Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Pakistan is the third largest low-cost IT-enabled and offshore business processes outsourcing services provider in Asia after India and China. The country's Open Source Resource Center (OSRC), a project of Pakistan's Ministry of Information Technology, has developed and released a FOSS resource kit entitled "OSS Training Toolkit," originally put together in order to facilitate OSRC's own training workshops in Pakistan. The toolkit contains step-by-step manuals in six modules covering various Free and Open Source Software applications. All the content is available in printed manual form and as OpenDocument (.odt), Portable Document Format (.pdf), and Microsoft Word (.doc) files for download.

"A discussion at the mozilla.dev.planning list has given the birth to the idea of a Mozilla Desktop Environment. This sure sounds like a possibility for Mozilla as it already has many of the applications needed; and the company is thoroughly familiar with XUL, which is a more-than-potent language upon which to build a desktop environment. By building a desktop environment Mozilla wouldn't have to worry about drivers (and such) and could choose from a variety of kernels, and still be in the center of attention. Mozilla has to expand some of the applications for this to work, though, like adding local file management with Firefox."

NEW DELHI: It's becoming increasingly easy to "communicate with computers in mother tongues" with free and open source software solutions now working better with a range of languages from Asia.

The development platform PHP continues to grow in popularity, becoming more and more of a powerhouse in 2007. Two new recent releases of PHP drive home the point that there is constant care and feeding of this platform by the open source community as usage continues to grow.

Lifting Barriers To Desktop Linux Adoption, Latest Version of Windows-to-Linux Technology Increases Support of Popular Windows Applications, Including World of Warcraft.

Funded under the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the QualiPSo (Quality Platform for Open Source Software) project is designed to 'make open source a formidable lever to strengthen Europe's competitiveness, accelerate information and communication technology (ICT) growth, and implement the i2010 policy for growth and jobs.'

Whether you're learning a foreign language or just need to look up an unknown word or phrase, a good dictionary application can come in handy. JaLingo and StarDict are two such tools. Each sports a polished GUI and a set of features that puts it among the best dictionary applications on Linux.

Terra Soft has claimed a fairly unique platform in the Linux community: Power Architecture computers, among which is Sony's PlayStation 3. More than a game box, the PS3 with Yellow Dog Linux runs as a low-cost home and office personal computer and Cell Broadband Engine development workstation. Linux ran on the PS2, but it was definitely a geek-only option. For the PS3, the geek factor was removed.

Open source software, once considered the realm of idealists and risk-takers, is increasingly finding its way into the corporate IT toolkit. For Grant Swinbourne, general manager of Online Channels at Jetstar Airways, the decision to use an open source content management system, Joomla!, saved his company software licensing costs close to $100,000 and "hundreds of hours" in contract negotiations and budget approvals.

African media workers and free software developers will have an opportunity to exchange ideas on the ways free software can be used in media production at a workshop to be held in Ghana in April.

BOSS Linux is a single-CD Debian-based distribution primarily designed for an Indian language user, though everything from the installer to the desktop defaults to English. BOSS 1.1, which was released last month by the Indian government-sponsored National Resource Center for Free/Open Source Software (NRCFOSS), includes several utilities and desktop enhancements, such as a document converter and the 3-D desktop Beryl, which make it a very usable distro, despite a few rough edges.

In recognition of Human Rights Day, we searched the net to find some examples of open source software being used to preserve human rights and fight against abuse. We describe a few of the applications that we came across, as well as the organisations that use them.

At its annual BrainShare users conference today, Novell rolled out a slate of new SuSE Linux products and talked up a new, two-fold corporate strategy devised in the wake of its controversial pact with Microsoft--but not without skepticism, and even vehement opposition, among some who traveled to Salt Lake City this week.

Novell will soon release a major upgrade to its SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 line. The enhancements, announced at the company's annual "BrainShare" tradeshow, will be rolled out in the form of the operating system's first service pack: SP1.

Government agencies are no strangers to open source, according to an FCW.com piece published today. At first blush, we imagined part of the attraction lies in cost savings, just like it does for many businesses investigating open source; however, FCW.com points out we’re wrong.

Government agencies are no strangers to open source, according to an FCW.com piece published today. At first blush, we imagined part of the attraction lies in cost savings, just like it does for many businesses investigating open source; however, FCW.com points out we’re wrong.

The availability of open source Linux operatings systems and software is putting pressure on suppliers of branded commercial embedded Linux products to differentiate their offerings from what is available royalty-free, according to market researcher Venture Development Corporation (VDC).

As Debian moves inexorably (glacially?) toward "Etch," its next release, ARM support keeps improving. Debian hacker Martin Michlmayr reports that Release Candidate 2 of the Etch installer, available now, adds support for Intel's ARM-based XScale I/O processors (IOPs), and for several IOP-based devices.

The One Laptop Per Child program reported today that after 303 builds, it finally has a satisfactory version of its Red Hat Linux-based Sugar operating system that is considered stable, according to OLPC president for software and content Walter Bender. "After a final few bugs that had hidden in corners were driven into the light, we issued Stable Build 303 along with Q2B76 firmware this week," Bender said in his weekly email report.

Johns Hopkins emergency medicine specialists have developed a tool to help hospitals prepare for disasters with the potential to overwhelm services. The Electronic Mass Casualty Assessment & Planning Scenarios computer program calculates the impact of such crises as a flu epidemic, bioterrorist attack, flood or plane crash, accounting for such elements as numbers of victims, wind direction, available medical resources, bacterial incubation periods and bomb size.