Showing all newswire headlines

I've been an enthusiastic owner of a GSM cellphone since 1999. I soon bought a serial communication cable to connect it to my PC. Since then I've tested several tools to retrieve and send data between the two. Searching the net one day I came across Gammu, a Linux-based command-line-driven open source synchronisation and backup tool written in C, focused mainly on Nokia models old and new. Gammu lets you retrieve and send SMS directly from your PC, synchronize your address book data, manage your calendar, and check out internal information about your phone's firmware and IMEI number.

The Mozilla Foundation released on Thursday an update to the Firefox Web browser to fix several vulnerabilities, including one that would allow domain spoofing. The open-source project released Firefox 1.0.1...

My work involves administering Unix Web servers and a mix of office desktops, along with developing the applications we run on them. I use Mac OS X to do it because it is something like a superset of those other popular OS choices. While much of the software I deploy is free, both as in speech and as in beer, I'm willing to open my wallet for OS X.

The OpenPKG project released version 2.3 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform multi-instance Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 2.3 consists of 545 selected (from a pool of over 850) packages.

The Linux world is bracing for the final release of the new Linux 2.6.11 kernel, which will include a long list of driver updates and patches, with InfiniBand support perhaps being one of most interesting new additions.

With shipment of an Intel-based "Linux mainframe" slated for later this year, and the release this month of new "Shunsaku XML Search" software, Fujitsu is currently pulling together mounting momentum in an increasingly competitive enterprise Linux race.

Commentary: As you've probably read, Mandrakesoft and Conectiva announced their merger today. The combined firms will be well-positioned to go after emerging markets not only in South America but around the globe. MandrakeSoft derives 40 percent of its revenue from North America, 40 percent from Europe, and the remainder from elsewhere around the world. Conectiva derives 95 percent of its revenue from Brazil, but its distribution is spread by partners in Columbia and Peru as well.

IBM has quietly added a new option to the suddenly vogue market for "hypervisor" software that lets a computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, CNET News.com has learned. [Licenced under GPL]

- PathScale EKOPath(TM) Compiler Suite Voted '2004 Supercomputing Product of the Year' in Online Reader's Poll -

Will the software industry's wave of open-source databases spill onto Microsoft's turf? Perhaps. The software giant is considering making the source code for its SQL Server database available to customers, according to Tom Rizzo, director of product management in Microsoft's SQL Server unit.

Mandrakesoft has agreed to acquire Conectiva, a move to combine the weight of two Linux sellers that individually have failed to achieve the dominance of Red Hat or Novell's SuSE.

A Dutch Web site has accepted an apology from Microsoft after it was blacklisted by the software giant's anti-spyware tool.

The French Linux vendor has acquired its Brazillian equivalent in a €1.79m all-stock deal.

Minimo, the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is poised to move beyond Linux PDAs and onto Windows CE devices, according to the Mozilla Foundation.

IBM continued to march ahead of rivals in 2004 in server sales, a key market in the computing industry, making gains in models using x86 chips and the Unix operating system.

Mandrakesoft, the European Linux leader, today is announcing a definitive agreement to acquire Conectiva, the South-American Linux leader. All details for this new acquisition are available in the press-release below.

Late last year the relationship between a free software project, Prelude, and a company that hired one of its programmers, ExaProtect Technology, broke down. In a reaction to what it perceived as unethical treatment of its development team, the Prelude project closed its development source repository, not just to ExaProtect but to the world, in an apparent breach of the spirit of the GPL and free software ethics. NewsForge investigates this cautionary tale of a relationship gone wrong.

For those of us who attended last week's LinuxWorld trade show in Boston it became clear that the worlds of Linux and business have intersected.

Now that your Linux VM is up, running and connected to the company network, it's time to move corporate work to the Linux side.

OpenOffice.org is gaining popularity in the corporate mainstream, yet one of its most powerful features, macros, can be pretty intimidating to new users. Let's see how easy it is to create an OpenOffice.org macro and connect it to a simple pushbutton.