Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

For the next interview in the People Behind KDE series, we travel to the Netherlands to meet a KDE promoter and meeting organiser, someone who helps the international community to experience KDE events, even if they were not in attendance - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Jos Poortvliet.

Oracle's assault on Linux looks to take the shape of a fork in the near future, according to Canonical founder and Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth. "They must be on track to fork soon," he told us, during an interview here at OSCON. "They are hiring too many people just to deliver patches. My assumption is that they are on track to fork and build their own distribution."

Telling the story of Project Indiana is not an easy one. Headlines like "Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris" or "Sun OpenSolaris to become more 'Linux-like'" have published, accompanying similarly themed articles. The problem is, this assertion is not quite on the mark. LinuxPlanet talked with several members of Sun's OpenSolaris team to discern just what the deal is.

"People who think SD was 'perfect' were simply ignoring reality," Linus Torvalds began in a succinct explanation as to why he chose the CFS scheduler written by Ingo Molnar instead of the SD scheduler written by Con Kolivas. He continued, "sadly, that seemed to include Con too, which was one of the main reasons that I never [entertained] the notion of merging SD for very long at all: Con ended up arguing against people who reported problems, rather than trying to work with them."

It's no secret that Mozilla Corp., the company behind Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other open-source Internet programs, has made Firefox its No. 1 priority. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker is now admitting that the popular email client Thunderbird has taken second place, and she's now looking beyond Mozilla to find another way to advance the program.

Sun Microsystems' ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office won't usher in an era of universal document interoperability, but eWEEK Labs believes it is the best option currently available for adding Open Document Format support to Office's massive installed base. The plug-in, which Sun debuted on July 4 in the form of a freely downloadable 30MB installation package, enables users to read, edit and save ODF-formatted word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation documents using the 2000, XP, and 2003 versions of Microsoft Office.

Rafael Wysocki posted a lengthy status report "describing the current state of development of the suspend and hibernation infrastructure: how it works, what known problems there are in it and what the future development plans are". Regarding future plans, Rafael noted, "the part of the suspend and hibernation code that should be taken care of first is the handling of devices. Namely, I think that we should first separate the hibernation-related handling of devices from the suspend-related handling of them in order to overcome limitations mentioned in Section IX. This also will be necessary if we want to try some new approaches to hibernation, such as the kexec-based one recently discussed on the LKML." He added, "the next thing that seems reasonable to do is to eliminate the freezing of tasks, described in Section VI, from the suspend and resume code, since the limitations related to it are regarded by many people as too restrictive."

The Fedora Project offered a peek under its kimono recently with details about Fedora 7 adoption and other statistics. Fedora 7 has snagged more than 300,000 users since its release at the end of May. While that sounds pretty good, Fedora Core 6 managed to attract more than 400,000 in roughly the same amount of time after its release. We asked Max Spevack, the Fedora project leader, whether the numbers are telling the full story.

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit group dedicated to accelerating Linux's growth, announced on July 24 that it had tapped long-time Linux executive Marcus Rex to serve as CTO. Rex "will help drive new standardization and technical initiatives around Linux and promote Linux adoption more broadly," the LF said.

"British software group Misys is expected to announce a major strategic gamble this week - giving its products away for free.""Under new American management, the company is planning to embrace the 'open source' movement, releasing a software code that can be copied or modified by other programmers.""Two new products are planned in healthcare and financial markets that Misys hopes will become industry standards: one offering a platform for trading carbon credits and the other aimed at harmonising medical records."

Ordinarily, the only place you see these programs are in laptops and the methods should work on laptops, and there are many places to go for information on the specialized laptop tweaks and GNOME and KDE laptop configuration options. But in an age of global warming and increasing costs per KWh, saving power on workstations by putting them to sleep when not in active use is a good idea, too.

Novell South Africa's Stafford Masie is leaving the Linux vendor to head up the local Google operation, reports ITWeb. Masie has led the Soth African Novell office for the past four years and has been a key figure in the Linux strategy adopted by Novell globally.

I am a Linux user, and I recently got an eMachines laptop. Since I'm Uruguayan, my mother tongue is Spanish, and that presented a problem: laptops usually have an American-style keyboard, and Spanish (as well as Portuguese, French, German, and other languages) requires some special keys that aren't on American keyboards. Here's how you can get international characters on your American keyboard -- and as a bonus, we'll see how you can enable the special"media" or"Internet" keys on some keyboards that aren't supported by Linux out of the box.

A recent story entitled, "Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die" didn't cover Linux or open-source companies. That got me to thinking. So here, without further adieu, is my list of five Linux companies that died before their time.

"After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml. This is the second stable 2.4 kernel released since Willy became the 2.4 kernel maintainer nearly a year ago in August of 2006. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface.

The 2007 business meeting of the IMIA Open Source Working Group will take place as follows: Sunday, 19 August 2007, from 5:30 - 7:30pm Venue: Room P3, Brisbane Convention Centre, Australia (in conjunction with medinfo2007) Agenda to be advised later. Apologies to colleagues who won't be at medinfo2007. All queries to imia.oswg[at]gmail.com Updates and agenda will be posted on the IMIA OSWG website atwww.chirad.info/imiaoswg

Membership marks the latest in a series of commitments to build interoperability with industry leaders

The open source collaborative software platform, Mindquarry, earlier this week launched the beta of its hosted collaborative service, Mindquarry GO.

Fuzz testing, which uses random input to test software for bugs, has been the biggest thing to happen in IT security in quite awhile. Now you can quickly and easily direct your own fuzz testing ops, thanks to a cool little program called zzuf.

Linux company DcData and telephony solutions providers BizCall have entered a strategic partnership in order to provide IP Telephony and VOIP services to the Kwazulu Natal market, forming BizCall KZN.