Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Do you struggle to keep tabs on your Thunderbird inbox? The SIMILE Seek extension might be the answer to your problems. The extension adds faceted browsing to Thunderbird, which allows you to search and manage your email messages in a radically different way than you are used to.

Open-source management company OpenLogic, backed by sponsors such as IDC and Unisys, has launched its long-promised Open Source Census, aimed at delivering the first detailed survey of how open-source software is used in the enterprise.

Your editor is typing this from the Linux Foundation's collaboration summit, currently in progress in Austin, Texas. The day's agenda includes giving a talk on the state of the kernel during the evening reception; beer-fueled hecklers would appear to be in your editor's near future. The first day, though, included a rather more sober panel on the state of the Linux desktop which revealed some interesting thoughts on where things are going.

LXer Feature: 20-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have lots of Linux and Open Source news including how Sun has started working on a free video codec, Ken Starks comes "back from the mountain", The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons, A new spin on Xfce and the one place Novell can beat Microsoft along and other MS related articles. Plus, we have Blue Jeans Cable's response to Monster Cable, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users and in our FUD section we have Seagate killing Linux support, Linux wanting to destroy things and how Open Source is costing the IT vendors $60 billion. Enjoy!

Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, arguably the world’s most well known version of Linux, is set to be released in a mere four days. Keen as I am on – shock horror – Windows Vista, and less of a shock, Mac OS X, I await the release of Ubuntu’s newest bird with great anticipation.

We need a new conversation about infrastructure. That's what Linux, the Net, and half a million FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications require. Because they're all part of a new infrastructural system that cannot be explained in terms of the old one — especially since infrastructure itself is not well understood. Or rather that it is too well understood in a general way, though not in the specific.

The final release of Fedora 9 has been delayed by two weeks, so I thought I’d take this chance to look at what you can expect from Fedora 9 and why you should be excited!

Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.

The Ubuntu development team today made available a release candidate version of the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron. The release candidate is the final testing release of Hardy ahead of next week’s final release. What we like: A better selection of default desktop applications, much-improved CD and DVD burning interface and much-needed audio improvements. What we don’t like: Boot speed is still a little slow.

In 10 years, Luis Villa has seen his career expand side by side with free and open source software (FOSS). Starting as bugmaster at Ximian, one of the companies that shaped GNOME as we know it today, he has been a mid-level manager at Novell, the coordinator of testing with the GNOME project, and a frequent member of the GNOME Foundation Board. More recently, Villa has been a student at Harvard Law School. When he graduates, he hopes to use his knowledge of how FOSS and business interact to benefit both.

Server heavyweight Sun Microsystems has made another foray into the world of open source software with the release of its StorageTek 5800 archiving software under a BSD Licence. Java.net uses the Sun StorageTek 5800 source code for its development efforts. Previously known as Project Honeycomb, the code for the 5800 has been donated to the OpenSolaris storage and Java.net communities, Sun said yesterday in a statement.

Testing is an important function of the software development process, no matter how big or small the development project. But not every company or developer has access to professional testing tools, which can run into hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The good news is that they don't need them, thanks to the tons of freely available open source software testing tools.

At times one really wonders why established Linux distributions such as Red Hat ever take the trouble to pursue the consumer desktop market. In the case of Red Hat, you tend to be even more puzzled that it considers doing so.

The Dutch NLnet foundation aims to financially support organisations and people that contribute to an open information society. Some time ago they decided to help KOffice in two exciting ways: to sponsor the design of a new logo for KOffice, with matching logo designs for all KOffice applications, and to sponsor Girish Ramakrishnan to improve the ODF support in KWord 2.0. The KOffice team is deeply grateful to NLnet for this support!

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on April 9 at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft's mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.

At least three industry consortia are attempting to ease development efforts for mobile application builders with Linux-based, open mobile operating system development initiatives. These efforts carry noble and productive intentions. But if there are multiple ones, leaving one "open" platform to differ from the next, will we be back to where we started?

Linux distributions have relied on the venerable Sendmail package since the early days of Slackware. But Sendmail's rich mail server features aren't an ideal solution for the typical desktop user whose primary mail support is delivered through a remote ISP. That's the perfect place for a simpler solution: sSMTP.

There's patching work ahead for users of alternative browsers. Mozilla updated its Firefox web browser on Wednesday in response to the discovery of a vulnerability involving its Javascript Garbage Collector function. The security bug means that memory corruption might be caused through specially-crafted Javascript code. Successful exploitation creates a means to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems.

Despite their prominent position in the world as leaders of technology, we hear from oriental countries quite rarely in the free software world. To find out what happens to KDE in the East, we asked some questions to Daisuke Kameda (亀田 大輔) of the KDE Japan Users Group.