Showing all newswire headlines

Your author has been interested in computer speech synthesis since the late 1970s, when he interfaced a Votrax SC-01A speech synthesizer chip to his Imsai 8080 computer with some wire-wrap wire. News of the recently created eSpeak project naturally piqued his long-time interest in speech synthesis.

eSpeak is a compact phoneme-based speech synthesis system that is available under version 2 of the Gnu General Public license.

Oracle's recent maneuvers in the open source software market are all about the upsell, according to one IT industry analyst.

Netcore plans to widen its client base through partnerships and by creating awareness about its Linux-based products.
[...]
Netcore’s reasons for using Linux-based solutions are its open, secure, reliable and stable standards-based nature.

In our first set of Linux.com training videos we showed you how to download Ubuntu GNU/Linux and run it from a CD without installing it. Today, in two short videos, we install Ubuntu on our hard drive.

About the videos: They're in AVI format, encoded with the free XviD codec, compatible with media players available for almost all popular desktop PC operating systems. If -- and this is unlikely -- your computer does not have the XviD codec installed, you can get it here or through your favorite free operating system's software repository. Windows and Mac users can find easy-to-install XviD binaries here.

A couple of weeks ago I found time to install Dapper Drake, the latest Ubuntu Linux release. In the same week my wife bought a brand new MacBook. The inevitable comparison got me thinking about what makes an otherwise good operating system great.

This interview with Trolltech Co-CEO Haavard Nord took place the day after Trolltech's IPO on the Oslo Stock Exchange. Nord candidly describes Trolltech's products, markets, and plans, which include broading its phone software platform through one or more acquisitions. Enjoy . . . !

Four Debian enthusiasts in New York City got together in 2003 and created the Community Free Software Group (CFSG), a non-profit entity to promote the use of free software in the local community. Since the group's inception, CFSG members have been busy helping young people in city neighborhoods learn how to install and run Debian Linux on hardware donated by area businesses and individuals.

Microsoft's announcement on plugins sounds like new news - but in fact this project has been ongoing for nine months, as Ray Ozzie let slip last October. Why announce it now?

AUSTIN, Texas, USA (July 6, 2006) — REAL Software, Inc., provider of REALbasic, cross-platform that really works, announced today that REALbasic 2006 Release 3 for Linux is available now. In addition to the over 100 features and fixes that have been added, REALbasic 2006 Release 3 for Linux has been specifically tested and optimized for use with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop from Novell.

What has caused the effective price of virtualization to head toward zero -- and how? In contrast to many who seem to feel that open source and proprietary software operate in two parallel but separate universes — that open source is used by people who can’t afford ‘real’ software, while proprietary commercial software is for organizations that need reliability, scalability, and all the other ‘abilities’ — I believe that open source is already challenging the proprietary software world.

Now that others have built a translator for ODF/Open XML interoperability after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts put out a call for one, Microsoft announces it would like to sponsor an "Open Source" project to build one of its own. What need is this filling? I'd say Microsoft's need to stay in the game. Can there be any other reason to duplicate work that has already been done?

No; WiMAX is not dead. For those of you who don’t know: it’s the new IEEE-802.16 standard, and now Intel, Motorola, and others are investing really big money into it.

The company is setting up an open-source project to create a series of tools that translate between the OpenXML and OpenDocument formats.

Since a contractor used an FBI agent's password and ancient off-the-web utilities to repeatedly crack the Bureau's network, people are starting to ask questions. Problem is, they're the wrong questions. After blowing $581 million on its failed Trilogy IT boondoggle, the FBI re-badged it, then re-sold it to Congress for another $500 million. Unfortunately, the Inspector General's report shows that the "lack of people who know what they're doing" persists. Does J. Edgar Hoover's old team have the minimal competence required to protect itself in the Internet age?

Ron Gilbert can’t find any support for his new game project. Who’s to blame? Well, Gilbert cites unimaginative publishers who are too short-sighted to appreciate his concept. Perhaps it’s time that Gilbert considered the alternative to proprietary game development. Perhaps it’s time we offered him this alternative.

Solaris and PostgreSQL love in

An integrated suite of open source middleware stacks featuring Solaris and PostgreSQL, potentially offered to developers as a service, are on Sun Microsystems' radar.

Wow - now even high profiled, long term MAC users get it: read all about it here. I guess that’s what’s happening if you (as a company; in this case Apple) give up too much of your own profile and switch to using what everyone else builds in as well.

Start-up Trinity Audio Group (TAG) is using Linux and open source audio applications in a small, portable, inexpensive digital audio workstation (DAW) claimed capable of professional-quality recording and mixing. The Trinity DAW is based on an Intel PXA270 processor, and targets field recordists, podcasters, and producers.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.18 kernel, "the merge window for 2.6.18 is closed, and -rc1 is out there". He noted that the changes are extensive, "the changes are too big for the mailing list, even just the shortlog. As usual, lots of stuff happened. Most architectures got updated, ACPI updates, networking, SCSI and sound, IDE, infiniband, input, DVB etc etc etc." Find the shortloghere. Linus went on described additional changes:

"There's also a fair amount of basic infrastructure updates here, with things like the generic IRQ layer, the lockdep (oh, and priority-inheritance mutex support) stuff by Ingo&co, some generic timekeeping infrastructure ('clocksource') stuff, memory hotplug (and page migration) support, etc etc."

Like all pieces of electronic equipment, computers have a tendency to malfunction and break; if you have never experienced kernel core dumps or unexpected crashes, consider yourself lucky. Many common hardware problems are caused by bad RAM modules, overheated or broken CPUs, or bad sectors or clusters on hard disks. In this article we will introduce you to some open source tools you can use to trace these problems, and thus save time, money, and headaches.