Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Alcatel-Lucent claims that the evolution toward Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Realtime technology, a major component of the recently announced Red Hat MRG, will enable it to strengthen reliability, scalability, security and stability throughout the lifecycle of its SME portfolio of voice, data, mobility and collaboration products. "Alcatel-Lucent will benefit from Red Hat's hardware certification program on its next-generation hardware platforms, and from Red Hat's extended support cycles including security updates."

Microsoft has broken from its past and is supporting the Eclipse Foundation. In a speech at the EclipseCon 2008 conference here March 19, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s chief open-source advocate, delivered a morning keynote and said that Microsoft will support two key Eclipse technologies, and he hinted that there may be more to come. Ramji is the director of platform technology strategy at Microsoft.

Since purchasing Suse Linux from its German parent in 2004, Novell has engineered an amazing turn-around in its business model. Prior to 2004, the world expected this proprietary networking company to slowly evolve its flagship NetWare product and equally slowly disappear into the murk of Microsoft’s marketing might.

Anyterm allows you to have secure terminal access to a server without needing any special software on a client machine beyond a Web browser. For example, with Anyterm you can open a terminal into your server from an Internet cafe. Because Anyterm uses a pseudo-terminal for communication with the shell, you can run most command-line tools from an Anyterm terminal running inside a Web browser.

I would have liked to have been able to tell you in great detail exactly what desktops and laptops will soon be coming from Hewlett-Packard equipped with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. I'd like to tell you, but HP is still holding its Linux desktop cards close to its chest and not revealing any details. This is very annoying.

The quest to get GNU/Linux to run well on a laptop has been a long running challenge. In this piece, Ed looks at his success with OpenSUSE on a Dell Latitude laptop.

"Grok" is a word that you may not know, but it has been in use since the 1960's. It is commonly taken to mean "understand" but it is so much more than that. Do you grok open source? The word is the key to understanding why talented developers give of their time.

Novell and SAP have announced that they will customize SAP's enterprise applications to work even more efficiently with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its associated virtualization and identity management technologies. According to the press release, Novell and SAP will optimize SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP's data center applications, further promote SAP's SUSE Linux-based Business All-in-One solutions and work within the SAP Enterprise Services Community program on behalf of customers in ways related to SAP's GRC (governance, risk and compliance) practices.

Gnash, the free software Flash player, has released its first beta. The new release is a milestone for both the project and the GNU/Linux desktop, which remains dependent on the proprietary Adobe player for handling Flash files (.swf). Although Flash support is not complete in version 0.8.2, Gnash has now reached the point where it is usable for the most common everyday purposes, such as watching videos on YouTube -- a point that Gnash was exaggeratedly reported as having reached last June. However, in many other ordinary circumstances, Gnash's success remains hit or miss.

In order to carry samples of my audio and video work to tradeshows, I need to be able to play a wider variety of audio and video formats than is available on any of the pocket devices out there. Fortunately, the open source Rockbox operating system doesn't require sacrificing nifty features like FM tuning and recording or voice recording and playback. And format compatibility is not the only reason one might want to install Rockbox. In fact, Rockbox was developed primarily with another purpose in mind: improving sound quality.

I was surprised last week to see a posting from Michael Tiemann, the President of the Open Source Initiative and a VP at Red Hat. Any posting with a subject of line of "Simon Phipps Was Right" is bound to catch my eye, but this one was especially unexpected because in the original discussion I had thought that Michael was largely right!

A little under a week ago, GNOME co-founder and Microsoft admirer Miguel de Icaza called me a jihadist. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that. When a man from Mexico uses words from the east one is unsure what he means to convey - but I thought it would be worth examining in detail the great developer's sayings.

With new social networks launching everyday most start with the same basic features. Bloggers have wordpress, mephisto, typo and other open source solutions. Yet there isn't an open source social network platform, until now. Built with Ruby on Rails this open source project has all the basic features you will need to setup a basic social network.

Over the past 2 years I've been getting into Linux more and more. After getting over my initial fear to move away from Windows, I realized in order for me to stay away from M$'s OS I would need to get my favorite applications to run in Linux. That's where Wine comes in.

Alexandre stated back in October 2007 that he knew of no 1.0 release blockers even then, and suggested we pick Wine's 15th anniversary for the actual date. Depending on how you look at it, there are several possible birthdays for Wine. Given that the exact birthday is a bit fuzzy, we'll simply continue with our normal biweekly release dates. That puts the 1.0 release at June 6th if it's ready by then, or June 20th or July 4th if it's not.

[I personally never thought I would live long enough to see a 1.0 release from Wine :-) - Scott]

Pat Quinn, the vice president of IT at lighting manufacturer Acuity Brands Inc., is quick to admit the irony. Nine years ago, he opted to go with an enterprise resource planning system from Oracle Corp. primarily because of Windows. "At that time, Oracle was one of the few vendors that could run on Windows, and we had a real Windows bias," Quinn said. Today, although Acuity Brands still considers itself a Windows shop -- many of the company's applications are developed in .NET and run on Windows -- its Oracle enterprise systems run on Linux.

2008 Linux/Open Source on Wall Street will focus on enterprise Linux and open source technologies, and their adoption in the datacenters of financial markets firms. Killer applications, including virtual appliances and virtualization, Linux-as-a-Service and realtime/low latency Linux will be explored, as will the practicalities of deploying open source stacks in business-critical, high availability scenarios.

Glyn Moody wrote an interesting article for the Guardian earlier this month titled “Why falling Flash prices threaten Microsoft.” It got me thinking about commoditization; specifically pondering the question: Is Linux driving the O/S towards commoditization as many would have us believe? The key point of Mr. Moody’s article is that several converging market forces are poised to impact Microsoft’s dominance of the operating system and productivity software markets.

PARSIX 1.0 is a Persian Linux distribution, created by a team in Iran and built on a Debian base. It comes as a live CD in which the default languages – ironically, I have to say, given the prickly relationship between the leaders of Iran and America – are Persian and American English. I always have some initial concerns about using Linux distributions whose first language is not my own, simply because of my own linguistic limitations. However, I had read good things about Parsix so I cast aside my doubts and dived in.

Hewlett Packard will start shipping some of its notebook and desktop computers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preinstalled later this year. “We are really excited by this deal because of the power that the HP distribution channel brings, the reach they have and their commitment to interoperability. I am very enthusiastic about what this relationship could bring,” Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian told eWEEK in an interview here at its BrainShare 2008 conference.