Showing all newswire headlines

Linux runs on the first e-book reader released this year ... and on the second ... and the third. Just a few days ago, the first Kindle 2s started shipping from Amazon.com, making them the first e-book readers to be released to the public this year -- and you may be surprised to learn that what's inside isn't some proprietary software running on Windows CE, but rather the good old Linux kernel.

I first learned of Microsoft bringing suit against in-car navigation company TomTom NV when I got an email from a journalist asking for comment. Why all the buzz? Because apparently several of the patent claims relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel - and while Microsoft has made noises publicly and threats privately for years alleging that Linux infringes multiple Microsoft patents, it has never actually brought a suit against a Linux implementer specifically alleging infringement by the Linux portion of their product. The result is that across the industry, everyone is asking the same question: What Does it All Mean? For what it's worth, here's my take. (hint: Don't Panic)

How do you take a project with 40 million lines of code that's shipping on millions of devices around the world and make it open source? That's the Everest of a problem facing the Symbian Foundation as they start to deliver on the promises made when Nokia brought Symbian under its wing.

Initiated by the Conservative opposition party, the push towards Open Source Software will now be realized in a ten point Government Action Plan penned by the governing Labour Party.

Leaving XP behind won't be easy. Have you thought about your choices--Vista or Windows 7? Is a third choice possible just beyond those two in Ubuntu?

W3C eGovernment Stakeholder Meeting Welcomes IT and Policy Representatives from Government and Industry to Washington, DC March 12-13, 2009

Virtualization has been a buzz word for a few years now. Some people think it has been over-hyped but I'm not one of those people. The big competing products seem to be: VMware, Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, Parallels (including OpenVZ), and Hyper-V. Is there too much choice out there? Choice isn't bad, is it? Will there eventually be a market shake up with a thinning of product candidates as a result? Will someone try to proclaim that they are the virtualization "standard"? I don't really know. I certainly like competition and don't think having a number of competing products is bad. There are both proprietary products and FOSS products. As you can guess, I lean towards the later if at all possible.

Another promising piece of news from the open source IT channel: Opengear, which develops open source systems and network management sofware, is growing its partner network and expects to generate record results this quarter.

Microsoft (MSFT) has gone and done it, they've filed suit in U.S. District Court claiming Linux violates their patents. The case centers on portable GPS device maker Tomtom, which uses Linux in its device.

For simplicity's sake, I keep all of my general-purpose boxes running the same Linux distribution. That minimizes conflicts when sharing applications and data, but every substantial upgrade means downloading the same packages multiple times — taking a toll on bandwidth. I used to use apt-proxy to intelligently cache downloaded packages for all the machines to share, but there are alternatives: apt-cacher, apt-cacher-ng, and approx, as well as options available for RPM-based distributions. This article will take a look at some of these tools.

It's arriving about two months later than originally scheduled (and didn't arrive in 2008 like Intel wanted), but X Server 1.6 has been officially released this afternoon and it wasn't 212 days late like the infamous X Server 1.4.1 release.

In the previous part of the article, we saw how Drupal handles JavaScript and we created a JavaScript tool.

In this part we're going to:

1. Create a simple theme
2. Add JavaScript to a theme.

Learn about Open source Content Management Systems options for UNIX. AIX® provides an ideal environment for blogs and for the Web Content Management System (CMS) tools running those blogs because of its Web and text-processing power. You get the best of both worlds by combining open source CMS and AIX for a complete and ready-to-use content management tool with extensive support from the open source community, along with a secure and reliable server with high availability, scalability, and enterprise-level support from IBM®. This article introduces some of the best CMS solutions for AIX available from the open source community, and helps readers understand the important differences among them.

To date, I don’t think I have ever seen any other operating environment support so many file systems and volume managers. You name it and I can assure you that one way or another, it runs on Linux. The problem with having multiple choices of methods or applications in configuring and managing your storage is that there may come a time where you will have to toggle between multiple interfaces in order to accomplish one set of tasks.

Weblog software (also known as blog software or blogware) enables users to maintain an ongoing chronicle of information on a website. Typically, a blog is a frequently updated, personal website, with diary-type commentary, descriptions of events, and sometimes includes graphics and video as well as links to articles on other sites. However, blogs can also be used for business purposes.

With a new government policy on open source announced, The H sounded out open source vendors for their reactions. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems was the first person The H called. He was pleased to see the updated policy, "It's a great thing to see it published, as the 2004 policy didn't help very much". The new policy had "a lot of good things in it" such as the costing in of exit, or as Phipps calls them, sundown costs and the preference towards open source because of, as the policy puts it, "its inherent flexibility". Phipps explained "Open source has inherent benefits in that it gives a CIO control of the complete life-cycle. The four freedoms put the CIO in control".

The Falcon Programming Language is a typeless language born for rapid development, prototyping, and ready-made integration. We may also describe Falcon as a “scripting” language with features that enable the programmer to create even complex multi-threaded applications. It mixes several different programming paradigms into an unique blend of constructs, overcoming the limitations and partialities of other languages. The objective of this brief article is to be very practical with code examples as well as step by step simple instructions. Read the full tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

As Microsoft pumps up Windows 7 for a potential Fall 2009 release, the operating system has received generally favorable buzz. But now, some folks are starting to wonder if Windows 7 will somehow save IT sales. The VAR Guy thinks not.

What is Lean Software Development? Fortunately, that's an OK question to ask if you are reading this book. It's not written for developers who are well versed in "lean" or "agile" development. That's good for the rest of us. For instance, in my "day job" we are slowly moving towards a more Agile development model. I suppose if some folks around here weren't all that sure what "agile" meant, reading up on it would be helpful. That's the sort of role this book hopes to fill relative to "lean", with the understanding that the "pro-lean subculture" is well associated with Agile development.

Dell is taking the netbook market by the horns, it would seem. First it refuses to accept that the Psion netbook trademark is a valid one, and now it bucks the market trend for not being able to sell Linux powered netbooks.