Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Microsoft and Red Hat have now consummated vows to love and cherish each other's operating systems on their corresponding hypervisors. The interoperability pact was inked in February of this year, leading the companies to "synchronize testing" in counterpart validation programs over the months. Starting today, businesses can mix and mingle Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on visualized environments with joint support from Microsoft and Red Hat.

Samsung Mobile announced its second Android phone of the week, this time aimed at Sprint's 3G network. Now available for pre-order for a Nov. 1 shipment, the "Moment" is based on an 800MHz Samsung processor, and offers a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 3.2-megapixel camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, plus GPS, says Samsung.

The Ubuntu project has released the first beta of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which has already been favorably previewed, especially for its fast boot time. Based on Linux 2.6.31, Karmic Koala offers GNOME 2.28 and Ext4 as defaults, and adds "cloud" features and improved installation.

This year's Open World Forum 2009, held in Paris, brought together the company heads of open source companies, public and government organisations and customers who use open source, for an exchange of views and an opportunity to map out the future of open source. The theme this year was "Free, Libre and Open Source Software: At the heart of the Digital Recovery" and among the numerous strands were presentations, Q&As and round tables with such notables as Jacques Attali, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, Roger Burkhardt of Ingres, Michael Tiemann of Red Hat, Mark Taylor of Sirius and Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth.

Sun Microsystems’ xVM server virtualization hypervisor has not yet seen the light of day as a commercial product, but the company is continuing to enhance the management tool. Now, the latest version of Ops Center has arrived featuring enhancements for running Solaris-based virtualization.

Small and home businesses (SOHO) can benefit greatly from using open-source software applications. Cynthia Harveys offers a tasty buffet of 50 to get you started.

Rikki Kite interviews Alex Spehr about her work on BugSquad and promoting KDE.

Keith Bergelt, CEO of the Open Invention Network (OIN), described the circumstances which led the company to recently purchase 22 Microsoft patents, as part of a talk at the first LinuxCon. While the circumstances surrounding that purchase were quite interesting—and indicative of Microsoft's patent strategy—he also described the mission of OIN as a protector of Linux from patent trolls. Because patents are likely to be a threat to Linux for a long time to come, organizations like OIN are needed to allow Linux development to continue with as few patent impediments as possible.

Yesterday I took part in an interesting event organised by BT called "Accelerating Enterprise adoption of Open Source Software" (disclaimer: filthy lucre was involved.) One topic that elicited much comment was why the public sector has singularly failed to deploy open source. As well as political issues (Tony Blair was and presumably still is manifestly in awe of (Sir) Bill Gates), there's another important issue to do with a fear of failure.

Arora is a free, cross-platform web browser built on WebKit (the engine that powers Safari and Chrome) that we've mentioned once before, but its latest release includes some interesting new features by default, including built-in support for ad blocking.

Verizon Wireless has signed a deal with Google to co-develop two Android smartphones, says eWEEK. In other Android developments, further rumors about a Motorola Sholes phone heading for Verizon have emerged, an HTC "Dragon" phone using Qualcomm's Snapdragon was tipped, and Google announced improved "AdSense" advertising for smartphones.

A report from the 451 Group's analysts has revealed that the Open Source Initiative has had it's corporate status suspended by the Californian authorities. According to OSI President Michael Tiemann, the organisation has been unable to get "our paperwork to the state in time" and so the authorities have suspended the OSI's corporate status. Tiemann adds he believes this will have a "minimal effect on our mission".

Vstone has announced a two-legged humanoid robot that sports an onboard, Intel Atom-based PC. The "Robovie-PC" can walk on joints that offer six degrees of freedom, offers an accelerometer and gyro sensors, includes a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and has a body padded with polyurethane foam, says the company.

At first sight, news that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, is just another win for free software. But the details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance – and very expensive – enterprise systems.

The pending US Supreme Court decision regarding In re Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw v. Kappos, in principle about patents on business methods and software, has lead to briefs being filed by numerous companies and associations. Those in favour of extensive patent rights have already taken a position, without issuing major public statements, at the beginning of August. "Amicus curiae" briefs by those who oppose software patents were due to be filed by the end of September. When filing their briefs, the open source companies and free software associations issued press releases in which they demanded a conclusive course correction in the US patent system.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

In December, Palm will open the official webOS developer program to support the creation of applications for the Pre and other upcoming smartphones. The company also launched its App Catalog of applications available for download.

Another month has passed since the release of KDE 4.3.0, so today the KDE Community announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2, a bugfix, translation and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.3.2 is a monthly update to KDE 4.3. It ships with a desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

Replacing a motherboard on a Linux system is usually a 30-minute chore, but sometimes things go haywire. Carla Schroder tells a tale of kernel panics and kernel transplants.

Last week Adriaan de Groot, Claudia Rauch and Kenny Duffus visited Tampere, Finland representing KDE. This gave a chance to meet face to face with members of the local team and talk about next summer's Akademy 2010 conference.