Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

If the FSF succeeds in blocking a landmark deal, the biggest losers will be software consumers, policy analyst James DeLong says.

Tim Bromhead, in a new entry over the bla.st blog, talks about writing neat and tidy URLs with PHP. He says, to do this you have to set up URL rewrites in Apache to send all page requests through a single PHP script. In this post he shows you, how to make the URLs with spaces easy to type for users.

Digital Doorways, a joint project between the Department of Science and Technology and the Meraka Institute, will provide rural communities with access to the various open source projects in a bid to improve South Africa's computer literacy.

The following letter is shown verbatim, as received from ESR, who has sent it to a number of Linux-related publications and mailing lists.

Spammers beware! A new programme launched by the Internet Society of South Africa has placed bounties on the heads of spammers. Bounty hunters could receive as much as R30 000 for a spammer's conviction.

Mono has long tried to provide an open source alternative implementation of Microsoft's .Net framework. It has succeeded in some respects, and in others it has been lacking, especially when it come to Visual Basic. That is no longer the case. As of Mono version 1.2.3, the Novell led project now includes new Visual Basic capabilities allowing development and deployment of Visual Basic for Mono on Linux platforms. The 1.2.3 release is the third point release in the 1.2.x series which was first released in November of 2006.

It’s a contentious time for the open-source community. Microsoft has partnered with Novell, Oracle is angling for Red Hat’s customer base, while Linux is promising to enlarge its influence in the burgeoning market for mobile phones and set-top boxes.

In a bit of nostalgia, I recently read the short story Why I Live at the P.O., by southern writer Eudora Welty. The humorous and quirky story led to the naming of one of my favorite pieces of software, an esteemed E-mail program, by its original developer back in the late 1980s. And the nostalgia was for the passing of Eudora, the software.

SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Beta 6 is now available for downloading and testing, the project announced today. The new release allows users to optionally select between two NVIDIA drivers, the latest v1.0.9746 or a legacy version (v1.0.9631), to maximize Beryl support for both newer and older chips, the project said.

Carnegie Mellon West's Software Management program is built on the university's existing software engineering curriculum, the school explained, but adds a business and organizational component that "breaks with tradition by giving students the broader perspective needed to collaborate with and lead the global, distributed teams that are defining next-generation software organizations."

In an attempt to boost its sagging fortunes, Dell, one of the leading PC makers in America, recently launched the Dell Idea Storm website to solicit ideas on how to get Dell back to the top. The most popular idea so far? Desktops with pre-installed Linux.

The FudCon videos from Boston 2007 are now ready for torrent download at: http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/

A joint KDE and Gnome meeting is taking place in Spain next month called Guademy. The objectives are to create new projects and initiatives of collaboration between both Desktops and allow new developers to get started. Aaron Seigo will give an update on KDE 4 and Albert Astals Cid will talk about Okular. Meanwhile in India Pradeepto Bhattacharya of KDE India will be talking at FOSS MEET in NIT Calicut about KDE 4 and why you should develop with Qt.

KDE was once again well represented at the 2007 Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 5x), demonstrating to show-goers why it is the most popular Linux desktop. There were talks, demonstrations from KDE developers and and thank yous in return. Read on for the full report.

Last year, PlanetOut.com was looking at a total revamp of its Solaris-based infrastructure. The company hired a new director of technology operations, Tom Cignarella, to deal with a glut of old hardware and an "immature operating environment" that hadn't kept up with best practices. After a 50% server consolidation, Cignarella needed a reliable networking monitoring application. He found one in an open source product that fit the bill perfectly.

On 23 January of this year, in response to censoring the highly information-packed website Uruknet, I sent an e-mail to Google News urging it to keep its internet search engine open.

The same day, I received a format reply:

Thank you for your note about Google News. This is an automated response to let you know that we appreciate your interest and feedback. Please note that this email address is no longer active. There was no follow-up from Google News.

Slackware Linux is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. Late last year the project marked 13 years of non-stop development with the release of Slackware 11.0. The distribution is best known for its no-frills, minimum customizations approach to applications like KDE. It's also notorious for its reluctance to switch to new version of several popular applications like Apache or GCC. No surprise then, that its package management system has seen little change over the years and is still available in just one flavor -- vanilla.

The Mono Project on Feb. 20 announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.

Free advice is worth every penny as someone once famously said. For years, I have been guilty of replacing the word 'advice' with the word 'software' as every attempt I made to get Linux to work properly ended, if not in tears, at least in immoderate language and the dog fleeing the room in terror to avoid low-flying Mandrake CDs.

How much money can a large enterprise save by migrating to open source from proprietary? In Novell's case, it's millions of dollars. During an address at the recent Linuxworld OpenSolutions Summit here, Debra Anderson CIO of Novell, detailed how Novell has transitioned to open source from proprietary for its own operations. It's an effort that is still ongoing.