Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

An industry that has long resisted IT automation got a double dose of medicine last week. Both Microsoft and backers of key open source initiatives laid out plans to push IT further into health care--plans that also put the Windows and Linux camps on another collision course.

Ted Leung is an open source developer (he works on Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project) and he warns that Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web with its Apollo and Flex platforms. He doesn’t want to give control of his work to yet another single vendor.

In January I reviewed Vector Linux 5.8. While the review was mainly positive I did complain about what I saw as some faults in the distribution. The response from the developers of Vector Linux was almost immediate, both in the Vector Linux forum and in the comments under my reviews, and was incredibly positive. In the weeks since then a surprising number of changes and improvements have already been made, particularly in the area of internationalization and localization. A suggestion I made in the VL forum regarding compiling and building packages to insure that localization files (translations into various languages) are included was taken to heart by the developers. The result is that when an updated Xfce package was built after version 4.4.0 was released it included the additional language support. So… if you’re native language is Danish or Hebrew or any other language for which translations exist in Xfce you’ll find, for example, suitable menus for your desktop.

The market for open source support services is going to boom over the next five years, according to a recent Gartner survey. The study of organizations in geographies around the world – including Canada and the U.S. – predict that spending in this country will likely see a compound annual growth rate of 16.1 per cent between 2006 and 2010. That's marginally below the expectation in the U.S. and almost three per cent more than the global average.

Although Red Hat is poised to roll out its much-anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 release shortly, work still continues on previous versions of RHEL. This week, Red Hat rolled out a beta release of its fifth update to RHEL 4, officially tagged Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5. It provides users with a small taste of the virtualization that is to come in RHEL 5.

Trolltech has done a lot of things right, in terms of making it easy for open source developers to write Qtopia applications. However, the company's unlocked, open Greenphone is hampered by counterproductive end-user license agreement (EULA) terms, concludes a review of the phone at LinuxLookup.

Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari Web browsers both continued to snare market share from Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) last month, a Web metrics company said today. According to Net Applications' February data, both Firefox and Safari accounted for slightly larger slices of the browser pie than the month before. IE, on the other hand, slipped by nearly the same amount.

Mozilla on March 2 released Thunderbird 1.5.0.10, a security and stability update for the popular open-source email client. Users of Thunderbird 1.5.0.x will receive an automated update notification within a couple of days, a Mozilla spokesperson said.

The IKVM.Net software tools provide an implementation of Java for the Microsoft .Net framework. IKVM provides a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and a Java byte-code translator, ikvmc. Used in place of the normal Java command, the IKVM JVM runs Java applications and applets dynamically. The ikvmc translator converts Java applications and libraries into .Net executable programs and Dynamic Link Library (DLL) files.

The GNOME project released version 2.17.92 of its popular Linux desktop on Feb. 28. This is the last unstable bugfix release prior to the 2.18.0 release, set for March 14, a project spokesperson said.

The Free Software Foundation, taking advantage of what it says is the rejection of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, is urging major computer hardware manufacturers to offer consumers computers without any operating system or with a free GNU/Linux OS.

Following the Gecko security update releases a few days ago, the SeaMonkey project has issued new security and stability releases today for its all-in-one internet application suite. SeaMonkey 1.1.1 is now available for download, fixing several security vulnerabilities, along with a few issues reported on SeaMonkey 1.1. Simultaneously, SeaMonkey 1.0.8, a security update based on the SeaMonkey 1.0 series, was also released.

In January, Motorola announced the formation of the LiMo foundation, the not-quite open source project that will collaborate on a Linux-based ecosystem for mobile applications development. Now, with the launch of the new OpenSAF project, Motorola and friends are moving up to middleware, and moving closer to true open source in the process.

I’ve used both Windows and Mac OS X, and I don’t know how people manage to install software on them. Yes, I’m a fan of aptitude (and I’ve had good experiences with Yum). It’s pretty clear to me that this software installation system has tremendous advantages over the traditional “download a random binary package from somewhere” approach common to Windows and Mac OS X, as long as the package you want is in the proper repository.

What happens when a free and open source software (FOSS) project attempts to introduce compensation for its developers? Because FOSS remains based largely on volunteer work, many worry that payment might demotivate both those who receive it and those who do not. However, community leaders who have observed how payment interacts with the FOSS ethos suggest a more complicated picture. Identifying four main types of payment -- bounties, payment in kind, grants, and employment -- these experts suggest that what happens depends on the type of payment, as well as on the individuals involved.

Despite improvements in code quality, Web servers remain at high risk of being hacked, according to a new paper from researchers who use honeypot technologies to examine how hackers tick. The Honeynet Project, which provides real systems for unwitting attackers to interact with, says Web applications remain vulnerable for host of reasons. These include poor quality code, the fact that attacks can be performed using PHP and shell scripts (which is generally easier than using buffer overflow exploits), and the emergence of search engines as hacking tools.

When the European Commission launched a streaming video service last year which excluded Linux users, large swathes of the open source community became deeply angry. Now, a Surrey local council has shown that open source operating systems can be included in such programmes.

The plan is for the rebuttals to be posted on march 5th, to leave plenty of time for people to read about the candidates before the DPL candidate debate happens.

The Gentoo-based SystemRescueCD 0.3.3 live CD was released on March 1, sporting a spiffy new 2.6.19.2 kernel and the WMaker desktop environment. As its name implies, SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM that can be used for repairing a system and its data following a crash.

If a million monkeys typing might eventually produce the collected works of Shakespeare, wouldn't a million penguins do just as well? A major book publisher is hoping so with a FOSS-powered online project to create a collaborative novel -- and appropriately, that publisher is Penguin.