Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Aonix has released version 1.0 of a virtual machine said to overcome Java's traditional weaknesses for "deeply embedded" systems. PERC Pico can be used with or without an embedded operating system such as Linux, and offers execution times "similar to C/C++ programs," with determinism in the low microsecond range, the company claims.

Google's Summer of Code (SOC) will be back again this year, and this time, Google plans to take advantage of lessons learned to improve the program for everyone involved.

Popular Linux distributor Mandriva yesterday announced plans to open an office in Nigeria in an effort to expand its market.

An India-based development services provider is offering Eclipse plugin-based GNU toolchains for Renesas processors, and an Eclipse-based IDE for Linux- and Windows-based development hosts. KPIT Cummins says its "KPIT Coronoa" IDE and KPIT GNU toolchains offer state-of-the-art features, and are suitable for commercial product development.

Alfresco, a start-up that commercializes open-source software for helping customers keep track of their digital documents, has adopted the General Public License in an effort to attract outside programmers.

Time recently published an article entitled Getting rich off those who work for free which, among other things, talked about free software this way: "Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser have also established themselves as significant and lasting economic realities."

As Linux establishes itself as a mainstream operating system, and open source tools and applications prove their enterprise readiness, a growing number of organizations are talking publicly about their open source deployments and direction. Recently, Mok Choe, CTO at Union Bank in Monterrey Park, Calif., spoke with Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears about the financial institution’s decision to scrap proprietary Unix systems for commodity servers running Red Hat Linux.

Anyone who has used more than one personal computer understands that a system seems to become obsolete sometime after the purchase but before it's first boot. For a school district, this issue is compounded by the volume of computers it has to maintain. However, Dr. Anne Hyland, director of curriculum and instruction for Bexley City Schools, said the district is switching to a new operating system that will save the taxpayers a lot of money.

Comments made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last Thursday to an analyst conference for the most part went unnoticed until stories this morning cited excerpts from a freshly published transcript of that conference. In one such story, an excerpted partial sentence was interpreted as part of a statement that Microsoft may yet exercise its option to sue manufacturers of Linux operating systems other than Novell for infringement of patent.

A commercial supplier of open-source routing and firewall software has transitioned its community-supported firewall/router Linux distribution to a Debian base. Vyatta Community Edition 2 (VC2) is based on Debian, runs on commodity x86 hardware, includes excellent documentation, and supports numerous enterprise features, including serial T1/E1 cards, VLANs, RIP, and OSPF.

Who said you can't make money by supporting free community-based Linux distributions? HP is making $25 million by supporting the free Debian GNU/Linux distribution in what may ultimately turn out to be a challenge to commercial distributions from Novell and Red Hat. HP announced in August 2005 it would be offering support services for Debian, which has been one of the most popular and widest deployed community-based Linux distributions since its inception.GNU/Linux.

St. Vincent's is a Catholic liberal arts college in Latrobe, Penn. With budget constraints typical of many small private educational institutions, the school is taking deliberate steps to use more open source software. Recently it ditched Microsoft Exchange in favor of Zimbra.

A pair of Sun's top Solaris executives have scurried right on out of the company,The Register can reveal. Solaris VP Tom Goguen will leave the company for "personal and family reasons," and Sun's director of Solaris marketing Chris Ratcliffe has also departed for "family reasons." Those damn families sure do take a toll on the executive lifestyle.

Nokia is now scouting about for new application ideas around the N800, its latest Linux-enabled tablet. At the same time, though, the company has no plans to stray from its choice of an essentially Debian Linux-based platform, or from its concept of the N800 as a device geared to on-the-go Internet connectivity. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

FredTrotter (me) has just won the bidding for theHistalk sponsoredBeers with Bush atHIMSS07. As a result I get to talk to Jonathan Bush the CEO ofathenahealth.As you can imagine, I will be talking to him aboutFreeB and FOSS medical software generally, but what else should I ask him?Slashdot style, if you will post a question for Jonathan Bush as a comment on this Linux Medical News story, and I arbitrarily decide that I like the question (since there is no meta-moderation here) I will ask him your question over drinks.Just a warning I have no interest in talking to him about politics, so no conspiracy questions, please.

The non-profit tuXlab program, which provides including tuXlab GNU/Linux desktops and other open-source software to South Africa high schools, integrated 10 more schools into its wireless network on Feb. 9. The project reportedly has now connected tuXlabs in 50 schools near Cape Town.

For the uninitiated, creating Debian packages is a mysterious process that looks much harder than it really is. To make it a little less mysterious, let's take a look at two methods of building Debian packages: using standard Debian packaging tools and the CheckInstall utility.

Announcing the third version of his syslets subsystem patches, Ingo Molnar noted that he has implemented many fundamental changes to the code including the introduction of threadlets, "'threadlets' are basically the user-space equivalent of syslets: small functions of execution that the kernel attempts to execute without scheduling. If the threadlet blocks, the kernel creates a real thread from it, and execution continues in that thread. The 'head' context (the context that never blocks) returns to the original function that called the threadlet." As threadlets are only moved into a separate thread context if they block, Ingo refers to them as 'optional threads'. He also describes them as 'on-demand parallelism', "user-space does not have to worry about setting up, sizing and feeding a thread pool - the kernel will execute the workload in a single-threaded manner as long as it makes sense, but once the context blocks, a parallel context is created. So parallelism inside applications is utilized in a natural way."

When Mark Alperin went looking to replace his aging ERP system in 2006, he found himself in the same place as many CIOs of midsize companies -- not feeling terribly sought after by software vendors who prioritize large enterprise accounts, and facing few choices. Alperin serves as COO with CIO responsibilities for Vertex Distribution, a manufacturer and distributor of rivets, screws and other fasteners. He wasn't happy with the two main packages for his industry, from Activant Solutions and Microsoft (neither of which he was using, nor did he want to use.)

Etherboot is an open source project that gets little public notice, but is essential to almost any other open source project that relies on thin clients or network booting. Here's a lightly edited log of an IRC conversation with Etherboot project leader Marty Connor and primary Etherboot developer Michael Brown.