Showing all newswire headlines

September 24 is probably not going to be the best day to work at a patent office, considering that geeks the world over are being called upon to gather outside and protest against software patents. But do we need, and what else will be happening on, the World Day Against Software Patents?

I think I promised yesterday that all posts having to deal with Number Pools And Guaranteed Combinations Within Fixed Lists would have that string in their title, but, upon further reflection, it seems like it would make every title waaaay too long, and none of the parts would get indexed correctly, since Google might discard them as duplicate content based on the title tag

Money Manager Ex is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. It is also a great tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.

In my last article for Linux Journal's web edition, I discussed a web-based program that queried an SQL database and output a native Excel file. That article was based on a program I wrote for a customer some time ago. Today, I'm going to write about doing the exact opposite; today's program will accept an Excel spreadsheet, collect data from it, and make additions to an SQL database. This program is also based on a program I'm writing for a customer. In fact, I wrote both programs for the same customer.

With 90+ percent of my desktop computing conducted from within Firefox, and half the Internet services I use supplied by Google, the opportunity to test Google’s new 'Chrome' browser was irresistible. Here are my first impressions.

Google is getting into the browser game with its first beta release of Chrome. The long-rumored open source project is scheduled to become available to users in 100 countries Tuesday, starting a new battle for loyalty within the Internet Explorer and Firefox user bases. Chrome boasts a slew of features designed to improve stability and speed.

Some small businesses and start-ups are standardizing on Ubuntu Server Edition because it's a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 and 2008. The VAR Guy wonders: Could a bigger trend be coming? Here's the scoop.

Move over, Apple Macintosh and Windows Vista. Yooter, a marketing and advertising agency, has standardized instead on Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition, reports Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu. The server deployments are particularly interesting. Here are the details.

With the recent release of Microsoft's Hyper-V shaking up the hypervisor market, we decided to conduct a two-part evaluation pitting virtualization vendors against each other on performance as well as on features such as usability, management and migration. Microsoft and VMware accepted our invitation, but the open source virtualization vendors - Citrix (Xen) and Red Hat (Linux-based hypervisor) - were unable to participate because they are undergoing product revisions. That left us with a head-to-head matchup between Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware'smarket-leading ESX.

Novell SUSE Linux, installed on an HP 2133 Mini-Note PC, has scored a major distribution deal with a huge US retail chain. But the news isn't all good, according to The VAR Guy. Here is the scoop.

Finnix is a live CD distribution designed to assist system administrators in such tasks as system recovery and network monitoring. Based on Debian testing and Linux kernel 2.6, Finnix helps with filesystem and partition manipulation as well as with data recovery, installation of other operating systems, and boot record repair. Finnix works on both x86/AMD64 and PowerPC systems. The latest release, version 92.0, fixes the Debian SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) vulnerability that was present in previous releases.

Reading the Slashdot article about Dave Mitchell from Great Britain, who got a 47 pounds refund from Dell for returning his copy of Windows was an inspiration for me to check, if it is possible in Poland, too. This is my success story.

Many people see Google's new Chrome browser as big trouble for Firefox. Here's why Mozilla needn't be shaking in its boots - and why maybe Microsoft should.

Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a month-long celebration of the GNU Project's 25th anniversary with a video in which British actor and comedian Stephen Fry expresses his support for free software. The GNU Project, as most free software community members are aware, is a collection of free software projects whose creation is usually taken as marking the start of the free software movement. Today, GNU software makes up slightly less than 15% of the typical GNU/Linux distribution, according to Matt Lee, a campaigns manager at the FSF.

Juliet Kemp uses some Perl examples to demonstrate techniques for keeping all of your scripts, regardless of what language they are written in, understandable and useful. So that when you look at them six months later, you actually understand what you did, and they still work.

The head of South Africa’s government open source working group, the chief technical officer of the State IT Agency (Sita) and The Shuttleworth Foundation, have laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from it website.

This guide shows how you can install and use incron on a Debian Etch system. Incron is similar to cron, but instead of running commands based on time, it can trigger commands when file or directory events occur (e.g. a file modification, changes of permissions, etc.).

Linux-Magazine author Dmitri Popov is starting a brand new blog titled "Cooking the Productivity Sauce", offering tips for the productive use of open source applications. As a start he introduces the OutWit extension for web scrapping. But even better yet, OutWit allows you to save and export the scrapped data, which makes it a great research tool. The extension has the potential to turn your favorite browser into a powerful tool for extracting and organizing data, so he says.

Well Labor Day is here and gone again, and the footloose, fancy-free days of summer are over for another year. It may warrant the shedding of a small tear or two, but we here in the Linux community are fortunate to have so much uplifting and entertaining news these days to keep our spirits up.