Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the features that many users dearly miss in OpenOffice.org is a grammar checker. Fortunately, LanguageTool fills the void, adding grammar-checking capabilities to OpenOffice.org.

If you define the problem as “A product 100% binary, bug for bug, compatible with Excel that releases new versions at the same time as Excel” you kinda stop even the hope of migrating someday in the future, because that ain’t possible. — jmorris2 on LWN’s “A think tank’s view of free software” Proprietary software companies such as Microsoft have their own source code and they have unencumbered access to read any free software source code they wish—without incurring any legal obligation to distribute their source code. If they truly wanted interoperability, they could pursue it anytime.

Nine years after version 2.0 of the popular open source bug-tracking system was launched, Bugzilla 3.0 has been released with the same statement as its predecessor, "We like the new version much better, and hope you will too."

Rhodes University Students will this weekend join a day-long Translate@thon to translate the open source Horde webmail application into the indigenous Xhosa language.

After years of writing about open source software Jason Norwood-Young decides to start creating his own open source applications. Now that he's built it will they come?

The words "fault-tolerant Web hosting" bring to mind hosting centers with multiple redundant power supplies, complex networking, and big bills. However, by taking advantage of the underlying fault-tolerance of the Internet, you can get a surprising level of reliability for little cost.

In the wake of releasing Java under the General Public Licence Sun chairman, Scott McNeil, says the company is considering releasing OpenSolaris under the GPL as well.

Red Hat Inc. on May 9 announced the availability of a new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop, at its annual Red Hat Summit tradeshow in San Diego. This desktop aims to deliver a modern user experience with an enterprise-class suite of productivity applications. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens stated, "Users, requirements and technologies have changed so dramatically over the past few years that the traditional one-size-fits-all desktop paradigm is simply exhausted."

Summit Red Hat, it seems, is all about open source and closed answers.

This just in from Cape Town: Python fans can look forward to a Saturday afternoon of Python fun at the Bandwidth Barn.

About one month ago, Snort 3.0 Alpha was released for testing in the community. If you want to be on the cutting edge of intrusion detection, packet sniffing, and keeping your system safe, check out this introduction to preparing for the future of i...

It's Global in a non-global sense. Summit Between 9 a.m. and noon, Red Hat developed a new desktop operating system strategy.

The third annual Red Hat Summit is underway in San Diego. This year's show already has a different feel to it than the first two. The crowd is larger, for one thing. The event is a complete sell-out -- so much so that Red Hat had to stop taking registrations. Attendees have booked all the available rooms at the Sheraton and are spilling over into two additional hotels, and Red Hat is running shuttles between the hotels. Unofficially, the crowd is between 1,200 and 1,400, up from less than a thousand last year.

Back in early March, a company called the Olliance Group held a gathering of about 100 corporate manager types at a resort in California's wine country. This "Open Source think tank" has now produced a 16-page report. It is, indeed, an interesting look at how a certain part of the corporate world views free software - though, perhaps, not entirely in the ways its authors intended. When a self-appointed "think tank" gets together to talk about free software, one is right to be cautious. When one of that event's top-level sponsors is Microsoft, an extra degree of nervousness seems appropriate. The other top-level sponsor, naturally, is Novell; the remainder of the list is NEC, Unisys, Jasper Soft, OpenLogic, and SugarCRM. Not the most community-oriented bunch one could have come up with.

IT professionals spend a lot of time thinking about security, and ways to make sure their systems are patched as quickly as possible. However, what goes on before they hear about a vulnerability is mostly a mystery. To get a clearer picture, we talked to Mark Cox, director of Red Hat's security response team, about trends in Linux security, who discovers vulnerabilities, how they're rated, and what's being done to minimize security problems.

Jens Axboe posted a series of ten patches that add support for large IO commands. He began by defining the problem..

Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) recently conducted a successful open source introductory course. With 40 people certified so far, there are plans underway to scale this up to as many as 1000 students in June.

A chapter of a new how-to book, Hacking Ubuntu: Serious Hacks, Mods and Customizations, has been published online at ExtremeTech.com. The chapter, entitled "Making Ubuntu Usable," explains how to tune Ubuntu to your personal tastes by changing startup music, background, fonts, icons, colors, and more.

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced that an initial version of the quality.mozilla.org site has launched. Described as "pre-alpha", the quality.mozilla.org site (QMO for short) is intended to become a central portal for the Mozilla quality assurance community.

Silly name, but a good idea, VMware is joining the rush down the road of paravirtualisation already beingtrodden by the likes of Novell and Microsoft.