Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The newest versions of Lightning and Sunbird, released simultaneously by Mozilla yesterday, include 38 new calendars as well as support for Google Calendar, a viable print function, enhanced support for Outlook displays and numerous other upgrades.

An open source version of Microsoft's potential Adobe Flash challenger, Silverlight, has been developed within two months of being unveiled as a beta.

Mandriva today announces its sponsorship of the 2007 aKademy KDE conference, which is taking place in Glasgow from June 30th to July 7th. As well as sponsoring the conference, Mandriva is arranging to provide special edition Mandriva Flash USB keys to developers attending the conference as a token of appreciation for their work.

Like other OpenOffice.org applications, Calc has several dozen options in how it is formatted and operates. These options are available from Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Calc. Thanks to OpenOffice.org's habit of sharing code between applications, some of the tabs for these options resemble those found in other OpenOffice.org applications. Others are unique to Calc and the business of spreadsheets. Either way, the more you know about Calc's options, the more you can take control of your work.

Opinion: With Microsoft selling the ammo? Or, is Microsoft fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons?

As Apple launches its iPhone today, a company attempting to build a similar touchscreen-based phone around an open, user-extensible Linux OS has acknowledged significant delays. OpenMoko now hopes to ship its first "mass market" model in October.

Innotek's GPL-licensed Virtualbox software lets you create a virtual operating environment inside your PC's real operating system. I've been using Virtualbox for several months now on a 32-bit laptop running Ubuntu 7.04, and I've been impressed with the software. However, my main PC at home utilizes a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and Virtualbox didn't support 64-bit OSes -- until this month. Now that I've tried it, I'm happy to report it works just as well as its 32-bit sibling.

The opening day of the 9th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) began with Jonathan Corbet, of Linux Weekly News and his now familiar annual Linux Kernel Report, and wrapped up with a reception put on by Intel where they displayed hardware prototypes for upcoming products.

For a lot of small-to-medium-sized business, the holdout has been Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions. Despite its "Enterprise" name, Intuit has aimed the product at businesses ranging from 50 to 250 people. For many businesses, this accounting server is now the de facto standard for financial organization, but it has been available only for Windows. But no longer--now you can buy Quickbooks Enterprise Solutions for Linux. Well, with limits.

The Python Enterprise Application Kit no longer exists as an integral project, according to a status report posted by its developer earlier this week, but some individual elements are thriving and will continue to receive attention.

Yoper claims to be a high-performance Linux distribution optimized for newer processors. It incorporates components from other distros, but its packages have been built from scratch to provide enhanced performance. I tested a beta of Yoper 3.0 on my desktop a year ago and was so impressed that when 3.0 was released this month, I installed it on my new Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv6105 notebook. Using it, however, left me disappointed.

Recently, Jeff Jones posted a survey comparing the number of vulnerabilities found in the first 90 days of Microsoft Vista deployments against those of a number of other operating systems. It may not come as a surprise that Mr. Jones, who is a Microsoft employee, found that Vista was significantly more secure than the alternatives. There has been no shortage of such surveys over the years, and it may be tempting to write this one off as another bit of random FUD. Still, it's good to have an answer to such things.

Right now “Open Source” is in a bit of a jam. Why? For years projects/companies have been using the term “Open Source” to describe closed products. It’s a situation Free Software advocates understand dearly - for years we’ve been trying to explain how the term “Open Source” is confusing when it’s goal is to describe the exact same freedoms Open Source supposedly heralded as a business’s dream.

Atmel has launched an interesting new chip line aimed at reducing NRE (non-recurring engineering) expenses associated with ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) development. The CAP ("customizable Atmel processor") integrates a Linux-friendly ARM9 core together with a metal-programmable function block where users can implement cores, DSPs (digital signal processors), or custom peripherals.

Company releases Linux version of desktop search software, which simultaneously scans the Web and computer-stored data for results.

The second annual LinuxWorld Korea took place in Seoul's Coex Convention and Exhibition Center June 20 through June 23. It was held in conjunction with the annual SEK show, the"representative IT exhibition in Korea." Some of the companies that routinely exhibit at North American and European Linux-oriented events were there -- and so were some you probably never heard of unless you live in or follow IT news from China, Japan, or Korea.

The Simple Linux Backup project announced the release of version 0.3.2 today. Simple Linux Backup is an easy-to-use program for backing up a desktop Linux system, with a friendly user interface, originator Steven J. Rosen said.

The non-profit, member-supported Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of its"largest-ever" release. The release includes 21 projects by 310 developers in 19 countries, and more than 17 million lines of code -- more than double the size of last year's release.

Trolltech will provide free phones and SDKs (software development kits) to developers willing to target its Qtopia application development framework for mobile phones. The Qtopia Greenphone Grant Program will provide an unspecified number of awardees with Qtopia SDKs, along with Trolltech's open, Linux-based Greenphone target device.

For better or worse, DRM is everywhere. In the past six months, letters have zinged across the web and provided fodder for newspaper headlines. The issue balances the rights of the consumer to use purchased works against the rights of the artist