Showing all newswire headlines

There is a lot of buzz in the tech media world about the upcoming Ubuntu Karmic Koala release, but it's not the only Linux release on its way from a major vendor. Novell's community-driven openSUSE project is nearing completion of its next major release, version 11.2 The first release candidate for openSUSE 11.2 was released this week and includes the latest Linux 2.6.31.3 kernel, social networking support and the inclusion of the GNOME 2.28 desktop, among other new features. While both the latest GNOME and KDE desktops are part of the openSUSE 11.2 release, the KDE desktop will now become the default choice for desktop GUI instead of GNOME. The move to make KDE the default choice is not seen by openSUSE as a shift, but rather a choice for users.

Akaza Research is pleased to announce the release of OpenClinica 3.0, the newest version of the world’s most popular open source electronic data capture (EDC) software for clinical trials. This latest production release marks a significant milestone for open source software in the clinical trials field, adding a host of new capabilities designed to further accelerate the adoption of open source into mainstream research.

When you need to offload photos from a digital camera onto your computer, you can do this using the default browser, a photo management application, or a dedicated tool like Rapid Photo Downloader.

Home automation may sound like a science-fiction dream, but in reality it is not only commonplace, but relatively simple to get started, especially with Linux. Smart control of household appliances and utilities begins at the low end with plug-and-play radio frequency (RF) and powerline modules and relays that can easily interface with a small home server in charge of scheduling and monitoring. At the high end, a home automation setup may include environmental controls, home security systems, and many other add-ons, which--despite the name--are important concerns for businesses as well as residential customers.

My favorite card game is Krypto. Eons ago when I was a youngun, you could buy this game from Edmund Scientifics, and can still find it on Amazon and other online nooks and crannies. The game is simple: there is a deck of 56 cards numbered 1-25. Each player is dealt five cards, and there is one common objective card in the middle. Players have three minutes to use each of their cards once to form the number on the objective card.

Hulu Desktop is now available for Linux. Ars puts it to the test on Ubuntu 9.04. Although it's extremely resource intensive, it's reasonably acceptable for a beta.

One of the things I love to hear about is success stories of Linux in education, especially in the K12 arena. Early adoption and exposure to Linux and Open Source has the very positive effect of opening the horizons of these students to the vast array of options available to them. But the number of instances that you hear of in regards to actual full on Linux and Open Source adoption in schools is few and far between, even though the number of schools supporting both is on the rise, albeit slowly. That's why I was very pleased recently to hear about a local school just southwest of where I live that had taken to living life with the penguin.

If you are a scientist and KDE user, you may already have been impressed by the range and quality of specialist software available for your use. But you may not be aware of the scientific graph plotting applications LabPlot (stable KDE 3 release with a KDE 4 version in progress) and SciDAVis (Qt4). The two projects have announced a collaboration to share common backend code to accelerate their development. We contacted the developers to get their take on their applications, the collaboration and the future of their projects. Read on to find out about the future of free software plotting.

In Part I of this OOXML update, my first post on the topic in over a year, I showed you how Microsoft maintains strong control over the OOXML standard. Despite their earlier promises that control of OOXML would be handed over to an independent, international committee, a look at attendance records reveals that the committee that maintains OOXML (JTC1/SC34/WG4) consists mainly of Microsoft employees, who outnumber any other company or organization on the committee 10-to-1.

When Cairo Dock v2.0 was out, it instantly became my favourite dock for Linux. Unfortunately, some Intel and ATI graphic card users were not able to run it in OpenGL mode (which is what's amazing about Cairo Dock). If you were among them, this is going to be great news for you: Cairo Dock in OpenGL mode now works with the very latest OpenSource drivers for ATI and Intel video card.

According to Harald Welte, the source code for the Palm Pre GSM model, currently being sold in Europe is now available from the opensource.palm.com site. Earlier this week, Welte pointed out that the source code for the new model of the Palm Pre was not available to the public, as it should be to comply with the terms of the GPL. An email to Welte from Palm has now confirmed the availability of the code for WebOS 1.1.2 and 1.1.3.

Cisco is keeping close tabs on the Asterisk open source IP PBX market. On the upside, Cisco spent time at Astricon promoting VoIP phones and other systems that link into Asterisk. But over time, Cisco will need to closely evaluate its Asterisk strategy. Here's why.

The Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala") beta won a positive review from eWEEK, while InfoWorld reports on the server edition's capability for developing private clouds that are compatible with Amazon EC2. Meanwhile, ArsTechnica found the developer's version of Ubuntu Moblin Remix to be "promising" but "rough."

The Parsix Linux distribution is derived from KANOTIX, based on the Debian testing branch, and developed by a team in Iran. The distro comes as a live CD with English and Persian languages installed by default and many others available. According to the release announcement features of the new Parsix 3.0 include GNOME 2.26.3, Linux 2.6.29.6-based Kernel, the installer supports separate /home partition, ext4 file system and GRUB 2, SquashFS+Lzma compression for the live CD and much more. After seeing the amount of changes to this release and remembering positive reviews of Parsix 1.0 and 2.0, I burned the .ISO to CD and got started.

Next month will mark the two-year anniversary of the Unreal Tournament 3 release, but to this day the UT3 Linux client still has not been released. Up to this point we have been told by Ryan Gordon (the one porting over the game and engine to Linux) that it is still being worked on and Epic Games has similarly told us -- just two months ago -- that it is slowly being worked on. We've been told similar statements now going back many months that the Unreal Tournament 3 Linux client was still being worked on, but there was no ETA for when it might be released -- even though Ryan has been porting the game for over two years and originally he was hoping to ship the Linux client on the same-day as the game's release.

October 24th, 2009, will be Linux Day in Italy. You may think that such events are only relevant for software geeks, but that's not the case at all.

There are easy ways to manage Linux servers, and there are hard ways. Charlie Schluting shows how to go from hard to easy.

How do you make money from Linux in the cloud? One potential route could be to open a store. As part of its upcoming Karmic Koala release, Ubuntu Linux is set to integrate a number of new cloud technologies. One of the efforts will include a cloud software appliance store to help expedite setup and deployment of private clouds.

Why do we love Linux so much? What is it that draws so many of us into the tinkering, experimenting, and everything else? In the Linux world, we blur the line between applications software and the operating system. This is important. It allows us to have more flexibility than any other operating system on Earth.

Uruguay has become the first country to provide a laptop for every child attending state primary school. President Tabaré Vázquez presented the final XO model laptops to pupils at a school in Montevideo on 13 October. Over the last two years 362,000 pupils and 18,000 teachers have been involved in the scheme.