Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Mandriva, the France-based Linux distributor, will have a version of its Mandriva Linux 2007 pre-installed on Intel's new low-end laptop for students, the Classmate PC. According to Intel, the ClassMatePC is a rugged laptop with a water-resistant keyboard and a theft-control feature based on a network-issued digital certificate. The laptop is based on an Intel Mobile 900MHz Celeron Processor ULV.

Using a bootable Linux CD will give you an accurate preview of what Linux will be like on your computer. Another option is a downloadable program that you install just like any other Windows software. Once installed, it runs a Linux emulator within Windows. I like the Live CD better because it will require less thinking on your behalf.

While users are pleading with Dell to sell systems with Linux pre-installed, smaller vendors have been offering Linux on OEM hardware for some time. One of the more recent arrivals in the OEM Linux market is System 76, which sells a decent selection of desktop, workstation, and notebook systems with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed. I test-drove the company's Ubuntu-certified Darter laptop recently, and found that it has a few flaws, but overall provides a decent system for Linux users clamoring for a Linux-friendly vendor.

HP, Duke University, The University of Minnesota, and Qwaq, Inc. have jointly announced the formation of The Croquet Consortium, Inc., a 501(3)c non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting the continued development and widespread adoption of open source Croquet technologies for use in education, research, and industry. The launch of The Croquet Consortium coincides with the Consortium’s release the open source Croquet Software Developer’s Kit 1.0 -- as free software under the Croquet Open Source License.

Comments about the third draft of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), which was released yesterday, are still coming in. So far, we've spoken with Free Software Foundation founder Richard M. Stallman, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and Bruce Lowry, director of global public relations for Novell. Their reactions offer some new perspectives and at least one possible sign of movement toward consensus. Together, they also highlight the issues that are likely to dominate discussion of the draft in the days to come.

Distributed computing, volounteer computing, call it what you will but it has huge potential to improve the resources available to African researchers. For this purpose applications have opened for a free (and paid for!) workshop near Cape Town in July.

The OpenOffice.org team today released version 2.2 of the popular office suite which is intended to make it easier for Microsoft users to migrate away from Office. Security, Vista integration and good looks are top of the agenda this time around.

A list of things to do before connecting your Linux computer to the Internet.

[Not exactly what I would do but its not bad advice. - Scott]

Linux supercomputer maker plans to use funding to improve cluster management software.

The original plans had called for the third draft of the GNU General Public License update to come out late last year. Needless to say, things didn't happen that way. Between trying to address concerns raised from various directions and responding to the Microsoft/Novell deal, the Free Software Foundation ended up having to slip its schedule; as a result, eight months have passed since the second draft was released. One could well argue that a major license update should not be made in a hurry, and thus the delays are not problematic. In any case, the wait is over: the new GPLv3 draft is available. In many ways, the draft resembles its predecessors; in others, it has changed significantly. This article will focus on the differences.

We are here today to talk about the developers of the KDE-Edu Project. The purpose of this interview is to feature and present their work and motivation, which is often not as well-known or regarded as other, more prominent work within the KDE project. The KDE-Edu developers are developing high-quality educational software for the K Desktop Environment. Their primary focus is on school children aged 3 to 18, and the specialised user interface needs of young users. However, they are also have programs to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn!

Chipmaker AMD has thrown its financial clout behind a non-profit organization setting up Linux-based computing and communication centers in East Africa. Inveneo initially used Wyse thin clients, but the organization has now switched over to MiniPCs based on AMD's recently-launched Ultra-value client reference design.

Software behemoth Microsoft could be one of the biggest losers from proposed license changes to the Linux operating system unveiled Wednesday. That’s a possible outcome of updates to the license pushed by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF wants to make mutually exclusive pacts such as the Novell-Microsoft open-source agreement (see Exit Interview: Jeremy Allison, Strange Bedfellows) a violation of the next iteration of the GNU GPL (General Public License), the license that governs Linux use.

The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America's history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.

CodeGear has announced that Delphi for PHP – an integrated visual Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for the popular PHP Web development language – is now shipping worldwide. Delphi for PHP brings the RAD productivity benefits that Delphi users have enjoyed for years to PHP Web developers. PHP, designed to allow Web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly, is the most prominent dynamic Web language today and has become one of the top 10 programming languages overall.

Germany's next-generation TerraSAR-X uses sophisticated ground infrastructure to deliver Earth observation data to scientists and commercial customers. Open-source software developed at ESA's Operations Centre is helping to make the mission a success.

Despite evidence of open source creep, Kagermann thinks it is still a database and OS-level model. He tackled the rise of open source in a recent interview with Computer Business Review. "It is an option for operating systems and databases but not at the business application level," he said. "There are no open source ERP products that are any good for the high end, although it could be argued that they could be developed for the low end."

This afternoon the the third draft of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) was released. This improved draft of the GPLv3 aims to better protect the open source community. Accompanying this delayed draft is a 60 page rational for the draft (PDF) featuring a large section responding to the Microsoft-Novell deal in November, which was a key factor in the draft's much overdue release.

You can almost set your watch by it nowadays: Twice a year, we have a new version of Ubuntu Linux to explore. April will bring the release of Feisty Fawn, also known as Ubuntu 7.04. (The "04" indicates April; the "7" stands for 2007.) I've been running prerelease versions of Feisty for about a month. In a moment, some notes on what I've discovered. But first, a bit of context and history.

GroundWork Open Source, the leader in open source systems and network management software, has announced that it has purchased support from Actuate Corporation, the leader in Business Intelligence, Performance Management and Reporting Applications, to create the first Open Source reporting framework for IT infrastructure monitoring and management.