Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The University of Nebraska was always a Microsoft shop. U of N Data and Internet Specialist Amy Stephen remembers when Windows NT was new, with 27 installation disks. "We went with that because we had every network protocol that had ever been created, and every desktop applications that had ever been invented, right here. MS was the only ones you could have that diversity with." But when all of Microsoft's "natural predators" began to die off, and Microsoft no longer made the university's needs a priority, Stephen found open source solutions a lot more attractive.

The Comodo Trustix team is proud to announce the release of Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5, an update to the previous "Tikka Masala". The new releases is named "Mirch Masala" to describe the new interesting changes associated.

MontaVista Software has strengthened its position as the leading provider of Linux for intelligent devices and communications infrastructure with the development of new advanced smartphones set to be released in Italy.

Dear Mr. Shuttleworth, Get into the hardware business. I saw you speak in 2004 in Gothenburg Sweden at the EuroPython conference, you gave the keynote (excellent speech) and told the audience about your upcoming project. It was a linux distribution that would be focused on the desktop and come with commercial support, two things you saw as being necessary to linux success.

Birmingham (England) City Council is mulling an extension to its open source software deployment, which was criticised last year for falling short of expectations. The council revealed last autumn it had installed just 200 Linux desktops, while using up more than £500,000 of open source public funding. The project was subsequently mothballed, and some machines in the city's library cluster were migrated to Windows XP instead.

I love the command line. If the command line were a dog, it would be a hard-headed labrador: big and somewhat intimidating, but really kind of even-tempered and friendly once she gets to know you. I just compared the command line to my dog Roscoe. I love them both, and they both frustrate me. I can't do much with Roscoe, but I can help out a bit with the command line. And so allow me to introduce four of my favorite utilities: df, du, file, and find.

Linux VARs are hopeful the launch of a new national open source think tank could help drive up public sector Linux adoption. The National Open Centre (NOC), whose founding members include Birmingham City Council and the National Computing Centre, will push for wider adoption of open source software and standards in the UK, with a focus on central and local government.

rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around -- nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution.

The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms.

Trolltech has loosened key licensing restrictions on its user-modifiable Linux-based mobile phone for open source software developers. Users of the Greenphone will no longer be restricted to running Qtopia software on the device, nor to using the device only in its supplied hardware/software configuration.

For more than a decade, PHP developers have had little choice in where they actually get the latest version of PHP: either PHP.net or as a package from a Linux distribution. Zend, the commercial backer of PHP, is now offering another choice. Zend Core 2.0, the first Zend Core release for the broader PHP community, is a PHP distribution that benefits from additional testing, bundled features, applications and support that also includes an update service. And though it extends PHP in a number of ways, it's still open source.

The Spain-based project team for ParallelKnoppix, a remastered live CD edition of Debian/Knoppix that allows the clustering of machines for parallel processing, has released v2.4 of the distro. It features a 2.6.20.1 kernel and the KDE default desktop environment.

The fourth quarterly report from KDE e.V. is now available. It covers the board meeting in Darmstradt, the fate of the technical working group and the status of the SQO-OSS research project. As usual there are reports from the working groups, including business cards, a branding meeting, an active HCI group and 27,478 commits. New members and finances are also covered. If you have been contributing to KDE for some time and want to get involved in the administrative side, do consider joining KDE e.V.

"Spring forward; Fall back," That's the way the saying goes. Some years I get it backwards, but I eventually catch on. I've never had to worry about my PCs getting it wrong before, though. Now, with the recent changes in the Daylight Savings Time (DST) rules, I do. Fortunately, there are ways to make sure that both my Linux computers and I get the new rules right.

Bahram Marvandi, A 35-year-old Iranian citizen residing in Austria, has written a software program using which the Firefox Browser can be used in Persian language.

Are we losing the war on spam? Is the war on spam a war we can win? Is there any reason for hope? When I learned how much spam was hitting our servers at O'Reilly, I decided to ask several long-time Internet luminaries these questions. Was the situation as bad as I thought it might be? In short, the answer is yes, which only makes me wonder why more people aren't talking about it.

Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari web browsers both continued to snare market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer last month, a web metrics company said.

Sony Ericsson last month at 3GSM in Barcelona said it was looking for partners for its UIQ platform, which it acquired several months earlier. The move was designed to help Sony Ericsson grow UIQ beyond just the confines of its own handset ecosystem and to challenge Nokia's S60 platform. Sony Ericsson is obviously trying to make sure that S60 doesn't dominate the smartphone marketplace. But is Sony Ericsson's current strategy the best way to achieve this end?

Chief maintainer Ken VanDine on March 4 announced the release of Foresight Linux 1.0.1, which boasts a 2.6.19.2 kernel and GNOME 2.16.3 desktop environment. Foresight Linux is based on rPath Linux (and its Conary package management), said to showcase the latest innovations from the GNOME project.

Red Hat announced today that it is making Exadel's Eclipse-based tool set available as open source through its JBoss division.