Showing all newswire headlines

Sun Microsystems has announced that in 2009, there will only be a minor release, instead of a major jump from version 6.5 to 7.0, for its open source NetBeans Java development environment. The developers are following their guidelines to release versions that focus on smaller changes and on API compatibility, as intermediate versions.

The Distribution List is a list of users that you can use to send mail to at one time. Instead of having to use CC: or BC: you can have a permanent list to send to. Zimbra offers a graphical interface to accomplish this task. This is a great way to send company mail to one user and it is distributed to the entire staff.

ASUS is considering to install the Linux-based Google Android OS on future Eee PCs.

A new packet capture repository has been launched called pcapr that is sponsored and run by Mu Dynamics. pcapr appears to be a good alternative to OpenPacket and it supports protocol tagging, searching, and packet viewing in the web browser.

Steve Ballmer's deal with the Catalonian government is seen as a leverage against their existing Open Source strategy.

Lucene open source software has provided the building blocks for enterprise search technology for a few years. Now, it has a commercial backer. Lucid Imagination hopes that putting itself out there as the business face of Lucene will convince more enterprises to build software upon it -- especially when budgets tighten and open source becomes a more attractive option.

If Google were to use Qt, things would be much simpler and Chrome would have a unified interface under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. But Google isn't satisfied with Qt. Release of the native Linux version of the Google Chrome browser is still planned for June 2009. Unfortunately, more problems than first anticipated keep cropping up. According to recent OSnews, they mainly have to do with the graphical interface.

Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, just got a promotion to corporate vice president, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Gutierrez, who has taken an increasingly active role in Microsoft's intellectual-property strategy since moving back from Paris a few years ago, where he had served as Microsoft's associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa (and where I first met him for hot chocolate and coffee), is well-known to the open-source crowd for his involvement in Microsoft's accusations in 2007 that Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents.

Version 3.0 of the ACCESS Linux Platform has been unveiled at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. The new version offers a richer user interface and compliance with LiMo.

When Red Hat and Microsoft announced a virtualization partnership on Feb. 16, both companies directed most of their messaging to customers. Now, Red Hat is back — promoting the Microsoft relationship to channel partners, and taking a thinly veiled shot at Novell. Here's how.

Perhaps pre-alpha was a bit too early for Mozilla to release its Fennec mobile browser for Windows Mobile. Early adopters who downloaded the application after it was announced Feb. 10 found it essentially doesn't work. "The bad news is the browser is basically useless for many people," Mark Finkle, a Fennec developer, wrote in a blog post describing the problem.

Earlier this month we published an article looking at the Linux versus OpenSolaris performance when using the new AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs. Ubuntu Linux was faster than OpenSolaris 2008.11 in nearly all of the tests, but as mentioned in that article, OpenSolaris is still dependent upon GCC 3.4 where as Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions are now shipping with the newer and much-improved GCC 4 series. Following that article being published, Sun Microsystems had requested some compiler tests since they were confident the results would be different had their Sun Studio compiler been used. Well, in this article we now have some OpenSolaris benchmarks from the same AMD setup using GCC 3.4, GCC 4.0, and Sun Studio 12.

This article shows how you can upgrade a system running Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. It is intended for both server and desktop systems.

Xbox Live is being targeted by malicious hackers selling services that kick players off the network. The booting services are proving popular with players who want a way to get revenge on those who beat them in an Xbox Live game. The attackers are employing data flooding tools that have been used against websites for many years.

[Why am I not surprised? - Scott]

Apple has been throwing its legal weight around of late trying to use IP law to protect its turf. Seems to me Apple should call off the lawyers and let the products do the talking.

Need to connect to a Windows server from a computer running GNU/Linux? pyNeighborhood gives you an easy and graphical way to do just that. Read the full tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

We've become quite adept at sharing information over the intertubes. But perhaps that's different when it comes to sharing that information personally and verbally. Ever been annoyed when someone at a computer asks you a question as though you're some sort of walking encyclopedia rather than looking it up on the Web? Jake Coyle has just the site for you.

One of Europe's largest postal systems is deploying Compiere's open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform. The deal involves a European IT consulting firm that's cashing in on open source projects. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

San Diego, Calif., February 19, 2009 – Building on its reputation as the data protection leader of the open systems market, Arkeia Software is proud to announce support of its 100th Linux platform. With Oracle Enterprise Linux, Arkeia Software reiterates its leadership as the broadest supporter for open source operating systems and applications. In addition to Linux, Arkeia supports other open source operating systems including OpenSolaris and the BSD family.

Yesterday I finally received my ASUS Eee PC 901 pre-installed with Xandros Linux. Note that Xandros is a Debian-based distribution. I was really excited to start playing with this new toy. Almost from the beginning I was experiencing problems and after doing some Internet searching, I realized I was not the only one. All problems though were related to the operating system and not the hardware.