Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Aging Linux and Unix systems have prompted car rental company Thrifty Inc. to modernize its server platforms and direct investment towards more innovative applications. Thrifty's IT manager Michael Morton said the transformation initiative began about eight months ago when its Red Hat Linux and SCO Unix systems were becoming outdated.

For more than 20 years, Unix played the role of the 800 pound gorilla in the server space, especially in enterprise, scientific, government and academic environments. But traditional Unix vendors have faced increasing competition on two fronts. Microsoft Windows Server products have made significant inroads, particularly in the business back-end. To a lesser extent, but cutting closer to the bone, is competition from Linux.

A clear sign that free and open source software (FOSS) has become mainstream is the growing number of small consultants who specialize in it. Listed on local users groups or high-tech forums and working mostly by themselves, these consultants rarely make headlines, yet they represent a sizable and growing niche in small business in modern North American cities.

Where in South Africa can one get a new PC with Linux loaded? Not a lot of places, as it turns out. Tectonic reports back after going in search of the proverbial needle in a Microsoft dominated haystack.

Wind River has joined the Texas Instruments (TI) third-party partner ecosystem, and will collaborate with TI's Dallas-based mobile handset division on advanced Linux and hardware/software tools support for TI's ARM11-based OMAP2430 smartphone processor. The partnership could also produce a Linux-based mobile phone reference design, according to Wind River.

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) just keeps on getting stronger. It is now an officialISO standard; there are numerousapplications that support it, with varying degrees of fidelity, including Google's onlineword processor and spreadsheet; there's an official Microsoft-fundedplug-in for Microsoft Office that allows it to open and save ODF files, and aprogram that converts between ODF and the Chinese UOF XML office format; and the ODF community has largely sorted out issues ofaccessibility that threatened to de-rail its adoption by Massachusetts.

Members of the open source GPE project (GPE Palmtop Environment) have announced a new offspring project to create a fully open source software stack for mobile phones, GPE Phone Edition.

A group of European open source suppliers have grouped together to trial the franchise model as a means to boost open source adoption among SMEs and help local providers find strength in numbers.

At RSA, ECC Leaders Discuss Plans to Advance Industry Adoption of Next-Gen Encryption

Thirty-seven percent of North American enterprises that sell products or services online will purchase a new e-commerce platform, according to Forrester Research. The options available to them include a considerable amount of open source applications. However, while open source is clearly making an impact in the e-commerce space, it is not yet fully integrated.

The penguin’s come of age. What began as a battle between proprietary and open source Linux software, started by geeks around the world, isn’t plain tech rhetoric anymore. It’s now a mainstream commercial platform — a technology that enterprises are taking very seriously and looking at as a major cost-effective solution that has scalability and a great future roadmap.

This is a status update for the Debian GNU/FreeBSD port. This port consists of two architectures: kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64.

To begin with, one myth that has to be exposed is that a division exists between open-source and commercial software. This isn’t true because some open software can be sold on a commercial basis, and services connected to open software can be sold as well. In this context, “free” doesn’t necessarily mean that open software is free of charge, but rather that it supports creative freedom. So it’s much better to categorize software as open and proprietary, rather than free-of-charge and commercial. The biggest difference is in fact, that open software can be “freely” distributed and modified, while proprietary software is under strict control of its author.

Podcatchers, the programs that download and aggregate your favorite podcasts, are popular on all platforms. Many are available for Linux, including iPodder and Podget. But the truth is that you don't need all that fancy stuff to harvest podcasts with Linux. BashPodder is a quick CLI-based GPLed podcatching client. It's one of the oldest ones out there, and may still be the best. It's hands-on, no-frills -- and a perfect example of how a few command-line statements can work together to do a powerful job.

The official Netscape Blog has announced that Netscape 9 is under development. Like the current Netscape Browser 8, this release will presumably be based on Mozilla Firefox. According to the announcement, Netscape 9 will be a standalone browser (lacking components like a mail client or Web page editor) and will have tight integration with the Netscape.com website, which was relaunched as a Digg-style user-driven news and current events portal last year. A subsequent post revealed that Netscape 9 will be released simultaneously for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Netscape Browser 8 is only available for Windows.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work begins on Amarok 2.0. KBlackBox becomes the latest games application to take the step into the scalable graphics arena. KTTT, a tic-tac-toe game, is ported to KDE 4. Further progress made on the knewstuff2 framework. Software RAID monitoring, along with other improvements in KSysGuard. Mailody gets support for printing HTML emails. Improved support for custom emoticons in Kopete. The sublime-integration user interface branch is merged back into the main KDevelop source tree..

Fully updated introduction to networking on Linux now covers firewalls, including the use of ipchains and iptables (netfilter), masquerading, and accounting. Other new topics include Novell (NCP/IPX) support and INN (news administration). Original material on serial connections, UUCP, routing and DNS, mail and News, SLIP and PPP, NFS, and NIS has been thoroughly updated.

Tech-heads yearning for Google to challenge Microsoft's domination of the desktop shouldn't hold their breaths, says Chris DiBona, the search giant's open source program manager.

Freeware on trial is a software consultancy service with the objective of making the user aware about available free software products and internet services. The team of consultants at freeware on trial write quality influential articles. They decipher truth from myth when it comes to developers and publishers claims about their goods. While there are quality product creators who try to make a living out of what they do best, often there are those who don't charge for their goods, or offer free versions of their products.

Encourages Development and Distribution of Thousands of Web and Desktop Widgets Enabling Myriad Applications