Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

BOSTON, MASS. -- Last Friday, after the LinuxWorld Conference& Expo, I sat in on the fifth Fedora User and Developer Conference (FUDCon) at the Boston University School of Management. Some of the buzz in the halls concerned Red Hat's announcement of the end of the Fedora Foundation (about which more in a moment), but there were some good talks too.

For those of you who don't know (and I'm sure there are many), Gentoo/BSD is a relatively unheard-of project with aims of merging both Gentoo Linux and the BSD systems respectively into one operating system. The project, which is sponsored by Gentoo Linux, has goals of creating a hybrid operating system using BSD underlyings, such as the kernel and system libraries, with Gentoo's portage system (package manager), administration facilities and design principles integrated on top.

Comment VMware has announced it is making its virtual machine file format freely available, with no license or royalties.

Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and interoperability is not yet perfect. We hope to be able to quickly identify and fix the incompatibilities that do exist in the upcoming 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 bugfix releases.

Firefox users can now immediately see a trusted search rating displayed next to each search result when using the Google search engine built into the Mozilla Firefox browser.

After the official announcement Monday morning, investment firm Goldman Sachs issued a statement praising Red Hat's move to buy JBoss for $350 million. The New York investment firm acknowledged it would come as a blow to many of Red Hat's Linux partners as well as operating system rivals Novell and Microsoft but asserted it's a good risk.

Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet) has launched a major upgrade of its mirror service that provides an Australian site from which users can download the most popular open source software.

Linux advocates are familiar with the refrain that would-be switchers in the graphic arts have to rely on Adobe Photoshop under Windows because it can do things that the GIMP can't. An important but altogether different hurdle is the installed (and paid-for) base of often expensive third-party Photoshop plugins. But a solution to that problem might be easier than you think.

To some, Dell marches to the beat of Intel and Microsoft drums, dutifully following their research and development plans. But to hear Kevin Kettler tell it, the PC maker often takes its own lead.

Welcome to our issue number 41 of Fedora Weekly News.

Naturally, Linux support was the thread through almost everything, but the event was about a very broad range of current topics and trends, including infrastructure, hardware, applications, open source, grid computing, virtualization, security, mobile, and many others. It was visually clear that these are all interdependent, and that Linux is here to stay.

In a famous example of how first movers can lose their advantage, second-mover Microsoft won the Web browser wars from Netscape and continues to dominate the market today. But that competition was the subject of another "war," this one among researchers who study how technology is diffused into the market.

In this TestRun podcast, eWEEK Labs' Jim Rapoza and Jason Brooks discuss the possible effects of the acquisition. (Podcast #67)

Nokia is "product" company, product manager Ari Jaaski told listeners at LinuxWorld last week; it never publicly released the source code to anything before. Yet in conjunction with the launch of its 770 Internet tablet, Nokia has started an open source application platform, dedicated programmers to existing open source projects, sponsored developers already working on open source, and expended resources to promote open source software.

Red Hat said in a statement, the transaction consists of 40 percent cash, with the balance in Red Hat common stock. It said it will also pay about $70 million more if certain performance metrics are achieved in the future.

Launched in December, Portableapps.com is a community site in which Haller and other developers offer versions of standard software that a person can take with them on a flash drive, a storage device that uses flash memory and is small enough to attach to a keychain. The hardware runs off a PC's USB port.

No matter what technology you might be considering as part of your Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation, there's sure to be a hefty number of mundane data integration tasks required within your enterprise.

An Interview with Kenneth Wesley Wimer II

That's right, for the first time you don't have to choose between buying an Apple Mac or a Dell or a HP; the Apple Intel-based Macs give you operating system variety like never before.