Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Australia's future economic prosperity will depend on it embracing the principles of community-driven technologies such as Linux and Second Life, according to Glen Boreham.

Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 Linux distribution has reached another big milestone, racking up two million installed users barely two months after tallying 1 million installed users. With the new threshold crossing, it is unclear whether Fedora 6 is the No. 1 Linux distribution in use today, but internetnews.com has learned that preliminary discussions are underway that could see Novell's OpenSUSE Linux distribution partner with Red Hat's Fedora to drive open statistics about Linux use.

An ultra-efficient new RISC-based processor architecture has gained its first Linux distribution support, according to representatives of the open source T2 SDE project. The project's cross-platform Linux build tools now support Atmel's AVR32 architecture, project representatives say.

A freshly installed copy of Firefox is a great software package, but what makes this open-source browser so special is the ability to customize it via extensions and themes to really make it yours. The problem is, there are so many available add-ins, it's tough to know what's worth installing and what's just going to junk up your system. That's where we come in. We've ferreted out 20 of the best extensions and add-ins used and recommended by hardcore Web surfers, developers and IT pros. Whether you're looking for more streamlined surfing, improved look and feel, cool design tools or serious Web development help, there's something (and more than likely several things) here for you.

A school district technology director is making wholesale changes in her employer's IT system by migrating most of 5,000 Windows desktops to a new setup based primarily on Linux-powered desktop PCs and thin clients. The change aims to reduce annual costs, offer many more applications, and use less energy. Windsor, Calif. School District IT administrator Heather Carver is migrating most of the district's 70 servers and most of its 5,000 desktop machines from a mostly-Windows environment that is quickly becoming obsolete to a new mixed environment that includes PCs running SUSE Linux, Wyse Linux thin-client terminals, and a smattering of Mac and Windows machines.

David Carr has written an article about Second Life entitled "Second Life: Is Business Ready For Virtual Worlds?" David is not the first person to write about doing business in Second Life, but he has managed to dig up some interesting information relating to Second Life's true population and technical infrastructure. If this information is accurate, it casts serious doubt on the potential for Second Life to be an effective medium for conducting mainstream, enterprise business activities such as meetings, mass product demonstrations, and large-scale virtual conferences -- at least in the short term.

An Australian consulting company specializing in software reverse engineering is demonstrating its capabilities by analyzing popular open source projects, such as the Linux 2.6.20 kernel. Arian Systems's "SilverBullet" generates detailed program information and graphics offering a "clear view" into undocumented legacy software, according to the company.

Zak Greant belongs to the first generation of adults to mature with free and open source software (FOSS). Starting with his discovery of the PHP programming language a decade ago, Greant has grown along with FOSS until today he is a consultant advising companies and projects on legal issues and corporate strategy. Recently, he founded Foo Associates, a small consulting company where he plans to continue promoting the values of the FOSS communities in business.

Hewlett-Packard is closing custom deals for thousands of desktop PCs running Linux, which has the company assessing the possibility of offering factory-loaded Linux systems, an HP executive said.

Sun Microsystems Inc., at the 2007 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, announced plans to open source Project Darkstar, an online game server platform written entirely in Java technology. The company also announced the opening of registration for the Darkstar Playground, which will enable developers to create a wide variety of games that can be provisioned through a single server platform.

In Samuel Becket's masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, Godot never arrives, and the play ends with our characters still waiting. I sometimes think Linux users are also stuck in a barren landscape endlessly waiting for Dell, HP, Lenovo, or another major vendor to finally deliver a mass-market Linux desktop.

FAA chief information officer David Bowen said he's taking a close look at the Premier Edition of Google Apps as he mulls replacements for the agency's Windows XP-based desktop computers and laptops.

Novell has come through on its first deliverable stemming from its controversial deal with Microsoft last year. The open source software vendor has produced a translator, available for download on its site, that allows users of OpenOffice, Novell's version of ODF, to read and edit documents produced using Microsoft Word 2007.

In days of yore there were apprenticeships, that time when young people went through a mixture of work, education and mickey-taking by one’s elders and self-professed betters in order to learn something useful in the time to start proper employment. They are long gone of course, but increasingly are being replaced by student competitions where every entrant gets some experience, some win prizes and some get hunted down and employedby the prize-giving companies.

Red Hat has teamed up with a pioneer Ajax tools supplier, Exadel, to offer open source tools for building applications aimed at its JBoss middleware. In doing so, Red Hat will add JBoss tools to the growing pantheon of those available as open source Eclipse platform plug-ins.

I've been looking for a good utility to track my work at the computer -- what projects I've been working on and for exactly how long. I wanted to select from a list of tasks and start and stop them with a mouse click, so it had to be a GUI program. I didn't want a project management application or one that was specialized for particular fields; I just wanted a general tool that was out of beta. I found what I was looking for in Rachota, whose name in Czech means the daily toil.

SteelEye Technology, a developer of high availability software for Windows and Linux operating systems, has teamed up with i5/OS high availability specialists Vision Solutions to sell cross-platform high availability solutions that protect virtualized Linux servers and Integrated xSeries Server (IXS)-based Windows environments running under i5/OS on iSeries servers, the companies announced last week.

In January, Chicago native Katie McAuliff, who has worked for Novell Inc. for 13 years, took over as president of Novell Canada, replacing Don Chapman. Ms McAuliff will oversee all facets of the Canadian organization including sales, marketing, consulting, support, training, finance and operations, with a focus on expanding and strengthening Novell Canada's partnership model. She sat down with Jack Kapica of Globetechnology.com to explain her company and its plans.

Are you concerned about brute force dictionary attacks on SSH? Given the popularity of these attacks, you should be. sshguard is a new tool to help protect against such attacks. Although it is still in beta stage, it appears to work well.

When it launches in April, Xandros BridgeWays will be the latest application in what has quickly become an increasingly crowded category of products offering interoperability between Linux and Windows server environments.