Showing all newswire headlines

Recently many have noted a comment made by Mark Shuttleworth in response to Canonical’s support of WINE and Microsoft Windows compatability). The community response to Shuttleworth’s comments were of mixed results. I must admit, that I agree with Shuttleworth.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2009.1 desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The first of a series of events that will bring together implementors of OASIS OpenDocument Format/ISO 26300 to unilaterally test and discuss implementation issues of ODF with each other. All ODF implementors and/or those looking into the matter are invited to participate in this event on behalf of the Netherlands government and OpenDoc Society. The aim is to provide a low-level hands-on interoperability testing environment in which vendors and community members can fine tune the interoperability capabilities of their ODF implementations and make test cases, recommendations and create best practices for implementors.

The first annual openSUSE Community Week starts on Monday. I interviewed Community Manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier to find out how the event came together and what he hopes to accomplish with the week long event.

If the trustee is successful, and given the way the relevant law reads, he should be, everything SCO has so desperately been trying to sell in order to feed their litigation habit will instead be sold in order to pay off their creditors - a thought we're sure chills old Darl McBride's cold, black heart right to the core. SCO, of course, says they plan to oppose the motion and present a new reorganization plan, but given the success their previous plans have had, we suspect the effort will be a lot like stretching out chewing gum to stop a 747. The hard-working guys at Groklaw, as always, have the text of the Trustee's motion along with commentary, as well as the whole lurid story for anyone who has managed to miss the three-ring circus.

Sun Microsystems Inc, a hardware maker that Oracle Corp is buying for more than $7 billion, may have broken a U.S. law prohibiting companies from bribing foreign officials, Sun said in a regulatory filing on Friday. "We have identified potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the resolution of which could possibly have a material effect on our business," Sun said in a 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said Oracle was aware of the matter before it agreed to buy Sun.

The Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor MP, today announced a bold and substantive “ Teacher Laptop Initiative”. This is part of a critical strategy to take forward the objective of improving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in teaching and learning. The initiative aims to ensure every teacher owns and uses a laptop, by providing them with a monthly allowance which will cover the purchase costs as well as the costs of connectivity. The details of the initiative are attached [PDF].

[They will buy you a laptop, as long as it has "XP or higher" on it - Scott]

A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.

A cool little screensaver I found online. A bit dated, but still very cool.

Digital storage is fragile. I'm sure this not news to you. If you have any computer files from the 1990s can you still read them? Are they on a readable medium? In a readable format? It is a chronic problem for businesses, but I think it's a more significant problem for normal, everyday people. Is the history of you and your family going to survive beyond the latest fad file format or storage widget?

They might be, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal becomes law. Although the idea of Microsoft paying billions of dollars might sound an appealing prospect, one knock-on consequence might be that open source coders would also be liable for any damage that errors in their software caused.

Transferring data off TiVo devices to watch them on laptops or desktops has often required expensive proprietary tools. Here are reviews of three free, Open Source tools that allow you to do this.

Huge under-utilization of virtualized servers is caused by inefficiency in migrating VMs across servers, to accommodate load spikes. As a result, an immense amount of wasted power and resultant carbon footprint and other ecological side-effects are created. A new software technique overcomes this

Android, Ubuntu, LiMo and Moblin have been battling it out in the Open Source mobile Operating system space for Mobile phones and Netbooks. Now, Novell has teamed up with Intel to push Moblin, instead of a version of OpenSuSE.

Coreboot.org released an almost-final 0.90 version of open source BIOS flashing firmware it says was nine years in the making. Flashrom offers Linux and UNIX users a BIOS flashing mechanism they can call their own, with support for 150 flash-chip families and 75 chipsets, Coreboot.org says. By its very nature, BIOS firmware is operating system-independent, since it loads before a computer's OS in order to identify, test, and initialize the device's processor, memory, graphics card, and peripherals. But, updating a BIOS to incorporate bug fixes and other improvements requires booting a computer into an operating system, then using the latter to run BIOS flashing software.

The release two weeks ago of WINE 1.1.20 brought some cleaner Direct3D code, but there really was not much to get overly excited about. The release of WINE 1.1.21, however, is different. With the release today of WINE 1.1.21, work is now underway in supporting Shader Model 4.0 in this open-source project atop Linux and other operating systems. Shader Model 4.0 is the shader language that is used by version 10 of Direct3D.

The saga of SCO v. Linux, known variously as SCO v. Novell, SCO v. IBM, SCO v. Everybody and their Mother, may be coming to a close. Yes, we know this comes as a shock — if anyone needs a moment to compose themselves, or, you know, dig out a case of Dom, we'll wait — but it may well happen faster than any of us ever expected.

Last month the US Election Technology Council (a trade association of US voting system manufacturers) released a white paper on open source and voting systems titled "Open Source - Understanding its application in the voting industry". The report came to the conclusion that the use of open source software for democratic elections is probably a bad thing - although the reasons given were less than convincing.

The night of May 7 a petition against Internet censorship hit the magic number of 50,000 signatures required for consideration by the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament.

MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), the efficient, open industry standard for video encoding, has made huge strides to become the industry leader in all areas – it plays on mobiles and MP3 players, it's used by HDTV and Blu-ray Discs, and cameras and HD camcorders record in it. H.264, currently the most efficient video compression algorithm, is also, since Adobe integrated the codec into its Flash Player, used for web videos and now Microsoft is also adding H.264 to Silverlight 3. Nevertheless, there is one important snag with H.264 – from 2011, license fees will be required from sites streaming video using this technology.