Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

More than two years ago the South African Revenue Service (SARS) began a process to migrate its desktops to Linux by calling for a proof on concept. Two years on the desktop migration has not happened but the tax-collection arm of government has made some progress towards wider open source use, including wide use of Suse Linux. We take a look at exactly what has been going on.

While backup and recovery solutions are considered paramount in most organisations, they are possibly one of the most overlooked procedures in company security policies, mainly because they seem to try to achieve the opposite. Security demands strong encryption and overall policy control over employee and enterprise-wide information, while backup software tries to simplify the data centre recovery process regardless of platform, location and user, anywhere on the network.

There are lots of Linux distros being touted as great desktop operating systems for PCs. However, there's only one that I can wholeheartedly recommend to business owners as a Windows replacement: Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED). SLED 11, which was released on March 24, stands above its competitors because it works and plays well with existing Windows business networks, data files and application servers. You can, of course, add this functionality to other Linux distributions -- if you're willing to do it manually. SLED gives you pretty much the full deal out of the box.

Imagine owning a smart phone that you can hack just as freely as a PC. OpenMoko is an embedded Linux-based mobile platform, and the Neo Freerunner is OpenMoko's slick little touch-screen smart phone that runs OpenMoko. Unlike other mobile platforms that are open in buzzword only, OpenMoko is a genuinely open hardware and software platform. Carla Schroder investigates this radical new approach to mobile devices.

Linux distributions (the Linux kernel plus a desktop and applications) come in many flavours. Here's an overview of just a few of the recent releases. While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

With apologies for returning to the theme of patents, I'd like to direct your attention to a long and interesting piece that has appeared on the Digital Majority site asking a very important question: “Did Red Hat lobby for, or against software patents in Europe?”

Next month should see the first steps from the Canonical camp that will let you run an Amazon-style cloud behind the firewall on Ubuntu. The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu, version 9.04, due in April, will let you take existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and run them on your own Ubuntu servers.

Novell on Tuesday released Suse Linux Enterprise 11, which includes for the first time a full runtime environment for Microsoft .NET applications. The open-source company said the new version of the data center operating system shows improvements over its predecessors in terms of interoperability, mission-critical computing and virtualisation. One of the key enhancements in Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is its Mono Extension. Mono is an open-source project that aims to create a .NET-compatible set of programming tools, including elements such as a C# compiler. According to Novell's product director for the EMEA region, Holger Dyroff, the addition of commercial support for Mono means Suse Linux Enterprise 11 users can migrate their existing .NET applications across to the Linux platform.

You're not really supposed to love an operating system. It's like your car's hydraulic system, your digestive system or the global financial system. It's supposed to do its job -- and not get in your way while you're doing yours. But like your car, your guts and the economy, computers are more complicated than they seem. And so are our feelings about them. As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix's 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. If that's not the basis of a lasting love, I don't know what is.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006.

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast? With your birth as our starting point, then, let's look at the biggest desktop OS milestones of the past 40 years.

A project that has no goals — no bugs to fix, no features to implement — has only stagnation to look forward to. The best prevention for this kind of stagnation is an active community of users who are quick to share what they want with the developers — even if there is the occasional users vs. devs feature stalemate. The KDE Project has no shortage of community-contributed ideas, and to keep the concepts flowing freely, the powers-that-be have implemented a new feature of their own: A designated section of the KDE Community Forums christened The "Brainstorm" Forum.

Novell announced the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Desktop (SLED) and Server (SLES) 11, offering new support for virtualization and cloud computing. The SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 11 distributions also include the Mono project extension for .NET compatibility, and a High Availability extension.

Mer is an outgrowth of Nokia's Maemo environment, designed to flesh out the tablet-centric operating system into a full-fledged Linux distribution suitable for embedded and desktop systems of all description. The project's genesis was an effort to back port the upcoming Maemo 5.0 release to no-longer-supported Nokia N800 and N810 tablets, but it has subsequently evolved to run on BeagleBoards, embedded navigation devices like the Pocket LOOX, and standard x86 hardware.

Here are seven ways to pump up your browser, whether it's Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox. Use these free browser add-ons to take notes in your browser, see thumbnails of Web pages in Google searches, drag an address in a Web page to an add-on and map it instantly, and quickly download video with one press of a hotkey.

Security researchers have identified a sophisticated piece of malware that corrals consumer routers and DSL modems into a lethal botnet. The "psyb0t" worm is believed to be the first piece of malware to target home networking gear, according to researchers from DroneBL, which bills itself as a real-time monitor of abusable internet addresses. It has already infiltrated an estimated 100,000 hosts. It has been used to carry out DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks and is also believed to use deep-packet inspection to harvest user names and passwords.

The disclosure that Red Hat have applied for a patent on what might strike some as an obscure corner of the software ecosystem has caused others to re-evaluate how open and collaborative Red Hat actually are. As the AMQP 1.0 standard entered into its final phase, a 2007 Red Hat patent application, the company now refers to as a "defensive" patent, on an obvious extension of AMQP, was automatically disclosed and caused quite stir. What is AMQP, why is it important, what has Red Hat done to cause a ruckus within the AMQP community, and what does it mean to open source in general.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell today takes the wraps off SUSE Linux 11, its riff on Linux for servers and desktops that now sports a commercially supported extension for the Mono runtime environment and a variant that provides high availability clustering of servers. The Mono Extension to SUSE Linux is the first time that Novell has offered commercial support for the Mono runtime, which allows applications that are coded in C# and using the .NET Framework to run atop non-Windows platforms. Novell bought into the open source Mono project when it acquired Ximian, the company behind Mono as well as the Gnome graphical user interface, back in the summer of 2003. That's a long time for Novell to take to get Mono commercial, but better late than never.

The latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell Inc.'s commercial distribution of the open-source operating system, bears more fruit from Novell's controversial two-and-a-half-year-old interoperability alliance with Microsoft Corp. One version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, what Novell likes to call SLE 11, will allow companies to run applications built with Microsoft's .Net platform to work on Linux without recompiling them. That version, called Mono Extension, even runs on IBM's System z, enabling IBM'S mainframe computers to run .Net apps.