Showing all newswire headlines

LXer Feature: 22-Jul-2006

Lobby4Linux founder, Ken Starks (a.k.a., Helios) recently went to Washington to take the fight for freedom - whether it's software or media - to the hallowed halls of Congress. Now he faces an even greater battle - a battle for his very life.

Advances in technology have revolutionized the way people live, learn and work, but these benefits have not spread around the world evenly. A digital divide exists between communities in their access to computers, the Internet, and other technologies. The United Nations is aware of the importance of including technology development as part of a larger effort to bridge this global digital divide. This article looks at how various United Nations agencies use free and open source software to meet the goal of putting technology at the service of people around the world.

Linux users are flocking to the stay-connected, work-anywhere contemporary lifestyle. R Cubed's LS1250-L Linux laptop is just right for these active mobile professionals.

Fluffy Spider Technology (FST) will reportedly port its user interface technology to ERTOS, a micro-kernel based real-time Linux implementation likely to be used in Qualcomm mobile phones. FST's "FancyPants" UI technology has already been embedded in a multimedia-enabled mobile terminal used in New York City taxis

Behind the firewall: If your company is averse to openness and transparency and is unlikely to change, then this article is not going to interest you much. Unless, of course, you are considering a change of direction.

One of Sun's CTOs has said that they will *truly* be opening Java, but in stages, a piece at a time.

[This has an interesting comment from Bruce Perens - dcparris]

File permissions are usually confusing to newer Linux users. Most 'newbies' are not accustom to implementing file security because of thier DOS/Windows background. Why do we need file security? It is primarly needed to ensure data protection and privacy from other system users. In other cases, file security is needed to prevent 'normal users' (as opposed to system administrators) from changing configurations or accidently damaging a system.

Has Redmond finally accepted that open source should be embraced, or are the company's recent partnerships with community-developed software providers simply another way to crack the competition?

The Gnome Partition Editor Live CD is a simple tool that will shrink a (usually "the") Windows partition on your hard drive, then make Linux partitions almost automatically. These four videos step you through the process of downloading GPartEd (the program's nickname) from SourceForge.net, defragmenting Windows, shrinking your Windows partition, and installing the three most commonly-used Linux partitions. As a free bonus, a fifth video will show you how to uninstall Linux and stretch your shrunk-down Windows partitition until it once again takes up your whole hard drive.

[ - A must-see for everyone who's going to fiddle with partitions and not willing to pay for Partition Magic - hkwint ]

Most people agree that IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino product is one of the most advanced and popular collaboration suites out there. Nonetheless, the newest version doesn't run on Linux, though IBM promised the contrary.

[ - The part about Linux is almost at the end of the article - hkwint ]

Organization believes open source ’not ready for prime-time’

[From the article: "I have no Linux background — I’ve grown up in a Windows world and am used to the GUI..."
Let me guess. Novell's sales rep is one of those anti-GUI fanatics that refused to show Paul Scheirick Yast because it's a GUI tool - and we all know that real geeks use the CLI. The only other thing I can think of that would prompt this kind of remark would necessitate an investigation of Mr. Scheirick's finances. I suppose he could be related to Tuttle's City Manager.

LXer Announcement: 21-Jul-2006

In an attempt to find out where the LXer readers live, LXer reader Dominik (incinerator) started a LXer Frappr map where readers (and editors!) can add themselves.

For people not familiar with Frappr: For every reader, a kind of flag is placed on a worldmap, so others can find out where on earth you live (Yes, living on earth is a prerequisite). You can add yourself by filling out some info in the upper right corner of the page.
I'd say it's very nice to find out where our readers live (and make that part of our 'plan to world domination'), so pleas add yourself!

Only 50 days after Dapper Drake (6.06) - on July 20, Mark Shuttleworth and his Canonical engineering team introduced their newest creation, Ubuntu 6.10 Knot-1, code-named "Edgy Eft."

Shuttleworth explained on the Ubuntu users' list why he chose the unusual name.

"Edgy is all about cutting edge, perhaps bleeding edge, brand new code and infrastructure. It will be the right time to bring in some seriously interesting but definitely edgy new technologies which lay the groundwork for the next wave of Ubuntu development," Shuttleworth wrote.

[ - screenshots here - hkwint ]

Mark Russinovich is best known lately as the guy who discovered Sony-BMG's rootkit-based copy protection on its music CDs, which the company ultimately abandoned in the face of a withering firestorm of reaction...."I'm very pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Winternals Software and Sysinternals."

Another independent bites the dust. It's in Microsoft's interests to roll out the welcome mat to corporate spyware. Now there is one less set of critical eyeballs on the Evil Empire...Carla

Bluewhite64 is een nieuwe Linux-distributie die gebaseerd is op Slackware Linux. Waar Slackware zich voornamelijk heeft gericht op het Intel x86 platform richt Bluewhite64 zich op het AMD64/EM64T platform.
[...]
Bluewhite64 Linux 11.0-rc1 uses the 2.6.16.25 kernel (with Linux 2.6.17.5 available in the /testing directory) bringing you advanced performance features such as the ReiserFS journaling filesystem, ext2, ext3, IBM's JFS and SGI's XFS filesystems, SCSI (including Adaptec), RAID, SATA controllers support and kernel support for X DRI (the Direct Rendering Interface) that brings high-speed hardware accelerated 3D graphics to Linux.

The Nokia 770 is an internet tablet designed to connect to the internet with 802.11b/g WLAN or through a phone with Bluetooth. It has a nice 800 x 480 screen (64k colors) and quite a few apps on board. The underlying OS is the Debian GNU/Linux derivative, BusyBox. As it stands, the device is not a phone.

LXer Feature: 21-Jul-2006

LXer's Don Parris got together with Versora, Inc.'s CEO, Mike Sheffey, Chief Software Architect, Nick Lassonde, and Vice-President of Marketing, Ray George to discuss Versora's role in helping businesses migrate from Windows to GNU/Linux.

World over, the benefits of the open source system are increasingly being acknowledged by the government sector. In India, Red Hat and Novell, the two major players in open source technology, confirmed the importance of its adoption in the government sector. In India, open source technology is fast gaining ground with the government in various fields like rural computerization, promotion of e-Governance, department intercommunication, etc.

Perspective. It's what separates one opinion from another. A person who looks at a glass that is half empty may be despondent but a person who looks at a glass half full may be full of joy. I like to think "Hey! Who the hell put that glass on this table anyway?". We all have different ideas that shape who we are, what we do, and why we do it. Often, these ideas blend into our interests and hobbies. With free and open source software (namely Linux) we see this frequently...especially when debating on the subject of libre and free.

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) version 1.2 was released last month, bursting with over 90 fabulous new features and improvements. Today we'll take a look at them and decide how fabulous they really are.