Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

While VMware Player is not designed to create virtual machines from scratch, other tools can help you to build your own VMs in a matter of minutes. You could use VMware's free VMware Server software, but it's overkill if you only need a quick-and-dirty way to build a VM. Instead, consider VMX Builder, an easy-to-use desktop tool for creating VMware virtual machines.

Although it may seem that open source software is a recent buzzword, the South African government has been successfully running open source software for more than 12 years now. Nhlanhla Mabaso looks at how far down the open source road South Africa is.

Only 15 years ago, Linus Torvalds was annoyed enough about the expense of the just-commercialized Unix workstations and systems on the market that he started to create his own operating system, one that had a look and feel very much like Unix. Back then, proprietary operating systems dominated the midrange of the server market, mainframes ruled the high end, and there was no such thing as an entry server, but rather a NetWare file system for file sharing and network printing. How the world has changed.

GnuCash is a personal and small business accounting package that provides true double-entry accounting, the ability to set up automatic recurring transactions, and simple budgeting. The application does not try to hide the complexities of managing your money from you with pretty screens. It does show you where (and how much) you're spending your money. If you're prepared to learn a subtly different way of doing things, you will find GnuCash a very powerful alternative for home or small business use.

Power.org has published a new PowerPC ISA (instruction set architecture) said to integrate and unify general-purpose and embedded PowerPC architectures. The non-profit organization has also published a Power Architecture Platform Requirements (PAPR) specification, aimed at helping PowerPC system vendors and Linux distributors create interoperable products.

Fedora Weekly News Issue 65

Taiwanese entrepreneur Roger Kung has bet on Linux for its low-cost, high-flexibility, customizable user interface. Linux-based smartphones held a 48 percent market share in China in 2004, according to government data. E28 has led the wave of Linux-based smartphones in China as well as overseas.

The MS/Linux patent wars begin . . . By agreeing to license Microsoft's intellectual property, SuSE distributor Novell has created a potentially fatal division in what's called F/OSS, the Free/Open Source Software movement. What has Novell done, and why is it so potentially damaging?

What should the Linux desktop of 2007 and beyond be like? That's what the OSDL wants to know in its latest Linux Client Survey, which runs from now until Dec. 1. The results will help the OSDL's Desktop Working Group work on the areas of development that are critical to users.

When I'm not hacking or writing about hacking, I'm brewing beer. When I say I'm brewing beer, I don't mean that I'm taking some syrupy stuff and adding it to boiling water and hoping for the best. I mean I'm buying various types of grains, various types of hops, some yeast, and potentially some other additives to help balance my brewing water or the pH levels at some point in my brewing process. Now, you can't go throwing all of this stuff together in random quantities and expect to hit your target flavor or style of beer. You need a recipe. This is where QBrew comes in. QBrew is an open source application to aid you in developing a recipe for home brewed beer.

[Now that is my kind of Open Source Software! Free Beer..get it? ;-) - Scott]

Asterisk, the leading open source telephony platform, is flourishing and AstriCon – the annual Asterisk conference and exhibition – has become the place to learn about it. Developers, resellers, IT managers and contact center managers grabbed their ten gallon hats and headed to Dallas to learn or to showcase their own Asterisk innovations. There were sessions for all levels, novice to expert, and intimate networking opportunities to meet a literal “who’s who” of open source telephony.

Virtualisation slashes development timesOne of the oft-quoted advantages of virtualisation is the re-use of existing server resources, a capability which need not just apply to servers working in a production environment.

With Firefox 2.0 out the door last week, Mozilla is turning its attention to version 3.0, with a goal to deliver the new browser about this time next year. Among the features Mozilla wants for Firefox 3.0 is Places, the revamped bookmark tool that was dropped from 2.0 development in April. "We definitely didn't want to add [Places] until it was ready for prime time," says Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's director of engineering

The Cape IT Initiative (CITI) are launching their latest new business acceleration initiative, VeloCITI. The idea is to select IT businesses with innovative and sustainable ideas and provide the support to get the companies up and running.

And so, last week, “Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. ... announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012”. I doubt it's as simple as that.

Sound eXchange (SoX) is a command-line sound sample translator. This Swiss Army knife of sound tools can be used to convert file formats of your audio files, and to apply sound effects such as echo, fade-in/out, and chorus to jazz up your music with just a few keystrokes.

Fighting fragmentationThe biggest obstacle in Java's path to becoming the dominant software architecture for mobile phones has been its fragmentation - both in terms of technical features and the various licensing schemes adopted by its early exponents. The past two years have seen the handset makers and large operators increasingly taking the steering wheel of the mobile Java movement, seeking to create unified platforms and work around the confusion caused by Sun's halfhearted open source approach.

The Beta sessions of the first South African LPI level 3 exams will be taking place in early December in Joburg and Cape Town. The exams can be written free of charge and registration is open to anyone with an LPI level 1 certification.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on porting kdegames applications to SVG and other general improvements continues at a fast pace. Work continues on video support in KPhotoAlbum. Krita gets a new star shape tool. Okular gets support for freehand ink overlays in presentation mode. Kate gets syntax highlighting support for ActionScript and RapidQ code. Mailody continues to mature as an alternative email client. Strigi refactors to allow searching within multiple simultaneous indexes, with preliminary interoperability with Akonadi on the horizon.

NetBSD 3.1 has been released: "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 3.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available in both source and binary form. NetBSD is a general-purpose Open Source operating system that provides interfaces for running a wide range of applications on a big number of different hardware platforms, all from one source tree. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bug fixes, security updates, new drivers and new features like support for Xen3 DomU."