Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

One of the first POS (point-of-sale) equipment vendors to adopt Linux will now become one of the first to offer solid-state storage. Wincor Nixdorf's new X-Series, due in January, will be offered with an Msystems mModule uDOC embedded flash disk.

Mayix XLiveCD 2006.2, a Gentoo-derived Linux distribution, was released last weekend by its Guatamala-based project team. Mayix, which is produced only in Spanish, includes the so-called "stage 4" binary Gentoo packages and sports a 2.6.17 Linux kernel, X.Org 7.1, and a GNOME 2.14 default desktop.

According to Forrester Research, open source databases can lower an enterprise's database total cost of ownership (TCO) by fifty percent. This finding and others were presented in an online seminar delivered on Oct. 12, 2006 titled "Realizing the Value of Open Source Databases: How Sony Online Entertainment Replaced Oracle with EnterpriseDB."

The "Slug" has gained much-improved Linux support, thanks to a new Debian installer that targets the device. The first release candidate of the debian-installer for Debian's forthcoming "Etch" distribution was released yesterday, offering nearly complete support to the Linksys $99 NSLU2 NAS gadget.

Sun Microsystems move on Monday to make Java open source code under the General Public License will not deter an Apache Software Foundation project that promised an open source Java implementation on its own. The Harmony project, started May 18, 2005, moved out of its incubation phase and into full-fledged project status at the end of October. Moving out of incubation is a sign within the Apache Software Foundation that an open source project is organized and has a critical mass of contributors. It's expecting to produce its 1.0 implementation of Java Standard Edition in mid-2007.

Casual Ubuntu users may have registered surprise when they first booted the distribution's Edgy Eft release this past October. Back at the beginning of the Edgy development cycle, much was made of the formation of a new, dedicated Art Team to develop a fresh look for the backgrounds and splash screens of the startup process. But when Edgy hit the shelves, the artwork was scarcely different from that of its predecessor, Dapper Drake.

A new preliminary version of the Slackware-based STUX GNU/Linux live CD, version 0.9.2, was released Monday, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel and the KDE desktop environment. STUX is touted as a live CD distro that can automatically load and save main configuration and personal files on a writable partition.

Open Shakespeare is a UK-based project to publish a fully open edition of Shakespeare's works. It's not trying to be another "Shakespeare on the Web," just providing an HTMLized copy of the plays and works. Its goal is to produce a reusable package of free and open material, including the main source texts, encodings in various open formats including XML and PDF, ancillary material, a Python API, and other documentation and tools.

As we prepared to open a new Freedom Technology Center in a rehabilitated site in New Jersey, I came to learn that Verizon was capable of offering fiber service at our location. Officially, they only claim to support those using Microsoft Windows and Mac OS/X with their service. In fact, with a little foreknowledge, you can have installed, activated, and use your FiOS service with an entirely free operating system such as GNU/Linux.

The city of Vienna has migrated more than 100 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, principally deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and AS on HP hardware.

The free Java community reacted positively, but cautiously, to the news that Sun Microsystems has released the code for Sun Java under the GNU General Public License. While community leaders showed appreciation of the news by cooperating in the announcement, developers in the free Java community reacted more tentatively, and at least some projects seem likely to continue development of their own implementations of Java.

Red Hat, a leading provider of open source, will introduce its newly integrated JBoss solutions to its Middle Eastern partners and detail the company's plan for partner activities in the region at the Gitex 2006. At the event will be held at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre from November 18 to 22.

This month's tasty installment explores the world of Roll-Your-Own Linuxes. Why would you want to assemble your own customized Linux image? Well, why not? For one thing, it's just plain fun. For another, despite the fact that there are hundreds of existing Linux distributions of all shapes and sizes, you might still find yourself wanting something that doesn't exist.

Underscoring the supercomputing market's move toward clusters, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just got the first of four Linux-based clusters that researchers plan to put to work doing climate studies, astrophysics and tracking the lifespan of the country's nuclear weapon stockpile.

It was a split decision this year. Both Nancy Anthracite and Will Ross are recipients of the 2006 Linux Medical News Freeodm award, co-sponsored with the International Medical Informatics Association. Ross and Anthracite have worked tirelessly to advance the cause of software freedoms in medicine: Anthracite through many activities through the VistA community and Ross through his work with Mendocino County Health Records Exchange and grant funding of important FOSS development.

Linux Networx today announced the next member of the LS Series, Performance Tuned (LS-P) Linux Supersystems. The LS-P Series are designed as turnkey, production-ready systems for leading product design applications. LS-P systems are performance tuned for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), crash/impact analysis and structural analysis applications. Visualization software from CEI is supported as an integrated application on all systems.

Back in July, Transitive, a startup company that has created a funky emulation product that allows applications written for one Unix-oid environment to be ported to Unix-oid environments running on other processor architectures, said that it had been working with Intel to make a variant of its QuickTransit software that would port Sparc/Solaris applications to Linux running on X64 or Itanium processors. Now, that product is shipping for X64 platforms.

X.org received a lot of attention and discussion at UDS, which is appropriate for such a desktop-focused distro. Binary drivers were a hot topic at the summit. Ubuntu developers also discussed how to provide a more robust configuration system for X.org, and what to do when problems arise with X.

The Third International Conference on Open Source Systems will be held in Limerick, Ireland 11-14 June 2007. The goal of the conference is intended to"provide an international forum where a diverse community of professionals from academia, industry and public administration can come together to share research findings and practical experiences. The conference is also meant to provide information and education to practitioners, identify directions for further research, and to be an ongoing platform for technology transfer. The conference general chair is Dr. Walt Scacchi at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine

C# has come a long way since it emerged from Microsoft's mythical "Project Cool" back in 2000. It is the primary language of Microsoft .NET, and has pulled ahead of Visual Basic among professional Windows programmers. At last week's Tech-Ed conference in Barcelona, C#'s lead architect Anders Hejlsberg drew large audiences for his sessions on the future of the language.