Showing headlines posted by dave

"The Freedom Toaster project began as a means of overcoming the difficulty in obtaining Linux and Open Source software due to the restrictive telecommunications environment in South Africa, where the easy downloading of large pieces of software is just not possible," says Jason Hudson, Shuttleworth Foundation project manager.

With an ever-growing market share and a continual stream of new software and functionality, MySQL AB's products have made a dramatic impact on the technology industry. New versions, features, and functions are arriving at an increasing pace, but database designers, developers, and administrators might feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of products, along with how frequently they're updated.

A totally new release of Knoppix was unveiled at LinuxTag 2005, Knoppix 4.0. This is the release that introduces the split between "maxi" DVD and "mini" CD releases. I've tried out the 4.0 DVD and let me tell you, I'm like a kid in a candy store.

Faced with rising IT security threats and needing a workable solution, the UK government is seriously looking at adopting some Open Source solutions, such as SELinux and Xen.

Red Hat Scholarships is the first ever open source program of its kind in the world designed to encourage young talent and spread the open source philosophy that has created world class software like Linux, Apache and many other programs.

Linux is not just the operating system for power users anymore. Janet Valade discusses the tangible benefits of open source software and Linux

...I want to reboot the whole Conference System. It sounds as though reboot is trying to do exactly that. Hope I can come home with some fresh ideas. Lord knows, we need them. Because the defaults are as stale as dumpster gunk.

ComputerWire contacted several enterprise service bus (ESB) companies to ascertain whether or not they would contribute to the Celtix open source ESB project, but so far none can be found.

AKCP has converted its data center security monitor from a proprietary RTOS to embedded Linux. The SensorProbe8Linux uses a variety of open source software to monitor server status, and a variety of attached sensors to monitor server room physical security.

Logicalware Ltd, announced today that that they have received an investment of GBP300,000/$548,000 from the Sigma Innovation Fund and Bill Dobbie, a technology entrepreneur. This is the first venture capital investment in an Open Source software company in the UK and is part of the global wave of support for this new way of creating software.

Well my laptop's fan has died, and no way it seems for this newbie to take the laptop apart and get a new one put in. Luckily, a friend had a computer for sale, and I bought it. Tried to install Lycoris on it (which was on my laptop), but the install would not would not go work, could get the screen up initially, but not after the reboot. Originally, this computer has XP on it, and had a problem with no sound. Had a friend come over, and he reinstalled XP; still no sound. That was when I discovered that I had plugged the wires into the wrong spot on the computer. Well XP, upon start up, had one trojan and about 3 viruses on it. That was when I started to use knoppix 3.6, which was given to me. It worked fairly well, but I couldn't quite figure out how to install it. So had a system on which Lycoris wouldn't boot, knoppix on a live cd, and then Ubuntu arrived. Tried to live cd, it worked, so installed it. Liked it, and it worked nice; however, never got java to install among other things, so couldn't access some of my favorite sites.

There are so many distros, and so many opinions about which is the best, it's hard for even a Linux veteran to keep them all straight. To help cut through the clutter, Tipmonkies.com has compiled a brief overview of the major distributions and their more noteworthy derivatives.

What do traditional farmers have in common with those taking part in the free software movement? Nothing apparently – while some deal with the millenary agricultural activity, others deal with what our imagination regards as futuristic. However, these characters seem to have similar enemies. They all have monopoly as their main opponent. Hackers from the free software movement fight for the code they develop and use to be free. Farmers, on the other hand, try to protect the species they have long been growing from becoming monopolized by multinational enterprises, which are interested in obtaining a patent on the seeds. In the last case, the code to be protected is a genetic one. Both farmers and programmers are, in reality, fighting for the same cause: free knowledge.

The discussion of open source vs. top-down security is not a new one. In fact it was a major issue at the time of the American Revolution. Washington advocated having a small army and citizens bearing arms, rather than the practice that had stifled freedom in Europe — only the government can have arms and, if a citizen uses a weapon to defend against an attacker rather than waiting for the police to arrive, that citizen is jailed.

To get an accurate picture of how costs associated with patch management figure into the TCO equation, Microsoft recently commissioned Wipro Technologies Ltd to study the cost of updating Microsoft and open source software in a real-world environment for desktops, servers and database servers. This is very important as for proprietary and open source software alike, administering security updates are a reality in the enterprise and a significant factor in total cost of ownership thus to get an accurate picture Wipro surveyed 90 companies in the US and Western Europe with 2,500 to 113,000 employees where both the Windows and open source operating systems were simultaneously being run.

Microsoft Office faces stiffer competition from the open-source world following major releases of Office competitors for the Mac OS X, Unix and Linux platforms this week. Open-source developers hope to give the software giant a run for its money in the enterprise by delivering productivity suites that cost less, work with Office formats as well as open-standards formats, and include commercial support options. The software appearing on the scene this week meets some or all of these conditions.

The Linux community, as opposed to proprietary vendors, provides innate security enhancements and affords a substantial number of resources from developers in the community to ensure that even seemingly insignificant security flaws are properly addressed.

Akiva Corporation, a provider of enterprise-wide open collaboration solutions, has announced the first commercial release of Silk. This software, which has been available in beta release since late 2004, is a comprehensive open source collaboration solution built to enterprise J2EE software standards. This open source software can lower the total cost of ownership when compared with other major proprietary collaboration frameworks.

Today Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced the beginning of a cooperation between Wikimedia and the KDE project at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the first applications, like the media player amaroK, start to integrate Wikipedia content the idea is to create a webservice API to access the information from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary. There are also plans for a KDE API.

Businesses and organizations investigating free enterprise software platforms might want to keep an eye on Alfresco, an emerging open source software company.