Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For a very long time now, I've been on the hunt for a distribution that really put a lot of effort into their KDE4 implementation. This has been a frustrating search, full of broken installations, incredibly slow performance, and so many visual artifacts they made my eyes explode. Since KDE 4.3 is nearing release, I had to pick up this quest in order to take a look at where 4.3 stands - and I found a home in the KDE version of Fedora 11. Read on for a look as to where KDE 4.3 currently stands.

The winners of the fourth annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced at this years OSCON. Over 47,000 open source projects were nominated for this years Community Choice Awards and 85 finalists were selected across twelve categories.

Eric Geier introduces the Untangle Gateway, a Linux-based user-friendly Internet shield that provides a firewall, ad-blocking, anti-malware, protocol control, secure VPN, WAN balancing and failover, and other advanced and essential services for safely navigating the big bad Internet.

Yahoo is close to making Microsoft's Bing its search provider. The deal, which would make Microsoft a more credible competitor to Google, is likely to be announced this week, and seems likely to be based on a revenue share, not on a big fat check upfront, as some at Yahoo had hoped. Yahoo's request for an upfront payment (it is said to have asked for several hundred million), in addition to revenue guarantees that would amount to billions over the course of the deal, caused a breakdown last week in the on-again-off-again talks. But they were revived late on Thursday, according to executives with knowledge of the situation.

The 2009 kernel summit is planned for October in Tokyo. Over the years, your editor has observed that the discussion on what to discuss at the summit can sometimes be as interesting as the summit itself. Recently, the question of how user-space programmers can communicate requirements to the kernel community was raised. The ensuing discussion was short on definitive answers, but it did begin to clarify a problem in an interesting way.

Today's Report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, "A Healthier Future For All Australians: Final Report," makes the e-health system a central plank in the future of health management in Australia.

Microsoft's original proposal to the European Commission, that it drop the web browser entirely from Windows 7, has been superseded with a new proposal that users be offered a "ballot box" of browser options. According to analysis by Glyn Moody of the presented documentation, it also appears to go much further.

Back in 2005 we had reviewed the SilverStone Sugo SG01 and found this innovative small form factor chassis with its unique design to be very impressive and a wonderful case for gamers and computer enthusiasts. There were a few areas with the case's design that was not perfect, but SilverStone had then introduced the SG01W Evolution model complete with a case window and a few internal improvements. Pushing forward to 2007, there was then the Sugo SG03 that had the same basic layout as the SG01 but was rotated so that it would stand vertically. This was, yet another, excellent SilverStone chassis to work with and was wonderful in almost every aspect. A year later, after initially only being available in the Asian countries, we got our hands on the Sugo SG02-F, which was a budget version of the SG01. Last year we then reviewed the Sugo SG04, which built upon the SG03 and was still another great chassis. What though do we have to look at from SilerStone this year when it comes to the Sugo series? You guessed it, the SG05. The SG05 (and the already launched SG06) are radically different from the earlier Sugo enclosures in that they are for micro ITX systems rather than micro ATX.

Microsoft Corp.'s unprecedented release last week of more than 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux community could put pressure on several top suppliers of closed-source drivers to make similar moves. Observers note that virtualization vendor VMware Inc., Wi-Fi chip maker Broadcom Corp. and graphics chip maker Nvidia Inc. still decline to offer their Linux drivers under the General Public License, a free software license widely used in the open-source community.

Local developers are helping to drum up market buzz to boost interest and expertise in open source technology across the country. Development in the mobile arena is particularly hot at the moment, among both individuals and software houses, according to Linux user groups in Singapore.

Reports that Microsoft had to release the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPLv2 because they had violated the GPL have been rebutted by Microsoft and Vyatta. Vyatta had been referenced by reports as the source of the accusation.

The forthcoming standard for the object-oriented language C++ will not be released before 2010. It will also lack the planned 'concepts' mechanism. This is according to information in a Dr. Dobbs Journal article by C++'s inventor, Bjarne Stroustrup. Concepts have been "decoupled" – or in Stroustrup's words "yanked out" – by the ISO group responsible for the standard, Working Group 21.

How can anyone make a living writing Free software? Why should a coder work for free? These questions, and others, are answered in this two-part series. Today we learn why Free and Open Source software are very important even to end users who are not coders.

In the dispute over bankruptcy-threatened SCO Group's legal claims, the company has submitted testimonyPDF in which it confirms having paid $100,000 to investor Steven Norris. According to the testimony, the money didn't actually come from Germany, but rather from its non-debtor Japanese subsidiary. The gift of personal funds from SCO boss Darl McBride is also mentioned. The payments to which IBM lawyers are objecting represent, according to the deposition, a baseless, sham argument, saying that "IBM and Novell are interested only in putting SCO out of business so it canot pursue its legal claims against them." SCO is in dispute with Novell and IBM over the copyright to Unix and over code allegedly illegally copied from Unix into Linux to which SCO claims it has copyright.

Microsoft released a set of Linux drivers for its Hyper-V software under the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) not because of "perceived obligations" to that license but because it is the preferred license of the Linux community and would benefit both Microsoft customers and users of Linux, according to a company executive. In a statement by Microsoft Senior Director of Platform Strategy Sam Ramji posted to the company's Port 25 blog late Thursday, Microsoft stood by its original reasoning to release technology called the Linux Device Driver for Virtualization on Monday under the GPLv2. Microsoft had not previously released code under this open-source license and had, in fact, criticized it.

During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers. Akademy-es started on Friday 10th with a talk by Cenatic, a governmental foundation with the aim to promote and improve knowledge of free software in public administrations, companies, universities, etc. For that, the foundation is creating and developing different courses both online and at site based on free software. They want to create a specific course for the KDE desktop, so they asked for collaboration from KDE España, the Spanish organisation to support and promote the KDE project in Spain. The president of Cenatic showed his interest in the project and this collaboration will be starting in the coming months.

The development of the next version of Ubuntu continues with the third alpha release of Karmic Koala. According to the announcement, this alpha contains software updates which "are now ready for large scale testing". Alpha 3 is one of a number of milestones which the Ubuntu developers release as they progress towards the final October release of Ubuntu 9.10.

Microsoft's historic embrace of Linux technology could have wide-reaching impacts on the virtualization market and Microsoft's rival VMware. By allowing greater ability to run Linux on the Hyper-V virtualization platform, Microsoft is making a compelling case that it could be the virtualization vendor of choice for consolidation of Windows and Linux applications, says Gartner analyst George Weiss. Microsoft still lags behind VMware in enterprise features such as live migration. But once Microsoft proves itself "good enough" in terms of functionality, many customers will be intrigued by Hyper-V as a lower-cost alternative to VMware, Weiss says.

There are more than a few of us who would be overjoyed to see Open Source take over the world. For the geeks at NASA, though, the world is not enough. Open Source is nothing new for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Linux Journal looked at Linux use in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratories way back in May 2000. The Open Source wonder runs its Colombia supercomputer, and will even power mans return to the moon.

While Linux systems generally have a good reputation for uptime, there are sometimes unavoidable reasons that a reboot is required. Typically, that is because of a kernel update, especially one that fixes a security hole. Companies that have long-running processes, or those who require uninterrupted availability, are not particularly fond of this requirement. A new company, Ksplice, Inc. has come up with a way to avoid these reboots by hot-patching a running kernel.