Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The nature of the enterprise desktop is changing, and the emphasis now is on instant accessibility, mobility and flexibility - attributes which Linux, on the server, desktop, netbook or mobile device, is well placed to provide In a world on the move, a fast and elegant browser is the key to open every door. The network is the computer, and everything you need can be accessed from the cloud, which may reside at the hub of the LAN or across the wider network.

The Symbian Foundation has released its first open source software package, the first step in the organization's plan to eventually open source the entire Symbian mobile operating system. The Symbian Foundation was set up by in June 2008 by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG and AT&T to oversee the development of the Symbian OS as an open source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The OS had previously been developed as proprietary software by the Symbian Foundation.

At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB. Read more about the results!

Ubuntu's maker, Canonical Ltd., is defiant that it can maintain its edge in the desktop Linux space despite Google Inc.'s upcoming Chrome operating system. Google may possess brand recognition and engineering resources that dwarf the 200-employee, reported $30-million-yearly-revenue Canonical, but Chrome OS's ascent "is no slam dunk just because you make an announcement," says Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical. Carr told Computerworld today that building a user-friendly operating system is "harder than putting a new feature on a search engine."

"All Things have an End," said Jonathan Swift, "and a Pudden has two." Such is the case for Ubuntu as well, and later this month the first of the ends will come due for its longstanding legacy, the Dapper Drake. The Ubuntu release cycle is relatively unique among Linux distributions in that it occurs exactly every six months, without exception — almost. The odd duck amongst the Ubuntu releases is Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake — its version numbering reveals it was released in June, while all other releases have arrived in April or October (X.04 or X.10). Nonetheless, the release was groundbreaking, including for the first time a number of features now taken for granted, among them graphical installation from the LiveCD, an improved — and now much bemoaned — Human theme, and a number of next-generation software packages, including MySQL 5.0, Firefox 1.5, and OpenOffice 2.0 among others.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wonders: is the Mono programming environment really a Microsoft threat to Linux, or is this just a tempest in a tea-cup? It depends on who you ask.

Makers of instant-on Linux environments say Google's Linux-based Chrome operating system won't interfere with growth in their markets and may help accelerate interest in quick-boot Linux platforms.

Ace coder Akkana Peck didn't want to keep a tab open in a browser all day every day just to keep an eye on Twitter, and none of the available Linux clients had what she was looking for. Either they required installing something like Mono or Adobe Air, or they had nasty bugs. And then she found out about Python-Twitter and how to write her own. (Beginners can do this too!)

Mozilla Labs has set up the Open Web Tools Directory, a bid to build a comprehensive list of the open-source developer tools available. On Monday, the open source browser project issued a call to the programmer community to help with the construction of the new central database.

Google has revealed at least some of the hardware manufacturers it's working with to design and build devices that run the much-discussed Google Chrome Operating System. With a post to the official Chrome blog Wednesday afternoon, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory said its hardware partners include Acer, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

Google will eventually take over the world. Oh, sure, we delude ourselves into believing otherwise, but deep down inside we know that one day, gLife will come out of beta.

Kristian Høgsberg, the Red Hat developer largely responsible for DRI2 and various other X.Org innovations, had started the Wayland display server project last year to leverage new technologies like kernel mode-setting and the Graphics Execution Manager. While there is not much to report on with Wayland since our last update, one of the components used by Wayland is Eagle, another Kristian Høgsberg project.

GNOME developer Thomas Thurman describes the future of the Metacity 2 window manager in a project blog. Apparently a new GNOME component named Mutter will be taking over its functions.

No one will be happier than Microsoft about Google's vanity venture to market computers with a Google-brand OS. It gives us the illusion of competition without seriously troubling either business, although both will obligingly huff and puff about how serious they are about this new, phoney OS war. Since both of these giants are permanently in trouble with antitrust regulators - they're at different stages of IBM-style thirty years legal epics - that's just the ticket for them both.

A posting on the Web Hosting Talk forum is feeding speculation about a critical security vulnerability in the OpenSSH server in CentOS/Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). According to the posting, the vulnerability is present in the OpenSSL version 4.3 used in this distribution. Although the version number is already several years old, the Red Hat development team tend to backport patches for older versions, with the result that the software may well still be up-to-date.

Google announced an open source operating system aimed at netbooks that combines the Linux kernel with its Chrome browser. Google expects to release open source code for the Google Chrome Operating System later this year, and will ship a final version in the second half of 2010, says the company.

Microsoft stated Tuesday that it will not pursue legal action against open source software developers using C# and CLI programming languages. This will likely make some developers much more confident in using the technologies. However, the promise does not include the non-ECMA parts of Mono. Devs for that project may have to choose between what's safe and what's powerful.

Since late 2007, the BBC has been using a JavaScript library called Glow on bbc.co.uk web sites, intending to release it as open source. Today, in an announcement by Stephen Elphson, Lead Product Manager for Glow at BBC Vision, the corporation is making good on that intention by releasing the JavaScript library under version 2.0 of the Apache Licence.

It's officially summer and there's a lot happening behind the scenes at Health 2.0 as we prepare for our biggest event yet! Our annual San Francisco Fall Conference will be held on October 6th and 7th at the Concourse Exhibition Center. Just two years after its first conference, Health 2.0 has become the must-see showcase for consumers and providers' use of new web and mobile tools in health care, and the venue where new products are launched, new concepts are developed and new movements are built.

FISL 10.0 in Porto Alegre, Brazil was the best yet, for many reasons. For a long time I have been impressed with how the FISL organizers (most, if not all of which are volunteers) have brought together government, industry and the community to put on an ever-larger and more complex event.