Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

MediaMosa, a video management and distribution platform, which has been developed in the Netherlands to deliver video content to the Dutch educational sector, is now open source. In their announcement of the release, the developers, SURFnet, a provider of IT services to education and Stichting Kennisnet, the public IT support organisation of the Dutch educational sector, said they hoped that open sourcing the application would allow other developers worldwide to work with the software.

A collective "aargh" resonated throughout the Linux blogosphere in response to Nvidia's dissing of Android in favor of Windows CE for running smartbooks. It really should come as no surprise, suggests blogger Gerhard Mack: "[Nvidia] is a company that got dragged kicking and screaming into the open source world, and they really don't want to be here."

As I described in an earlier article, the first two years of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay "have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers has developed educational applications for the laptops."

The OSCON (Open Source Convention) conference will present over 200 sessions between July 20-24 in San Jose, Calif., covering a variety of desktop and embedded Linux topics. Meanwhile, SourceForge.net has opened voting for its 2009 Community Choice Awards, with winners to be announced at OSCON.

The Eclipse Foundation has hit its planned date of June 24 of releasing Galileo, its newest annual collection of development platform projects.

Only one week after the first beta was released, VirtualBox developer Frank Mehnert has announced the availability of the second beta of version 3.0 of the open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. In addition to numerous bug fixes for the previous release, the second beta includes several performance improvements and fixes for SMP guests. Several OpenGL and Direct3D related issues and a high CPU usage issue on certain idle Windows guests, have also been addressed.

Communtu wants to give new installers and Windows converts an easier time with Ubuntu. They will present a webpage with a list of suggested programs to install as a metapackage, including multimedia and proprietary software, and then install it.

Berlin's art colleges are completely switching over to Linux. Most of the productivity software on the workstations has already been swapped for free alternative products as part of a project that started over eighteen months ago.

The Boxee developers have announced the launch of a new public alpha for Windows of their cross-platform open media center with social networking and community features. Boxee is a fork of the XBMC Media Center that includes several customised additions, including Web 2.0 services integration with Twitter, Tumblr and Digg, as well as major audio, video and photo portal integration (such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, Shoutcast, Flickr and Picasa).

The popular open-source Sugar Learning Platform, a Linux based OS that was developed for the OLPC project, is now available to run from a 1GB USB flash drive. Sugar Labs has announced that the rather splendidly monikered Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry is immediately available, and can be used to reboot any PC or netbook directly into Sugar.

Jennifer Schiff introduces us to Openfiler, the robust, enterprise open-source storage networks operating system. It is managed with a Web-based GUI, and works with any industry standard x86 or x86/64 server, and has a very attractive price tag.

The SCO Group, threatened with liquidation and still locked in a legal tangle with companies, including IBM, over alleged use of code from UNIX System V in Linux and with Novell over the copyright to UNIX, has published a list of FAQs on the takeover with which it hopes to avert liquidation, on its website. According to the information provided, the software business would be sold to unXis, whilst the SCO Group would continue the, so far highly unprofitable business of litigating against Novell, IBM, Red Hat and others. Revenues from the sale will reportedly restore SCO Group to financial health and allow it to continue to pursue its various legal disputes.

Apple Macs, iPhones, and other mobile devices are being pulled into the open-source tools universe of Eclipse, a group whose genesis was enterprise Java and C/C++. The project today released Eclipse 3.5, codenamed Galileo, which wraps 33 projects in an integrated release. For the first time, the bundle can be downloaded for development of Cocoa Mac applications destined for deployment on 32-bit and 64-bit Apple systems.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about a digital and analog circuit simulator called ksimus. One of my readers asked what the difference was between ksimus and ktechlab so I thought I'd take a look at ktechlab.

Last week we discussed the value of enunciating kernel design patterns and looked at the design patterns surrounding reference counts. This week we will look at a very different aspect of coding and see why the kernel has special needs, and how those needs have been addressed by successful approaches. The topic under the microscope today is complex data structures.

The ScummVM developers have agreed a settlement with Atari over GPL violations in three Nintendo Wii games developed by an Atari subcontractor. An official press release from the ScummVM developers "cyx" and "fingolfin" stated that a case over three games, "Freddie Fish: The Case of the Missing Kelp Seeds", "Pajama Sam: No Need to Hide When It's Dark Outside" and "Spy Fox: Dry Cereal" which used the ScummVM engine to run classic point and click adventure games, had been settled in May, with Misitic Software paying all legal fees and making a donation to the Free Software Foundation.

Intel and Nokia have announced a long-term relationship that will see the development of Intel-powered, Linux-based handheld mobile computing devices. The partnership between the chipmaker and handset manufacturer was announced on Tuesday. Under the deal, the companies will collaborate on several open source mobile Linux software projects, and Intel will license HSPA/3G modem intellectual property from Nokia.

The Eclipse Foundation's annual release train, this year dubbed Galileo, has now been released. According to Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director at the Eclipse Foundation, the Eclipse release train brings together a large number of Eclipse projects and synchronises them into a single release with the aim of making "commercial adoption simple and straightforward". The idea is that rather than a commercial adopter trying picking up what could be dozens of separate projects, by using the release train, they can plan for one major annual update.

A survey by Actuate which looks at open source attitudes and adoption has included China for the first time. Surprisingly, according to the survey, 80.3 per cent of Chinese respondents were already using open source with the main benefit being perceived as the lack of licence costs. More surprisingly was the 72.6 per cent of those respondent s who cited access to the source code as a benefit. This is a far higher figure than in North America (39.9 per cent), the UK (35.2 per cent), Germany (41.1 per cent) or France(36 per cent).

Medical, the Universal Health information system, is finalist on Sourceforge 2009 Community Awards. With over 47,000 nominations, the community has chosen 85 finalists in 12 categories. Medical is among the best 10 projects this year for government.