Showing all newswire headlines

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install the free VMware Server (version 1.0) on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake). VMware has just released version 1.0 of its free VMware Server. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free). In this article we use Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) as the host operating system.

A number of US informatic technology companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle have criticized Indonesia`s open source application policy.

[I read it and I'm still confused. Help? -- grouch]

Probably the most frequently asked question to the docs team at MySQL from the public is “I want to translate the manual into [insert language]”. That language can be anything from one we already have, through to some comparatively obscure suggestions.

More and more women are turning computer geeks these days. And proof is the all-women teams bagging two of the top awards of the 'Lord of the Code Contest', meant to promote software talent among the young.

Starting on July 15, the day that the Mozilla Foundation was created, we ask that you tell just one person who doesn’t use Firefox why you think they should, why you do.

Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you’ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.

An interesting thread has been winding its way around the blogosphere lately, about something called the "Firefox operating system".
[...]
Nobody says exactly what a Firefox operating system (let's call it FOS) is supposed to be, and so I've been wondering about it.

Interview with Pierre Fricke, director of product management at Jboss

[...]
GEELAN: Now you know why we have Pierre to do this. This is good stuff.

[I agree with 'GEELAN'. -- grouch]

One of India’s leading universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) has launched a 6-week workshop to expose more students to the benefits of FOSS. The program aims to partner student programmers from local Delhi colleges with bio-informatics experts from JNU to come up with a complete suite of open-source software for bio-informatics.

The head of School Wide Services, Mr. Terry Wister, removed all of the linux computers from room 218 at Monarch Park Collegiate, while I was at lunch, on Wednesday, June 21, 2006. The lab had been in operation for 5 years.
[...]
Easily the best systems I have ever used in more than 35 years of using computers of all sorts. As an example, just the use of easyurpmi alone made the job of installing and selecting software a joy with just a click of a few buttons!

[I missed this interview when it came out. -- grouch]

My previous blog, Pay a little now, pay a lot later, generated a lot more traffic than I expected. Lots. As a consequence, it was seen by many people who probably aren’t as familiar with certain aspects of free software as my normal target audience. This led to several misunderstandings.

A newly launched electronic theses deposit system, the Repository Bridge allows theses produced at Welsh universities to be automatically and electronically added and stored at the National Library of Wales.

[Note that the Fedora it speaks of is not the GNU/Linux distribution. This one, the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture, traces its beginnings to 1997. -- grouch]

The goal of the GNU GPL is to ensure that all users have the four essential freedoms -- (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change it, (2) to redistribute it, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Access to the source code is essential for freedom 1 and freedom 3. Thus, we designed the GNU GPL to insist that all redistributors make the source code available to their users. This requires them to do a little extra work, but that work is generally necessary for the sake of the users' freedom. Keeping source code conveniently and reliably available for the users is more important than saving distributors a little effort.

Open-source software developers that move to a closed-source licensing model to help pay their bills can create challenges, but they also offer opportunities for federal agencies, experts say. Federal users who are increasingly reliant on open-source software are paying more attention to those decisions, and they are stepping in to get the outcomes they want.

[Try to find "GPL" or "GNU" or "free software" anywhere in this article. Maybe if the U.S. feds educated themselves better about the GPL, "Congress, the FBI, the Pentagon and the Treasury Department" would not be so terrified that "a foreign company could make one of the government’s primary security tools proprietary and take control of the Snort source code." Snort is GPL'ed, though you might have to dig around the site to discover that, as Snort proclaims itself "open source". It appears that studious use of the term "open source" and avoidance of any mention of the philosophy behind free software contributes to fear and misunderstandings. -- grouch]

Novell Inc. will start shipping Release 10 of its Suse Linux on Monday, marking the first full new release of Suse Linux since August 2004, according to the company's president and chief executive officer.

Here are five essential tools for securing Firefox by disabling JavaScript and Flash, sniffing out suspicious sites, foiling phishing, preventing peeks at private data, and preparing powerful passwords.

[Good information in there, if you can get to it through the advertisements. -- grouch]

IBM will also allow management of Xen virtual machines under IBM's Virtualization Engine, allowing IT managers to use familiar IBM management software to provision and manage multiple Xen virtual machines.

The company is called Ohloh, and was named after the first surfboard in Hawaii. Its mission will be to analyze open-source software projects and provide customers with detailed information about them, including how much it would cost to duplicate the project given an average programmer salary of US$55,000 per year. The Linux kernel, for example, clocked in at nearly 4.7 million lines of code, has had 1,434 man-years of coding effort put in so far, and would have cost approximately US$79 million in salaries.

[This is the second story of this startup, and I still don't trust the founders. No reflection on the author of the story, as it is a very good report, but I don't think Ohloh ever read David A. Wheeler's Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More!. I'll trust Mr. Wheeler's well documented analysis long before taking the word of former MS execs. Their undocumented, asserted figure is only about 13% of what Wheeler estimates. Maybe this partially explains the incredibly low quality of MS software; after executives get done dipping in the revenue, the leavings for programmers are 13% of what is needed.-- grouch]

The SCO Group Inc. is appealing a U.S. magistrate's ruling that stripped many of its claims in a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp.

Novell will try to recover from earlier Linux fumbles by releasing major updates on Monday, adding Xen virtualization software to its enterprise server product and glitzy graphics to the desktop counterpart.

How does one live in Gloucester County in the summer and study penguins? Gloucester resident and Virginia Institute of Marine Science student Heidi Geisz is finding out.

[Ok, ok, it's not about FOSS, but it mentions penguins, Gentoo and Adele. It's still fascinating. -- grouch]