security protocols are available for use in Linux-based VoIP (voice-over-IP) devices and softphones. Additionally, a GPL-licensed softphone based on the new implementations is already available for download, testing, and use.

Finnish phone maker is behind the open source movement, but it is still giving Symbian its vote for cellphones.

Selling a new license to the kernel developers was always going to be an uphill battle. They are a large and strong-minded crowd, occasionally suspicious of the Free Software Foundation and its attitude toward Linux, and happy with the licensing that they have now. Given the immense practical difficulties involved in changing licenses, there would have to be a strong incentive to get the developers to even try.
[I goofed and linked to suscriber content, I linked to an article that has been released. I'll get the kinks worked out on this though, Sorry. - Scott]

Want to see a dinosaur? Press the Chart button in OpenOffice.org Calc, and you will be presented with a real software relic. While other parts of OpenOffice.org have been thoroughly redesigned and updated, the features and the overall look of the chart module remain virtually untouched since version 1.0. The situation is changing, though, as a group of OpenOffice.org developers has started to work on a new chart module.

Install .rpm Files in Debian and Ubuntu

The acronym "LAMP" was coined by writer Michael Kunze in an article in the December 1998 issue of German computing magazine Computertechnik. Kunze was trying to show that a bundle of free software could be a feasible alternative to expensive commercial packages.

The Epiware has announced that their flagship Project and Document Management Suite — which is something like a very light version of SharePoint for LAMP environments — will be released as Open Source under the GNU General Public License.

HP looks to utility, aggregation and legacies. Following on from the formal launch earlier this month of the latest version of its Integrity Servers equipped with dual-core Montecito processors, HP put on a users' bash in London to drum up business from both existing and new customers.

Kirk Murrin of Linux Guru Consulting has published a clever-looking hack that adds a web interface to mconfig. The hack aims to let users configure and build Linux kernels remotely, access kernel and driver documentation, and even use browser forms to add and edit source files.

Linus Torvalds released the 2.6.19-rc1 patch noting that for a number of reasons it was larger than usual, "it's a huge thing with tons of changes". He described what's in the patch, "I think we got updates to pretty much all of the active architectures, we've got VM changes (dirty shared page tracking, for example), we've got networking, drivers, you name it."

That's Systems Management Server to you. Microsoft is beefing up policing for Windows licensing after going back to the drawing board on its asset management strategy. Upcoming editions of Systems Management Server (SMS) will introduce metadata and workflow tools and capabilities for management of software licenses in a three-phase plan.

Back in August, Ars reported that Sam Ramji, Director of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab, invited members of Firefox's development team to the Microsoft campus. At the time, it was unclear whether the Firefox team would actually accept the invitation. Now, roughly one month later, we have discovered that a handful of Firefox developers did journey to Redmond, and one member of the team kept track of the experience in his blog.

Deep Thunder is a web-based business-oriented service that provides weather forecasts precisely and quickly enough to address specific business problems and streamline weather-sensitive operations.

Open source and on-demand CRM are experiencing a convergence of sorts, brought together by online application exchanges. Mirroring Salesforce.com's AppExchange platform, Cupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM today launched its own marketplace for business applications based on its open source CRM tool.