Showing all newswire headlines

Infragistics is today expected to open an online community for creating and storing patterns to build rich interfaces using Microsoft and other technologies. Called Quince, this is a free patterns catalogue and "community resource" to help those building user interfaces, from the look and feel through to the workflow. You will be able to search templates, get updates via RSS, rate patterns, and submit patterns using a pre-designed template that outlines important information you should include.

Asus is taking pre-orders for a netbook based on Intel's second-generation netbook platform, the secret-shrouded N280/GN40 chipset. Early product specs confirm that the second wave of netbooks are likely to offer faster graphics and lower power use, along with room for much, much larger batteries.

Much of the reader feedback to "Why Windows Must Go Open Source" is saying, "No way." But part of my hypothesis is the fact that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) as a developer culture is much less averse to such a move than Microsoft as a business culture. Consider the Windows Template Library, code that's now part of Google's browser, Chrome. Microsoft's Windows Template Library is a light version of Windows Foundation Classes, which provide an efficient way for calling user interface services out of the Windows API set. A browser needs to make use of certain Windows functions for its own operations to succeed as a window on the Web. WTL makes those services available.

I was browsing around my local Carphone Warehouse shop last week. Unlike the last time I crossed their threshold (November) I noticed that their Ubuntu netbook display had vanished. There was only one netbook on display and it was advertised as running Windows XP. Their website also advertised the Asus EeePC with Windows XP too. I approached a sales person to ask about a GNU/Linux option on the Elonex and was informed that they no longer stocked them. What when wrong? Read the details of the inquest at Freesoftware Magazine.

SugarCRM has fundamentally overhauled the web services framework and has now added a REST (Representational State Transfer) interface that will allow for easier development of the services based upon Sugar data. Another new feature is a CSS based themes framework, which will allow developers to create new themes, without writing any code. The new Mobile Studio Editor will help to optimise SugarCRM for mobile devices with pre-built layouts and views for specific mobile use.

Ben Kepes at Cloud Ave. offers some interesting analysis of a question Yuuguu CEO Anish Kapoor recently tackled on his company's blog: Has software as a service (SaaS) killed open source as a business model? The question raised, of course, is why these concepts are at odds at all -- why are they mutually exclusive? They aren't, per se (SaaS companies can -- and do -- offer their code under open licenses), but Kapoor imagines that for some companies, SaaS takes a bit of the shine from open source. Kepes counters that while this might be the case, SaaS has a fair bit to gain from the open source model.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and said to yourself, “today is the day that I'm finally going to backup my workstation!” only to find out that you're a day late and about 320Gb short? Well, that's about what happened to me recently, but don't worry, the story has a happy ending. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

Bruce Byfield reports that Linus Torvalds may have switched too soon from the KDE 4 desktop because of usability problems. Less than a week after he made his off-hand comments, KDE 4.2 has been released, adding many of the customization settings that Torvalds and others complained were lacking in the KDE 4 series.

A great deal is being made of the fact that Linux creator Linus Torvalds has switched from using the KDE desktop to using GNOME, something he did many months ago, and something he mentioned in passing during an interview last month. Microsoft TechNetWhat New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 The latest person apparently trying to cash in on the seemingly eternal mine-is-better-than-yours angle of the two desktop environments is the usually sober Glynn Moody, with the opinion that Torvalds may have switched too soon, before KDE 4 became more usable and revealed why it is a much better environment than GNOME.

The Linux blogs were feeling the love a bit early this week, perhaps in preparation for Valentine's Day. Much of the discussion centered on how to support those who are new to the Linux experience, and how to help them break out of the "Windows mindset."

Two Microsoft Business Solutions veterans have joined Openbravo, a fast-growing provider of open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point of sale (POS) software. The moves signal growing momentum for business-centric open source applications. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Landon Fuller has released a beta of Plausible CrashReporter (plcrashreporter), for the iPhone to simplify the process of getting crash reports from users. Currently, to get a crash report, a developer has to ask the user to sync their iPhone, look on the hard disk for the correct crash log and then get the user to send it to them. With Fuller's solution, an in process signal handler catches the crash and writes a crash report. When the application is run again, it can check for a crash report and submit the report via a HTTP server, an email, or store it locally.

This guide shows how you can create USB startup disks (on your USB flash drive) from various Linux distributions with UNetbootin. This is useful if you want to install a Linux distribution on a computer that has no CD/DVD drive.

When I first heard about the project of porting KDE on windows I was very skeptical of the reason behind it but not so much of the viability of such a project since Trolltech decided to release the Qt 4 license under GPL for the windows version. KDE on windows is an audacious project aimed at porting all KDE applications on MS Windows natively. KDE also has a similar project for Mac OSX.

Much has been written about how Linux is an optimal OS for a lightweight netbook. And netbooks themselves are on a tear: ABI Research is projecting that 35 million will be shipped in 2009, and estimates that number to increase to a stunning 139 million by 2013—not bad for a category of PC that no one heard of 18 months ago. But some buyers of Linux netbooks are running into trouble. MSI’s recent return rates – four times that of Windows XP models – and the recent controversial story of a woman who couldn’t do required classwork because she couldn’t run required software on her Linux netbook indicate that, at the very least, there’s a learning curve for the average user.

The Midnight Commander file manager developers have restarted work on the, once quite popular, file manager for the Linux/Unix console. Midnight Commander was inspired by the famous Norton Commander for DOS. In recent years, there had been no development at all, but now a "Bugfix Release" 4.6.2 has been made available. The new release, as the tag suggests, contains no new features.

The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems.

Since it's nigh on impossible to produce accurate figures of operating system usage, we have to make do with figures that provide a rough estimate, at best. One such set of statistics are the figures from Net Applications, which tracks the 160 monthly visitors to its hosted websites. The latest figures from January 2009 have been published, and they show that the rise of Mac OS X continues, as well as that of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 did quite well too.

Obama's inauguration must have brought out the optimist in tech journalists. In the last week, Ron Miller and Charles Babcock have written to implore Microsoft to open source Windows. While inspired and with some solid reasoning, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Here's why. As much as I believe in open source, I don't think it's realistic to expect Microsoft to change course so quickly or drastically, even though Vista has been a pretty big mess for the company. (I would, however, be happy to be proved wrong on this front.)

Debian developers are planning to release their latest OS offering - called Lenny - on February 14. Debian developers are planning to release Lenny, the latest version of the operating system, on February 14. The team issued a second release candidate