Showing headlines posted by dave

Like nearly every other person who has contributed to this series, I have tinkered around with my share of Linux distributions. I happened on Linux From Scratch (LFS) about an year and a half ago. With LFS, my choices run deep into the system -- into matters such as which shell to run, what feature of glibc to use, and how to tailor boot scripts. LFS 6.0, which is what I have built my system around, comes with gcc 3.4.1 (which is used to build everything else), a fairly recent CVS build of gcc 2.3.4 (which the LFS team provides for download), kernel 2.6.8.1, and udev.

Although not as versatile as a spreadsheet, table formulas in OOo Writer can help you automate more of your work.

Red Hat opens its first partner and customer get-together with a song, an announcement of the open-source rebirth of the Netscape Directory Server, and an odd dig at Sun.

The potential importance of open-source models is beginning to dawn on mainstream business and government. How companies and nations respond could help to determine who thrives in the growing know-ledge economy. Yet a high proportion of decision-makers is only dimly aware of what open-source is and why it matters.

Developers have been urged to pay more attention to issues such as support, documentation and roadmaps if they want companies to trust open source

At the Red Hat Summit, KeyWest Bank says open-source software has brought cost savings.

Search giant Google has announced a contest that is intended to introduce aspiring developers to open source software. To sweeten the pot, Google will give $4,500 to each student who completes an open source project. Several groups are participating, including Gnome, Apache and The Wine Project, among others.

Hear ye, hear ye: Over the last week, 20.02 percent of visitors to PCWorld.com have been using Firefox as their browser. I believe that's the first seven-day period in which the Little Browser That Could has surpassed 20 percent usage here. (It shot up to about 18 percent usage very quickly after its official release, and has been gaining more users at a much more leisurely pace in recent weeks.)

Application NewsThe Summer of Code is Google's program designed to introduce students to the world of Open Source Software Development. The open source model of software development is one of the most effective innovations of all time. Who doesn’t love the idea of great programmers working on their own time to crank out elegant code that benefits us all?

"At one point we had three separate network monitoring systems, three separate performance management tools and a plethora different scripts, web pages and command line tools. We sent out critical alerts by email, pager, and SMS, often to completely inappropriate people. The company was growing, and it looked like it was beginning to need a grown-up systems management tool, but which one...?"

An official at the European Commission has called on Europe to take a more proactive approach to open source or risk missing out, and outlined steps that European businesses and governments can take to help open source.

Day 2 of the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans began with speeches from Red Hat's Michael Tiemann and IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I also caught up with free music guru John Buckman for his thoughts on making money from music online.

Red Hat Ready certification has been awarded to Arkeia's enterprise network backup software so that it can provide backup services to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 environments for x86 platforms.

The original GPLFlash project, which was meant to bring to GNU/Linux the ability to play Macromedia Flash movies, stalled when Macromedia released a 32-bit binary Flash Player for Linux. Because of that, and because of a lack of development help, the last significant update to GPLFlash was in June 2000. But in the past year there has been a surge in developer interest in the GPLFlash project, and now it's back, with greater stability and fewer bugs. Unfortunately, it would take a complete rewrite of GPLFlash to play the vastly different Flash 6 and Flash 7 file formats. That's why GPLFlash2 is now under development, with the goal of being a fully Flash 7-compliant replacement for the restrictively licensed Macromedia Flash Player and browser plugin.

The latest issue of Linux Gazette is ready for viewing and download...

A retired university lecturer in Australia has come up with the latest twist on Linux, fielding a distribution of the operating system that takes little memory and can boot directly off of a USB thumb drive. Dubbed Puppy Linux, the OS is one of dozens of custom and guerilla variants on Linux circulating throughout the broader software community.

Making good on its promise to the open source community, Linux vendor Red Hat Wednesday released the Fedora Directory Server. Officials said they have spent the past nine months working on the core components of the code to get it licensed under the GPL and make it available for ongoing open source development at the Fedora Project.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) may soon support a version of the Linux operating system designed for its NonStop line of fault-tolerant servers, an HP executive hinted Wednesday.

Telephone company, VoX Communications has just rolled out what it is calling the first VoIP application server cluster technology based on Linux.

I'm proud to announce that the Red Hat Directory Server product, and the Fedora Directory Server open source project have launched!