Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

When entrepreneur Adam Green introduced Michael Kowalchik to the idea of reading lists (OPML subscriptions to customizable collections of news feeds), it got the software developer fired up. "I built a prototype of a reading list browser kind of thing, and the more we talked the more we realized we had a lot of vision in common," Kowalchik says. "I said, 'Hey, do you want to partner with me on this?'" Green, who started out in an advisory role only, decided he liked Kowalchik's interactive browser widgets so much that he would invest his money and his time, and Grazr Corp. was born.

The Web 2.0 mantra suggests that you forget desktop applications and embrace AJAXified browser-based apps that you can run from any OS, anywhere, as long as you have a speedy connection to the Internet. But what about times when you can't get online? Firefox, Opera, and others are looking to make it possible run applications offline, anytime, anywhere.

With large enterprises in its sights, Red Hat talks platforms and partnerships. Red Hat today announced version 5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), its server operating system - but at the European launch in CeBIT the talk was not of all the technology inside, such as Xen virtualisation and JBoss middleware. Instead it was all about partnerships, packaging and support. In particular, Red Hat will now work with application developers, both to offer co-operative support and to recommend other open source software.

We get it. You're slammed. You can't find the time to blink. Let alone make plans to attend the 2007 Red Hat Summit in San Diego, May 9-11. Stop for a second, OK? Find the time. You'll be rewarded.

Gone are the days when free software could blithely ignore what was happening in the world of proprietary code. The two approaches are now inextricably intertwined as more and more users and companies choose to run both. One paradoxical consequence of this is that as free software becomes more widely deployed, Microsoft's impact on it becomes greater. Against this background, a recent shift in Microsoft's public statements about open source assumes a particular importance.

The Wall Street Journal Tuesday published an informative article on how Linux is finally starting to get some real traction as the operating system of choice in business and personal desktops and laptops -- not just in servers in data centers.

PDFedit is not the first tool for editing PDF files on the GNU/Linux desktop, but it does have a strong claim to being the first truly practical one. Although only at version 0.2.5, PDFedit is already a practical solution for manipulating pages and text in PDF files, as well as for salvaging content in usable formats. It suffers only from an eccentric interface and some of the instability typical of an early release.

Red Hat hopes its latest release will lock in its position as the Linux leader as more companies vie for a piece of the competitive market.

Crypto guru Phil Zimmermann speaks to us about the potential loss of our heritage to digital rights management. Tomorrow's archaeologists will have plenty of DVDs from our era, and no way of reading them.

South Africa's first Open Tuesday was held on Tuesday night, drawing a mixed crowd of OSS developers and potential investors. The first of what should become an important monthly event on many people's calendars, it started people talking about the possibility for OSS in South Africa to reach its full potential.

British-based banking and financial services group HSBC is standardizing its thousands of Linux servers on Novell's SUSE Linux, a direct result of the recent cooperation agreement between Microsoft and Novell.

There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so we'll stick with the console login for now.

France's National Assembly is staging a revolution of its own: it's moving from Windows to open source. When the Assembly meets next in June 2007, its members will be working on 1,154 new computers running Ubuntu Linux.

SkinnyCorp.com has built a group of community-based sites on a traditional LAMP stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. SkinnyCorp software engineer Harper Reed credits the open source infrastructure with keeping the business agile. He says the licensing costs of proprietary software would have strangled a business that's growing as quickly as his.

Welcome to this year's 4th issue of DWN, the newsletter for the Debian community. The Debian listmaster determined as part of the spring cleaning effort several unused and obsolete lists that will be closed down. Tony Mobily noted that the last GIF patent has finally expired. Gustavo Franco reported that Second Life runs on Debian servers because it is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff.

Simple file encryption is useful, but sometimes it's more useful to encrypt a complete filesystem or disk, such as when you need to protect a large set of files. Or you may need not only to protect, but to completely hide the presence of sensitive data from prying eyes. For these cases, here are several options for securing your systems.

One of the best ways you can participate in the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution is by helping to test software and reporting bugs and issues to project developers to help them improve their code. Even in the wild and woolly, sometimes undisciplined approach to development that we see in FOSS projects, there are ways to test more effectively. Here are more than a dozen tips suggested by testing gurus and developers that can help you become a successful tester.

Tuomo Valkonen, who you may know as the author of the Ion window manager has a rant about the brokenness of the megafreeze development model, where a Linux distribution attempts to stabilize the entire system. As an upstream contributor, I find it highly frustrating to release a new version of my software and have users contact me for about ancient versions I no longer want to support.

In a bid to promote the mainstream adoption of Linux, Canonical and Linspire announced a technology partnership. Linspire will start to base Linspire/Freespire on Ubuntu, while Canonical will in turn use Linspire's CNR application delivery service.

Given a copy of the Linux- based educational software package tuXlab to review, James Archibald revisits school days and gives it a run through.