Showing all newswire headlines

Actel announced SoftConsole, a free software program development environment for Actel’s CoreMP7, a soft 32-bit ARM7 microprocessor core for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

"Wow, that's impressive!" was one of many comments made by visitors to the KDE stand at LUG Radio Live 06. Five of the KDE-GB crew attended the two day event in Wolverhampton demonstrating the latest Kubuntu distribution, Dapper Drake, and the finest KDE applications, including Digikam, to over 400 attendees.

August 2006 (#129):

• 2-cent Tips
• Mailbag
• Talkback
• Making XMMS Effect plugins, by Kumar Appaiah
• Away Mission -- SEMTECH - The Semantic Web Technology Conference, by Howard Dyckoff
• The Geekword Puzzle, by Ben Okopnik
• Low-Fat Linux - Now with Less Cruft!, by Ben Okopnik
• A Prisoner of Windows, by Lew Pitcher
• Issues In Concurrent Server Design on Linux Systems - Part I, by Amit Saha
• Ecol, by Javier Malonda

In the months after the SCO Group's Linux-related lawsuit against IBM was filed nearly three and a half years ago, the tiny Utah software company saw its stock soar tenfold. But on Tuesday the Lindon company's stock was a long way from its October 2003 high of $20.50 per share. After a sustained slide fed by sustained poor earnings results and courthouse reversals, SCO shares closed Tuesday at $2.28 per share.

[Shareholders should sue for mismanagement. It's sad to see a good company in the hands of idiots. - dcparris]

LAS VEGAS -- If you've been concerned about the death of Black Hat -- either because of its purchase last November by CMP, or by the rumors you've heard of a "Microsoft track," -- you can relax. The place is jammed.

I chuckled over Xen's documented method for the ordinarily painful physical-to-virtual system migration: Use the "dd" command to copy the boot drive from another server to a local file, point Xen at that file, and boot the VM (virtual machine). Who needs consultants?

The Massachusetts IT funding proposal that MA CIO and ODF champion Peter Quinn resigned in part to protect died on Monday when the State Senate failed to approve it before the 2005-2006 legislative session ended.

The Franconia region around Nuremberg, Germany, hopes to establish Europe’s first "Linux Valley" with the launch of a new business campus focused on open-source innovation.

OpenNMS is an opensource enterprise network management tool. It helps network administrators to monitor critical services on remote machines and collects the information of remote nodes by using SNMP. Normally openNMS installation and configuration takes time, but this guide tries to cover the installation and configuration part in a few steps.

Software libre for Spanish juntaThe Spanish region of Extremadura has pledged to move all government computers onto open source software within the next year. Officials will be mandated to use the open document format standard for office communications over the same time frame.

Paranoia is becoming more common these days, and if you let yourself be engulfed by it, there's definitely not a shortage of things to be concerned about. We know that the governments have the technology to monitor our lives (wiretapping, satellites, other stuff we have no earthly idea about), but regular users are also using certain tools to invade our privacy.

[Hmmm... all that secret code. Wonder what else they're keeping secret? Never mind that, just replace your non-free OS with a libre OS, and you won't have to worry near as much about whether your software vendor is spying on you. - dcparris]

The second discussion draft of the GNU General Public License Version 3 has prompted some to question the Free Software Foundation's motives. eWEEK Labs' Jason Brooks finds the changes in keeping with the spirit of the GPL, but thinks some compromise may be in order.

[Oh, I get it. Let's all bow to master Linus. On the other hand, we can keep the DRM out of Free Software. I think someone's been taking lessons from Uncle Tom. - dcparris]

Traditionally on a Unix-like system like GNU/Linux you must mount a device such as a CD-ROM before being able to use it. This is one of the biggest complaints from newcomers, especially Windows refugees. The latest versions of the GNOME and KDE desktop environments offer automounting functionality, and some distributions (such as Ubuntu and its derivatives) have it enabled by default. If you choose not to use any of these environments, here's an alternative solution.

So far, Hewlett-Packard prefers the earlier GPL, raising the specter that two versions of the license will survive.

[Look, businesses have to realize that freedom trumps profit because freedom ultimately offers profit. Software patents just kill the golden goose - dcparris]

As the US computer manufacturer SGI reports, one of its Altix 4700 systems has outpaced the previous STREAM Triad benchmark record by a factor of 4, achieving a sustained memory bandwidth of 4.35 terabytes per second.

The ongoing discussion about the Reiser4 filesystem [story] continues on thelkml. Jeff Garzik discussed the complexity introduced by a plugin layer [story], suggesting it is really a second VFS, "furthermore, it completely changes the notion of what a Linux filesystem is. Currently, each Linux filesystem is a tightly constrained set of metadata support. reiser4 changes 'tightly constrained' to 'infinity'. While that freedom is certainly liberating, it also has obvious support costs due to new admin paradigms and customer configuration possibilities."Linux creator Linus Torvalds weighed in on the discussion, "as long you call them 'plugins' and treat them as such, I (and I suspect a lot of other people) are totally uninterested, and in fact, a lot of people will suspect that the primary aim is to either subvert the kernel copyright rules, or at best to create a mess of incompatible semantics with no sane overlying rules for locking etc."

It's been nearly a year since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, so I sat down with Louis Suárez-Potts, chair of OpenOffice.org's community council and community manager, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., last week to see what's on the OpenOffice.org development roadmap. Suárez-Potts says that development is moving along nicely, but it will probably be a while before we see OpenOffice.org 3.0.

Novell has decided not to use proprietary Linux modules such as the NVidia accelerated driver. My first reaction was that Novell was being needlessly idiotic. Then I readthis article on OSWeekly.com, by Matt Hartley. It calls out the leading Linux distributions for failing to band together to pressure hardware vendors to pre-install Linux. I've been saying basically the same thing for the past few years, so I heartily agree with this article. It was then that it occurred to me that Novell may have made the right decision, even if for the wrong reason.

Care2x is an open source web-based hospital information system (HIS). The development of Care2x started back in 2002 by Elpidio Latorilla. The software is released under the GNU General Public License. The latest version 2.2 is maintenance release. The most noticeable things it features are:New graphical installer (based on MirrorMed's installer).MySQL 5 support.Main menu visibility according to the user's permissions.Improved Arabian and Italian translations.Improved Turkish ICD10.

I've been covering the Free Software Foundation'sDefective By Designcampaign against Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies since its planning stages. Starting from scratch, in less than three months, the campaign has grown to 7000 members. This number is impressive, especially since the campaign introduces a degree of activism previously unknown in the free and open source software communities. What strikes me, though, is that, for all the loathing of DRM, how rarely the reasons for opposing it are spelled out. In some cases, the reason may be that people consider them too obvious to be worth mentioning, but, too often when I've probed, people haven't even heard of the possible objections. These objections begin with the fact that the case for DRM has yet to be made, and continues with arguments about consumer rights, privacy, competitiveness, and industry standards.