Showing all newswire headlines

Bitsim is shipping an evaluation and development board that targets 2D graphics-intensive embedded applications, such as instrumentation and gaming devices. The "Badger" board is based on an ARM9 processor and Altera Cyclone II FPGA (field-programmable gate array), and apparently is accelerated by Bitsim's "Badge" softcore processor.

Genealogy is a burgeoning hobby and to help the home genealogist, a whole range of software is available. Much of it is commercial but here I’ll look at one of the most popular free software options—GRAMPS. Charting your family history needn’t mean compromising on licensing.

Running a Microsoft Windows NT server these days is a brave (or, perhaps, stupid) thing to do: Support for the product has finished, and as far as Microsoft is concerned, the product should be put in a rest home for retired software. Windows Server 2000 is also getting long in the tooth, and in a few years it too will reach the end of its support lifecycle and be looking for its rocking chair and slippers.

Neuros Audio's tiny Linux-based DVR (digital video recorder) has lots of potential, if community enthusiasm continues, according to a review at LinuxLookup.com. The "Open Source Device" (OSD) is already capable enough for users simply wishing to record or transcode TV for playback on hand-held devices, the reviewer says.

As 2006 winds to a close, the editors of LinuxDevices.com have assembled a retrospective aimed at highlighting major trends and events in the world of embedded Linux. Of the approximately 1,200 stories we published this year, these were the most important, in our opinion.

Linux seller's net income drops, but revenue rises; executives say competition from Oracle hasn't taken customers away.

"There is no doubt in my mind, that ASP.NET is the most powerful and versatile platform for web applications at the moment."

[I am in the process of learning how to use ASP.NET at work, so far just getting the .NET framework downloaded and other dependent software in order to run it has been the challenge. I'll let you know how it goes - Scott]

The project team for Linux Mint, one of the first "customized" Ubuntu distributions, this week released its 2.1 version, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, the GNOME desktop environment, and an expanded set of browser plugins and multimedia tools.

Jeremy Allison -- best known as one-half of Samba's leadership team with Andrew Tridgell -- has resigned from Novell in protest over the company's patent agreement with Microsoft. Allison, who left HP to join Novell in April of 2005, will leave the company at the end of the month. He was Novell's Lead Developer on the company's Samba team.

BSD and Linux programmers have had a lot of success in creating drivers for new computer hardware in a timely manner, but much of their effort has been without the support of major hardware manufacturers. Intel, Marvell, Texas Instruments and Broadcom, though separate and competing entities, seem by one consent to prevent non-Microsoft operating systems from working properly with some of their most widely-used network chips.

A group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service has developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run.

With the increased availability of robust, enterprise-grade open source components, today's software projects require dynamic collaboration among project teams and often depend on a mix of globally created and maintained components. In its second generation, the Apache Maven build tool was designed to take on these modern challenges. This tutorial gets you started with Maven 2.

BadVista is the latest in a series of activist campaigns launched by the Free Software Foundation (FSF)in the last eight months. It follows the highly successfulDefective By Designcampaign against so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, and an unnamed effort to encourage the activist media to make free software part of their agenda. Released on December 15, the campaign currently takes the form of a blog site coordinated by John Sullivan, a program administrator at the FSF. The site features a logo with its name over a quartered flag reminiscent of the Windows logo, but in black and with what appears to be a skull in one corner. So far, the contents is mostly the announcement of the site, an explanation of its purpose, and a news aggregate about the problems and limitations of Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Everybody knows that the media world is undergoing extraordinary changes from the digitization of content and the growth of digital platforms like the Internet. Predicting who will win and who will lose in this transformation has been both a parlor game and a game of high-stakes finance for everyone involved. While there has been lots of speculation as to what might happen to different companies, what hasn't been talked about as much is, what will happen to media industry people?

After running 120 tests using ten benchmarks and the twelve ATI display drivers that were released in 2006, our ATI A Year in Review has been completed! In this article we delve into how ATI has affected the Linux community this year, and how they are actively working on improving their image and support. But what direction is ATI/AMD headed in for 2007? We answer all of these questions and share a lot more exclusive information in our Phoronix ATI/AMD AYiR 2006 review.

Many small businesses have avoided Linux for a variety of reasons: not enough applications, complexity of installation or that it requires too much technical know-how to run. The technology has matured over many years, which raises the question: how valid are these considerations today? Drew Robb reports.

Alek Komarnitsky's controllable Christmas lights started out as a hoax, but now Komarnitsky is using Linux to power the controllable Christmas lights for real in order to bring attention to celiac disease.

Just as the year in open source was cruising to a finish in 2006 -- all gussied up in a neat bow for the year, November arrived with a splash to re-draw the whole map.

The legendary Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) has resigned from Novell in protest over the Microsoft-Novell patent agreement, which he calls "a mistake" which will be "damaging to Novell's success in the future."

The first 10 years of XML were only the beginning. This article Takes a good look at the future of XML. XQuery and native XML databases will be very, very hot. Also pay attention to anything called Web 2.0. Yes, it's hype; and yes, if you asked four speakers at this conference how they defined Web 2.0, you got six different answers; but there's a lot of reality behind the hype. XSL-FO and XForms will be more important next year and developers will start to build impressive systems with them.