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The open source optical character recognition (OCR) landscape got dramatically better recently when Google released the Tesseract OCR engine as open source software.

Bob Whitinger is taking over the site and ushering in an exciting new era for LXer.

Since its inaugural release in October, 2004, Ubuntu has earned a significant and very loyal following among desktop Linux users. More recently, Canonical announced plans to make Ubuntu a player in the enterprise Linux market, including a new server release and extended support packages tailored for business users.

It seems most PC users have heard of Linux and, at the very least, the idea of open source software has piqued their curiosity. Here, we explain open source in greater detail so, if you are interested in getting started with Linux, now is the time to give it a try.

In a roundtable this afternoon at the MIT Emerging Techologies Conference, panelists agreed that updates to browsers are constantly breaking Web applications, causing endless headaches. Both Internet Explorer and Safari came in for criticism. The exception was Firefox, an open source browser that adheres more closely to standards.

In the middle of the yearly KDE conference aKademy, the KOffice team has released the first release candidate of version 1.6. This release follows the earlier beta according to the schedule.

Shares of Red Hat plunged 23% in afternoon trading Wednesday after the open source software maker posted disappointing forward guidance.

Novell announced this week that it plans to offer support for Linux virtualization -- including instances of its rival's Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 -- with its Xen virtualization technology included in Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10.

A Google search for “open source” will give you 1,660,000,000 results, a number that increases every day. This says something about the escalating popularity of open source as a software idea in the digital era. This should also give you a reason to read Open Source and the Law by Priti Suri and Associates.

Firefox 2 moved closer to its final release yesterday when Mozilla unveiled the Release Candidate 1 (RC1) version of its popular open-source web browser.

BLAG aims to create a one CD distribution with everything people need for the desktop environment. It also aims to be a 100% Free Software distribution and has been recognized by as doing this on the GNU website, along with only six other distributions of GNU/Linux.

This guide describes how to back up and recover your MySQL databases with mysql-zrm on a Debian Sarge system. mysql-zrm is short for Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL, it is a new tool that lets you create full logical or raw backups of your databases (regardless of your storage engine and MySQL configuration), generate reports about the backups, verify the integrity of the backups, and recover your databases. It can also send email notifcations about the backup status, and you can implement multiple backup policies (based on your applications and based on time (e.g. daily, weekly, etc.)).

Avocent has announced a Linux-based media extender aimed at presentation and signage applications. The MPX1000 can extend audio and HD video content from one or more sources to up to eight synchronized display devices, over wired or wireless Ethernet, according to the company.

Two hot issues are making the rounds. First, Debian and Firefox are having a spat, and the end result may be that Debian will distribute Firefox under a different name. Second, the war betwen Linus Torvalds and other Kernel developers and the Free Software Foundation over GPLv3 is continuing, with Torvalds saying he's fed up with the FSF. Here is my take on both, and related issues.

The KDE contributors conference part of Akademy 2006 in Dublin kicked off Saturday morning bright and early, much to the dismay of those who had been out late the evening before at the registration desk, conveniently located in a pub.

When most people think about the Mozilla Firefox browser, they think of it as being open source and free. The truth is, while Mozilla Firefox is open source, it is not entirely free, and it may not even be legally compatible with Debian GNU/Linux, one of the most popular community Linux distribution bases.

Here is a perfect example of licensing follies, and perhaps unintended consquences- Firefox cannot be modified and distributed without approval from Mozilla. But it can be modified and distributed without approval if you name it something else. -TC

The emergence of the Internet has given creators the opportunity to collaborate in ways that have never before been available. Using the Internet, collaborators can edit documents in real time, discuss those changes with other collaborators and readers around the world, and with a single click distribute the end result to countless readers. But how does one of these collaborators enforce rights in the resulting works?

I'm a power user in some ways when it comes to software, but I've never been similarly inclined towards the hardware side of things. Don't get me wrong - I still love a good processor or a graphics card, but in my case, I'm more interested in the stuff that runs on the hardware. I mean, you may have that horsepower, but it's not going to do you any good unless you have some powerful applications that utilize it.

Sun Microsystems, Inc., hosted an open source education symposium, spotlighting more accessible education resources, featuring the Open Source Solaris Operating System. The discussion focused on collaboration and community, in an effort to rethink traditional education models.

IBM swung a haymaker at SCO on Sept. 25. The corporate giant asked the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, Utah for summary judgment against all of SCO's claims. The SCO vs. IBM case is over three years old. Although The SCO Group Inc. has had little success in persuading the court or the buying public that IBM did indeed take SCO's Unix intellectual property and place it within Linux, the company has stayed its course.