Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

With all the bugfixes how history, the GNOME project team last week released v2.18 of its popular desktop environment. For the first time, GNOME ships with a bundle of online games, chess with a 3D look, and Sudoku crossword puzzles.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser may have the lion's share of the general market, but when it comes to security types, Mozilla's Firefox open source browser is an even contender, according to a security survey released Monday.

Aimed at new users, the Fedora Project's Fedora Desktop User Guide (FDUG) attempts to address some worthwhile questions: What does its audience want to do? What does the audience need to know to accomplish those tasks? What explanations and layout will help them absorb the information they need as easily and as quickly as possible? FDUG does a reasonable job of anticipating audience need, covering topics from logging in and basic desktop features to descriptions of setting up mail and managing photos and sharing directories. However, its presentation of information fails to answer the other questions implicit in technical writing, and suffers in both text and design from a lack of consistency.

Almost two years ago, the FSF (Free Software Foundation) started work on the first update of the GNU GPL (General Public License) in over a decade. A last-minute hitch, though, is keeping the license from appearing. The FSF announced at the May 2005 LinuxWorld Expo that the GPLv3 would be out soon . The project has taken a little longer than expected. At last report, the GPLv3 (GNU General Public License 3) was to be out by early 2007 .

Robert Knight, lead maintainer of Konsole has launched a Konsole Usage Survey. 28 questions are waiting for your answers. Use this chance to give useful feedback about a vital and often-used base application of KDE to enable Robert to make Konsole the best console application for KDE 4.

Many times a simple screencast showing how to do something by using a series of screenshots in sequence in a video can explain what paragraph after paragraph of words cannot. Linux and a few open source applications make the job of creating such screencasts easy.

If you need to convert word processor documents to and from Microsoft's OpenXML format, you have at least two choices. A new utility from Novell work as an OpenOffice.org extension, while a separate project makes an add-in for Microsoft Word. One is clearly better than the other.

The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the second release candidate (RC2) of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Etch. Unless release critical issues are discovered, this will be the version of the installer that will be included in the release of Etch.

Opening and closing terminal windows constantly to do simple command line tasks is a waste of time. Tilda has the answer with a single-key drop-down terminal window.

BizCall, which specialises in open source PBX software for small to medium businesses using solutions based on the open source Asterisk solution, now partnered with Aheeva, a Canadian company to offer enterprise level open source call centre software for larger organisations in South Africa.

Telecoms company Storm will include the open source-based Pinpoint Securemail in its data products following a deal with Linux specialists Synaq.

Novell SA's locally-appointed training partner, SmartSource, will now be offering the 'Migrating from Red Hat to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10' training course. The course is aimed at allowing existing Red Hat qualified engineers to expand their skills base and benefit from a deeper understanding of the two solutions' similarities and differences.

So, you've turned your back on traditional mail clients and get your mail fix via Gmail these days. The only problem is getting to all those old message that are stuck in your old email client. One way to stuff that old mail into your shiny and capacious Gmail account is to use Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader.

Black Duck software today announces the latest edition of its license sniffing software, primed and ready for General Public License Version 3.0.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Interface experiments in Amarok 2.0, with the aKode engine shown the door. Initial work on incremental parsing functionality in KDevelop. Further functional development in the Step educational physics simulation package. More refinement of the Oxygen-themed KDE Games artwork, revised sounds in the Oxygen sound theme and more work done on the Oxygen widget style. The Oxygen iconset is dual-licenced as Creative Commons and LGPL. Support for the Plucker document format in okular. Zoom work (ViewBar) and Coverity fixes in KOffice. Basic Phishing protection and the start of user documentation in Mailody. Optimisations in KJS (JavaScript interpreter) and KSysGuard. Import of Athec into playground/games and KBackup to playground/utils in KDE SVN. First NEPOMUK-based GUI elements appear. KSplashX displaces KSplashML as the splash screen engine for KDE 4.