Showing all newswire headlines

In the following story I will explain you how I made to work my laptop with Fedora. No, not my opinion or expectations of it but how I made it to work, what were my difficulties and how I solved them. At the previous part of the article I talked about the perfect symbiosis of my new laptop and Fedora. Yes and no. Of course I am surprised and excited of the work and I really expected more troubles but there is a lot more to be done.

Bad standards and standard wars are an all too common part of modern information technology. Now, IBM has announced that it's not going to put up with them anymore. And, yes, Microsoft, IBM is looking at you. In a statement, Ari Fishkind, public affairs manager for IBM Research's Development and Intellectual Property section, says that "IBM is announcing a new corporate policy governing its participation in the technology standards community. As members of that community, we are formalizing a commitment to behave in a progressive and transparent way as we promote open, high quality standards."

In her ROSE blog Linux Pro Magazine editor Rikki Kite reports about a discussion on the Ubuntu women mailing list. Some women are bugged by the phrase "Ubuntero", which led to bug report 27826. It seems Mark Shuttleworth thinks it's worth changing the name for Ubuntu activists to something gender neutral.

HP and Oracle are teaming up to release the HP Oracle Database Machine. The HP Oracle Database Machine has some analysts predicting that Oracle will disrupt the data warehouse market, as Oracle issues a direct challenge to data warehouse leaders like Teradata. Not too long ago, Microsoft sought to shake up the data warehousing market with the purchase of DATAllegro. Not to be outdone, Oracle jumped into the fray at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. But instead of an acquisition, Oracle pulled the covers off a project three years in the making—the HP Oracle Database Machine..

[So let me get this straight, Oracle is making hardware? Oracle entering the hardware business with or without HP's help; is a major move for them and the market. - Scott]

Yesterday, IBM announced a new "I.T.Standards Policy," calling for (among other things) more transparency, openness and inclusiveness in the standards development process, and for the use by standards organizations of fewer, clearer and more open-source friendly intellectual property rights policies. IBM also disclosed the wide-ranging, and in some cases radical, recommendations offered by 70 standards experts from around the world. These recommendations are intended to raise the bar in standards development. But will anyone fall in line behind it?

While the top brass at Sun Microsystems might seem to be clueless about the company sometimes, there are plenty of people who know where the bread gets buttered - or doesn't. They know that Solaris and the servers that run it are what really matter at Sun. And that means Sun's OpenSolaris project and its related Solaris commercial distribution are still the key to success or failure for Sun Microsystems.

FreeIPA has existed for some time as RHE IPA for Red Hat Linux and has been added into Fedora. Still, since it is an extra add-on to RHEL, CentOS has not gotten it rebuilt yet. That is a shame because FreeIPA is an easy to configure, easy to manage security information management solution. If, like me, you want to use IPA with CentOS, this tutorial is for you.

Life-saving scientific research is being stifled by a "broken" patent system, according to a new report. "Blocking patents" are delaying advances in cancer medicine and food crops, says the Canada-based Innovation Partnership, a non-profit consultancy. The full benefits of synthetic biology and nanotechnology will not be realised without urgent reforms to encourage sharing of information, they say.

The K-12 Open Minds Conference is the first of its kind - an International event specifically for K-12 educators designed to make OPEN SOURCE software and OPEN SYSTEMS more available and easier to use. Last year's conference was a huge success and paved the way for an even more exciting conference this year!

Novell is getting into network access control via an OEM agreement with StillSecure that initially provides a stand-alone product but also includes plans to ensure that software works well with Novell’s ZENworks configuration management. Called ZENworks Network Access Control, the Linux package is based on StillSecure’s Safe Access, and can be downloaded from Novell’s site for use on customer-provided server hardware. (Compare client management products.)

In June, updates on two browsers were released: Firefox version 3 and Flock version 2 beta. Those in the know are already aware that the Flock browser was built with Firefox 3 code as its foundation. So here are some specifics for those who deal with requests from patrons for alternative browsers on library laptops or desktops or who may want a better understanding of the differences between Firefox and Flock.

Within 48 hours of launching at the start of September, the Google Chrome open source browser managed to carve itself a pretty impressive one percent share of the global web browser market. That honeymoon period would appear to be over as we approach the end of the month and the market share starts to plummet...

Ziproxy is Web proxy server, but rather than cache content the way Web proxies like Squid do, it's designed to compress the content that it fetches from the Web before forwarding it to the Web client. It can be useful for serving mobile devices like handheld Internet tablets that cannot take full advantage of high-resolution, high-quality images, or where the browser client is running over a mobile data plan where speed is low and bytes are expensive.

How to rescue your friend's Windows box using LinuxDefender Live ;) Did I actually mention Windows and NTFS in the title of this post? It's a good thing I managed to squeeze a little "Linux" in there or I'd commit myself to the nearest convalescent home immediately ;) Actually, though, if the title is a bit off-putting, this post is all about freeware Linux and how to use it to fix NTFS partitions if you need to.

T-Mobile introduced the first Google Phone, the HTC-made G1, Tuesday morning at Guastavino's, a cavernous banquet and wedding space on New York City's Upper East Side. We were there to record the event, capturing 23 pictures with our iPhone.

To a lot of people, Ubuntu represents the most end-user-friendly nongeek-compatible Linux distribution. But there are other commercial distributions that work even harder to create a desktop experience that is, frankly, Windows-like. The two most well-known of these are Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows). Since Xandros recently acquired Linspire, that leaves it pretty much in sole possession of that segment of the marketplace. Xandros tries to set itself apart from the majority of popular distributions in two ways. First, by making the installation and administration procedure as simple as -- or simpler than -- the best free distributions. Second, by integrating commercial software offerings into its package management system.

Network access control (NAC) aims to unify endpoint security, system authentication, and security enforcement in a more intelligent network access solution than simple firewalls. NAC ensures that every workstation accessing the network conforms to a security policy and can take remedial actions on workstations if necessary. For example, NACs can check if a workstation has antivirus software installed and, if not, NAC will limit the workstation's access to the network. In some cases, if NAC is capable of remedial measures, it can force-install an antivirus program on the workstation so that it will conform to the security policy. Although NAC can improve the security of your environment, most commercial NACs cost several thousand dollars. However, using NAC does not need to be that expensive. PacketFence, a free open source NAC application, gives you the security of NAC for free.

In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're putting the newest release of the popular Ubuntu distribution through its paces.

Almost every laptop on sale today comes equipped with the Kensington security slot on the side or back, through which you can connect a theft-deterring locked steel cable. The system's down sides are (a) that a would-be thief can damage or destroy your equipment trying to yank the cable out, and (b) that you have to buy the cable separately. As an alternative, the free software utility Adeona won't preemptively deter theft, but it will help you track down your stolen equipment and better the chances of its recovery by police.

The Linux Plumbers Conference may have ended last Friday, but the discussions -- and one discussion in particular -- will be analyzed, deconstructed, and argued for quite a bit longer. Greg Kroah-Hartman's assertion is that Canonical doesn't contribute significantly to kernel development and the packages that make up the core of a Linux system. Canonical CTO Matt Zimmerman responded to this assertion. It seems at that point, much of the community, developers and users alike, took to examining their particular parts of the open source elephant.