Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

David Nielsen has started a pledge drive to fund nouveau development. (nouveau is a project to produce complete and free open source drivers for NVidia video cards.) This pledge drive does not have the official support of the nouveau developers, but what a wonderful idea to be able to present them with $10,000 to support their work! If you would like to use the hardware you’ve already paid for under terms that respect your freedom and choice, consider pledging $10 to this effort. (I’ll discuss the pragmatics and politics of free drivers more in a subsequent weblog soon.)

Small businesses with small budgets can save a lot of money by deploying open-source software — at least in theory. The Linux operating system and office productivity software such as OpenOffice can be downloaded free. That sounds a lot better than paying $200 (£101.49) for each system's OS and $300-500 more for an Office suite.

Two banks and an insurance company have accepted Microsoft Corp.'s offer of technical support for Novell Inc.'s SUSE Enterprise Linux. One of the three, Credit Suisse Group, has yet to use SUSE Linux, said spokeswomen at the two software vendors.

Eyeon has released the Linux version of Fusion. Based on the recent December release of version 5.1 of the visual effects software, Fusion on Linux is the company’s next universal platform initiative.

Adam Turner looks at how to keep your old computer from joining the mountain of tech waste that's clogging our landfill.

New Meta data based Linux desktop search system, which overcame the limitation of current Linux desktop search capabilities, was developed. Thus likely to fuel more active developments in open source based semantic desktop search technology too.

Analysis As PR stunts go, Sun Microsystems' Blackbox trailer park computing launch this autumn wasn't bad. Sun pumped up some rather dull AMD Sun servers by unveiling a black, spray-painted, branded shipping container that could be crammed with Sun storage and server devices.

One of the aims in the drafting of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) is to internationalize the language to make it easier to translate. Those who doubt the need for this effort only need to look at the efforts to write an alternative free license in the Brazilian state of Paraná to change their minds. Despite the good intentions of its creators, the alternative license has been labeled as non-free by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its Latin American counterpart, the FSFLA, and is currently being re-written under some protest -- all of which might have been avoided or minimized had an internationalized version of the GPL been available.

Mozilla Corp. today released a version 2.0.0.1 update for its Firefox browser and version 1.5.0.9 for its Thunderbird email client, for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows machines. For those still using Firefox 1.5.x, version 1.5.0.9 includes the same security fixes.

I want to share the experience I gained from the switch over to Ubuntu Linux a few months ago. It might be of some help to other people looking for a superb alternative to Windows. Even though the new Windows Vista OS is being released, some people might not want to use this upgrade. There are numerous unbiased reasons not to upgrade, including the fact that Vista is extremely demanding on resources and will cost an arm and leg to upgrade. On the other hand, Ubuntu is completely free and so are most other Linux programs.

Six months after Sun Microsystems Inc. said it was not a matter of if but when it would open source its flagship programming language, the company announced that it would release the Java platform as free software under the GNU General Public Licence V2.

Female registrations have hit an all time high for Linux.conf.au (LCA) to be held in Sydney next year. More than 50 women have signed up to the traditionally male dominated event, which represents approximately 10% of the overall number of registrations.

A new, downloadable book helps users to install, configure, extend, and troubleshoot SUSE 10.1. Jem Matzan's SUSE Linux 10.1 Kick Start provides a clear, concise, task-oriented guide to getting one of today's most polished and popular desktop Linuxes doing everything most users want.

On Friday, February 2nd, Fedora enthusiasts will gather at Boston University for the annual appearance of the world-famous groundhog Fedora Phil. According to legend, if Fedora Phil sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of Fedora test releases.

Sasken Communication Technologies says its multimedia application/codec stack was licensed by Wistron NeWeb Corp. (WNC) for several Linux mobile phones due in early 2007. The phones will run Sasken's "Multimedia Subsystem Solution" (MSS) stack on a MontaVista Linux kernel and TI OMAP application processor.

Rafe Levien sees himself as one of a small but growing collection of people working to reconcile the free software and typographic communities. Most font designers, Levien says, "have a real suspicion of the free software ethic. It's only in the last year or two that we've seen some bridges being built between these two worlds."

Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies have already signed up for the SUSE Linux enterprise subscription certificates Microsoft is offering under its recent, controversial deal with Novell.

After many months of development, Thunderbird 2.0 is almost ready to debut. The Mozilla Foundation released the first beta of Thunderbird 2.0 last week, and I've been using it to manage my mail since then. The new release boasts tagging, history navigation, new mail alerts, improved extension support, and a number of other features. Thunderbird 2.0 won't knock your socks off with exciting new features, but it's a nice, gradual improvement over the Thunderbird 1.5 series.

Trolltech has enhanced its dual-licensed software stack for mobile device UIs (user interfaces), and has moved more of it to GPLv2. Qtopia 4.2.0 features new VoIP (voice-over-IP) and WiFi capabilities, while the Open Source Edition now includes everything in the commercial version except DRM (digital rights management) and telephony components, the company says.

Zmanda Inc., a provider of open source backup and recovery software, announced that Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL, its enterprise-class backup and recovery solution for MySQL databases, is now available on Ubuntu. ZRM for MySQL now supports all major Linux distributions.