Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

South Africa is seen by the outside world as a good launchpad into Africa. For international IT companies opening new offices in South Africa, Cape Town appears to be the first choice.

The UK government is biased against the use of open-source technology, a situation that could limit the computing skills of the future workforce, according to experts attending the launch of the National Open Centre (NOC) this week. Speaking at the launch event at the Houses of Parliament, John Pugh MP argued that there is “widespread ignorance” within the public sector about open-source.

Red Hat has announced the launch of the first Red Hat Challenge, a contest for graduate students to formulate a group concept plan in response to a business challenge question. The Red Hat Challenge is an open invitation to create an innovative solution to a Red Hat business problem and provide the Company with original, cutting-edge ideas to shape its future business model.

Although the orange and black color scheme is a wee bit passé, we do have to give props to Grundig Mobile for their new Linux-based phone, the U900. It features a single-chip architecture, which has long been considered to be the "holy grail" of modern mobile phone technology.

Everyone knows the famous PHP phpinfo(), which provide the programmer with invaluable information about his server configuration and set up. This is a useful tool as soon as one get a new server, and it is also a tool to talk with any administrator.

Linuxchix NZ are booking a venue for the linux installfest, so i need a rough idea how many people are interested. It'll be on 31st March 2007, which is a Saturday, and in Wellington central. An install fest means you bring your OWN computer (we can try and provide SOME monitors and peripherals), and we help you get set up with linux.

Matt Dillon posted the design synopsis of a new highly available clustered filesystem he will soon begin writing forDragonFlyBSD. The feature summary at the beginning of his document included,"on-demand filesystem check and recovery; infinite snapshots; multi-master operation, including the ability to self-heal a corrupted filesystem by accessing replicated data; infinite logless replication, meaning that replication targets can be offline for'days' without effecting performance or operation; 64 bit file space, 64 bit filesystem space, no space restrictions whatsoever; reliably handles data storage for huge multi-hundred-terrabyte filesystems without fear of unrecoverable corruption; cluster operation, provides the ability to commit data to locally replicated store independantly of other replication nodes, with access governed by cache coherency protocols; independant index, data is laid out in a highly recoverable fashion, independant of index generation, and indexes can be regenerated from scratch and thus indexes can be updated asynchronously." He then goes into detail on each of these points and many more, explaining how he intends to implement the new filesystem.

Adrian Bunk posted a couple lists of known regressions that found their way into the 2.6.21-rc1 kernel [story] since the release of the 2.6.20 kernel [story]. Adrian notes that his lists only include bugs that are not yet fixed in Linus' -git tree. In an updated version of his lists he included 19 known regressions, including links to bugzilla or the appropriate mailing list discussion thread. The lists track who submitted the bug, who is currently handling it, who caused it if known, a link to a patch that fixes the problem if any, and the current status.read more

Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt toolkit has become the second Patron of KDE. Trolltech itself should not need an introduction, since they have worked together with the KDE project since its inception ten years ago. Knut Irvin, the community manager for Trolltech points out that "KDE does an excellent job of making UNIX-based desktops easy to use. Trolltech gains from feedback, bug reports and the spread of Qt through the success of KDE".

"One of your developers wants to extend an open-source application to solve a company problem, then contribute the code back to the community. That's fine. But making that process work in enterprise terms involves more than getting the legal department to recover from its fainting fit.:

[Our very own Sander is profiled, and one of my fellow Linuxchix, Penny Leach- TC]

Nat Torkington raised this week the very real question of whether the term "open source" is now completely meaningless, in the sense that its meaning has now been sucked out of it by companies that purport to be open source yet don't allow users to feely download, compile, and use the software in question. One example Torkington cites is SugarCRM, whose license he describes as "a questionably modified OSI-approved license.

Tehran, Iran - Manager of Linux Persian Project spoke here Monday of putting to use 34 plans of that project that were commissioned to firms through tender on an approximately ten billion rial ($900k) budget.

Commercially supported open source software may not be prevalent, but it is not alien in data centers any more and it is certainly getting to be more normal. But if a somewhat self-serving survey of open source projects done by OpenLogic is any indication, many popular open source packages are still lacking enterprise-class support, and this is an issue that has an adverse affect on the adoption of open source products among enterprises.

The Zenwalk project has announced the release of Zenwalk Linux 4.4. The "mini" Linux distribution utilizes a 2.6.20 kernel, and is one of the first distros to incorporate the new Xfce 4.4 desktop, which came out on Feb. 7, according to project team manager Jean-Philippe Guillemin.

Edubuntu is the Ubuntu distribution's educational variant. It provides a software platform that allows educators to spend more time teaching with computers and less time managing them. In addition to Linux and the typical productivity software, Edubuntu provides the organisational package SchoolTool and educational programs for children between preschool and high school, with three age groups within this demographic, each with their own relevant settings.

If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gearheads. When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.

Bill Gates once called the open source community a bunch of communists, thinking the open source ideal was against anyone owning the fruits of their programming labors. However, he has missed the real point of choosing open source. It's about not being held to ransom and having the freedom to switch suppliers with impunity -- freedom to modify, extend and supplement your technology as you see fit.

Ainkaboot's Octimod MPC7-1500 is a high density Gentoo Linux-based clustering platform based on Mini-ITX boards. Each processing module is hot-swappable, and contains a 1.5GHz C7 powered VIA EPIA EN 15000 motherboard.

With open-source ERP deployments now starting to take more hold, Spanish-based Openbravo is quickly gaining international penetration, garnering as many as 20,000 downloads a month of its Web-based software from all over the world.

"I'm not interested in the more academic aspects of computing," says Brian Aker, director of architecture at MySQL. "I'm interested in solving problems." This approach has taken Aker from being a teenage hacker to today, when he spends an increasing amount of time thinking about where IT in general and databases specifically are heading.