Showing headlines posted by dave

Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. A paper from the MIT talks about the development process of Free Software, which is the basis for an article on Groklaw that emphasises on the importance of Free Software due to its educational potential. Looking at the traffic on the debian-release list it becomes apparent that Debian sarge will be released soon.

For as long as most technologists can remember, there has been "Wintel," the $250 billion industry dominated by Microsoft's Windows operating systems and Intel's microprocessors. But "Lintel," or the Linux operating system and Intel, is now encroaching on this empire, and behind it is the entire open-source software movement, which threatens to overthrow the Windows industry.

A project report evaluating the use of open source software (OSS) within a small number of schools has been published by BECTA (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency).

The program will include a free assessment for customers interested in or considering a Solaris-to-Linux migration.

A few days ago, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), chaired by Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen, announced that it would provide legal services free of charge to the Wine project, an open source implementation of the Windows API on Unix-based systems. And the funny thing is, to my knowledge the Wine project hasn't even been sued yet.

Broadband over power lines has been in the news again recently. At one time BPL was seen as the best way to bring affordable Internet access to poor and rural America: an answer to the technology gap between the haves and the have-nots. Now, thanks primarily to boosters like Michael Powell and Kevin Martin, Powell's successor at the FCC, it's back for another go at the broadband access market. But BPL remains a flawed and controversial technology. Proponents in Texas are pushing a pro-BPL bill past confused legislators in Austin at the same time their counterparts in Washington, D.C., are considering a measure to rescind "BPL-friendly" rule changes made at the FCC last fall.

The hardware and services giant is to offer, free of charge, a service to help customers move from Sun's operating system to Red Hat Linux

The Government's Digital Strategy, released today, is a positive development, but the lack of acknowledgement of Open Source and 'e-waste' issues is disappointing, says Green Party IT Spokesperson Nandor Tanczos.

Schools considering a move to open source face a tricky decision, but the momentum is on their side

Microsoft's Windows x64 editions are significant for the spread of 64-bit computing, but the company's platform rivals have had versions of their operating systems for AMD's 64-bit architecture for quite some time.

Latest version of Carrier-Grade Linux lets telecom-equipment makers build less expensive, high-availability network components.

A real-time signal processing consultant has posted a how-to on building a combination home router/server that draws just 3.1 watts, including AC adapter. PAMurray says the set-up, based on a Peplink Manga running Debian, saves power compared to a separate router and laptop-based server.

"When I read Microsoft-Red Hat Warming Trend on CNET, a question leaped to mind: Would Microsoft buy Red Hat? Money surely wouldn't be a problem. PR surely would be."

A little piece of technology history is up for sale at eBay.com. Jason Braverman, the IT director at HYC Logistics in Memphis, Tenn., is selling his vintage Matchbox handheld PC at a fraction of its original cost. Braverman put the starting bid at $300 for the five-cubic-inch computer, which runs Linux and operates as a fully functional Web server.

A new search tool has been launched that is designed solely to help users identify and access open source code on the Internet. In what it claims is the first free search engine of its kind, Koders.com provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to find existing solutions to complex software development problems and discover new OSS (Open Source Software) projects.

Increasingly, corporations are turning to Linux servers to support important business applications such as customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, ecommerce, supply chain management, and Web sites. As the operating system becomes the foundation for these vital applications, administrators need system management tools that outline how well the servers are performing and pinpoint the source of any performance problem.

Many of you are familiar with the usual image processing software, like Gimp, where the mouse is used to interact with the software. This is usually a convenient and fairly intuitive way to use a piece of software because you can work on an image, manipulate the mouse and see the effects immediately. While this works well when you are working on a single image, what happens when you have hundreds of images to work on? This is increasingly becoming more common due to the use of more digital cameras. It is a chore, for example, to put a timestamp on, convert the format, or resize all the images one at a time. Ah, this is where ImageMagick comes into play.

Novell's latest release of SUSE Linux, SUSE 9.3, demonstrates Novell's continuing commitment to delivering polished, off-the-shelf, 32-bit Linux distributions for the desktop and professional markets. October 2004, which is when the previous version of SUSE Linux was released, seems like only yesterday. So what's new--and, perhaps, why should people care?

High-performance software developers may be getting a leg up on the latest hardware advances with a new set of open source software tools for developing scientific libraries created by U.S. university researchers. They claim the "new breed" of software they've created, dubbed "SPIRAL," could revolutionize how computer code is written, particularly in light of the latest advances in high-performance hardware that is often, as in the case of IBM's Blue Gene/L supercomputer, running Linux. The automatic code generator, which provides a broad range of solutions to identify optimal signal processing and math functions, spits out high-quality code that is less buggy, saving testing and time, Carnegie Mellon University professor and researcher Jose Moura told NewsForge/ITMJ in a recent interview.

Customers can download a release candidate of the latest version of the company's Carrier-Grade Linux Edition, the first to use version 2.6 of the Linux kernel.