Showing headlines posted by dave

SCO appears to have given up its claim that the GPL is unconstitutional! SCO made a mistake it seems, and now, like Gilda Radner's classic Emily Litella skit on the old Saturday Night Live, they say,"Never mind." Maybe BayStar talked some sense into them.

Digital cameras capture images that are great for printing but generally unsuited for sending by email. The files are often too large, poorly named, and many images need to be rotated. Luckily, a number of open source tools are well-suited to solving these problems quickly.

Novell has announced its soon-to-ship SUSE LINUX 9.1 conforms to the Free Standards Group's LSB Runtime Environment for IA32 product standard, demonstrating adherence to the community-developed standard for Linux-based systems.

A handful of Linux kernel developers recently debated "swapiness" at length on the lkml, exploring when an application should or should not be swapped out, versus reclaiming memory from the cache.

The Australian Computer Society will release an open source policy document later this year, calling for the adoption of open source technologies by Australian government entities and the private sector.

Get rid of annoying Web marketing and protect your privacy, using both the browser and a proxy server.

Telecom equipment vendor Giga Stream says it uses IP Infusion's ZebOS Advanced Routing Suite (ARS) in a unique embedded Linux based "Universal Navigation Switch" (UNS) that integrates voice, data, and radio access to support seamless subscriber roaming between Radio Access Networks (RANs) and Wireless LANs.

Work to achieve government security standards, security certifications and work with the NSA-developed SELinux lead the list of security initiatives planned by Red Hat. Red Hat's goal is to advance industry security standards and simplify security for customers.

In yesterday's annual strategy memo to Microsoft employees, CEO Steve Ballmer declared: "Noncommercial software products in general, and Linux in particular, present a competitive challenge for us and for our entire industry, and they require our concentrated focus and attention."

It's 'ciao, Microsoft' week for Brazilian public servants. Over 2,200 civil servants are in Brasília, Brazil's capital, for training in free software The program's intention is turn the participants into propagators of open source. The use of open source represents annual savings of US$ 1.1 billion for the Brazilian government.

European Commission funds will help to pay for pilots of open-source technology for the public sector.

Distinctive Devices says it has received a $3.2 million dollar purchase order for embedded Linux based set-top boxes (STBs) that it calls "representative" of other deals. Italian digital TV vendor Goldtop will buy the devices and resell them into both terrestrial and satellite-based digital television markets.

This interview with Red Hat Vice President James Prasad, who heads up the company's embedded operations, discusses Red Hat's background in embedded systems, embedded Linux market strategy and product plans, and recent partnership with Wind River Systems. Prasad came to Red Hat via its acquisition of Cygnus Solutions in January, 2000.

Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz said that Red Hat Linux' kernel was proprietary. You might have had a similar impact describing the Pope as Jewish.

If you've been developing for Windows for (n+1) years, you might consider venturing into open source software development a daunting prospect. Reading the Free Software Foundation Web site makes it look like all development is done in straight C -- of course there's no Visual C++ or Visual Basic. Linux doesn't have its own component model and there is nothing even remotely like DirectX for low-level hardware access. It's just too hard for the dyed-in-the-wool Windows developer to program for Linux.

As reported on Slashdot and elsewhere, Linux kernel hackers have discovered that some proprietary modules running on the Linux kernel have been "lying" about their licensing. Doing so allows those modules to pass the automated license test done when they are loaded and thus escape the "tainted kernel" messages the loader would otherwise produce. NewsForge has gone behind the scenes and spoken to Linus Torvalds and the CEO of one of the firms providing proprietary modules for Linux to learn more about this story.

Born in Mexico City, Miguel de Icaza was the driving force behind the creation of the Gnome free software desktop, and co-founded the open source company Ximian, bought last August by Novell. In July 2001, he helped start another ambitious project, Mono: a free implementation for GNU/Linux of Microsoft's .Net framework. He talks to Glyn Moody about Mono's progress, how Ximian was bought by Novell, and why he is so scared of Microsoft's Longhorn.

A few weeks ago I got my hands on a copy of Debian Non-Profit, one of a growing list of Custom Debian Distributions. And after spending a few weeks installing and re-installing it on my painfully old (433MHz AMD) work machine for testing purposes I've become something of a fan. There are some issues that could do with a little more attention (in my opinion) but as a whole the Morphix-based Debian NP is a formidable start to what could be a very important project.

> While most people bicker about which OS is best, the truth is much vaguer: what computer is sitting on your desk has more to do with your comfort level than intellectual choice.

If you need a markup language to create nicely formatted documents, Linux has plenty of them to choose from -- DocBook, TeX and LaTeX, Lout, the roff family, and of course (X)HTML and XML. So do we really need another? I didn't think so, until I ran across Almost Plain Text (APT), a simple system for marking up text in which most of the formatting is done using indentation and ordinary keyboard characters. Using APT's command-line formatting engine, you can output APT documents to PostScript, PDF, LaTeX, and HTML.