Showing all newswire headlines

If you need a free Web development environment, look no further than Eclipse. The JavaScript Development Toolkit (JSDT) is an open source plug-in that brings robust JavaScript programming tools to Eclipse. JSDT streamlines development, simplifies code, and increases productivity for pure JavaScript source files and JavaScript embedded in HTML.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit held on April 8-10 in Austin, Texas, may have been invitation only, but fortunately the LF has posted videos for the rest of us. The videos include keynotes from Red Hat and Sun/MYSQL, and a panel on Linux PCs.

SIMchronise, a mobile technologies company based in the United Kingdom, recently launched a mobile data backup service called PhoneBackup.eu that is built on the Open Mobile Alliance's Data Synchronization and Device Management standard (a.k.a. SyncML). SIMchronise principal Philippe Joly says that with the "high number of device models and manufacturers" of wireless phones, open standards make it easier for companies to provide data synchronization services.

After all the heat Psystar took in the blogosphere for its erstwhile Macintosh clone -- a commodity box that can run OS X -- many said the company was either a sham or about to fade quickly away. Well, in recent days, the company has begun offering its own Mac updates for Psystar Hackintosh users, pledges more surprises in the future and is also offering a pretty nice $299 computer called the OpenLite that runs many versions of Linux and has pretty nice specs for the price. While they used to preinstall only Ubuntu, the most recent announcement has them also willing to install CentOS and Fedora for those who want them.

OpenSolaris 2008.05 refused to do just about anything on every computer I've tried, but the OpenSolaris-based MilaX runs like the proverbial wind on most of those boxes. So I figured it was time to try BeleniX, another project that brings a GUI and live-CD environment to OpenSolaris.

As the clock ticks down, the appeals are piling up objecting to OOXML's approval by ISO/IEC. The latest appeal was sent today by Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), the National Body representing Brazil, and a trusted source has sent me a copy (other knowledgeable sources tell me that as many as two additional appeals are likely to be filed before the clock runs out). Brazil's appeal objects to some of the same issues raised by South Africa, but also includes a laundry list of actions and inactions at the BRM that have also been well-aired in blog posts by BRM participants, including refusals to hear a proposal urged by Brazil, poor decisions based not on good results but on expediency, and much more.

KeyTouch is an application designed to allow you to make full use of all the special function keys on your keyboard, whether the hardware supports Linux or not. It's a great idea, especially with all the multimedia applications that come standard with today's PCs. But as is often the case, the devil is in the implementation details. Marvin Raaijmakers wrote the first version of KeyTouch in 2004, after finding he could not configure the extra function keys on a new keyboard he had just bought. Today, KeyTouch is included in most modern distributions (Mandriva, openSUSE, Fedora, and Ubuntu, to name a few) and the project is actively seeking packagers for other distributions.

Everyone knows the drama of Microsoft and Yahoo. Or at least, most know the most recent developments, as the series' beginning at the end of January has been so long-running and drawn out that many have put the early developments out of mind. When DailyTech last reported on the ongoing drama, billionaire Icahn was preparing his board ouster with the help of potential future board member and vocal billionaire blogger Mark Cuban. Microsoft said that it didn't want Yahoo, when Yahoo expressed fresh interest, but it softened a bit and applied for FTC approval of buying a portion of Yahoo stock to help Icahn, a pro-merger enthusiast, succeed in his takeover bid.

In this article by Chang Sau Sheong, we learn how to create a Job Board Mashup Application using Ruby on Rails and Facebook. This application allows the user to perform some functions and features of a job board. Through this article, we will be able to acquire candidates through Facebook and search for jobs.

In this final installment to the series I'll double your reading pleasure by presenting two new Linux softsynths. Such a deal, two reviews for the price of one! When I wrote my article on the LinuxSampler Project I noted the distinction between a performance sampler and a studio sampler. It occurs to me now that the same distinction should be made with regards to synthesizers. The synthesizers profiled in this review are best considered as performance synths, so let's see what makes the difference.

Mandriva 2008 Spring Powerpack is a great, easy Linux OS to use. Mandiva's subscription service is a bonus and worth the money. Just a few less coffees a year and you too can get on board with Mandriva!

Goldfarb represented that anyone can use Moonlight: "Moonlight is usable for anyone on any distribution of Linux (redhat, ubuntu, etc.) -- it is not limited just to Novell as Mono is." And he linked to the covenant, saying it "applies to all downstream recepients of the software." Is that true?

[This relates to the discussion here. Inflammatory headline by me! -TC]

Earlier this month Novell quietly released Moonlight -- a Linux client for Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Silverlight is a .Net-based cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for delivering rich media to the Internet. In a nutshell, it is Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash. To use Moonlight you need to make sure you have all of the current Mono packages installed. Ubuntu and Fedora come ready out of the box. On other distributions, check the package manager. You can also compile Mono from source.

Developers in the Debian project had a busy week cleaning up after the openssl vulnerability was disclosed. Once that was taken care of, they moved on to process-related issues. Clearly, some shortcomings in how Debian handles patches to the programs it ships have been revealed; now the project would like to face those problems and make things work better in the future. The resulting discussion shows Debian at its introspective best, and may well have results that other distributors will want to pay attention to. As a Fedora developer noted: "This bug could easily have been us on the receiving end." All distributors make changes to their packages, so all of them are potentially exposed to this kind of failure.

Last month Mandriva announced its latest Spring edition. Despite a few minor glitches, after several weeks of testing the two Mandriva flavors, I have finally come across a distro that gives you the best of the GNU/Linux and proprietary worlds in terms of ease of use, range of software, and stability on hardware that ranges from old Celerons to newer multi-core machines.

Mozilla's Screaming Monkey offers hope to developers who are frustrated by Internet Explorer's slow speed and skeptical of Microsoft's commitment to internet standards. So say representatives from Google and the Ajaxian community, in a joint presentation at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. According to the pitch, Mozilla's yet-to-finish Screaming Monkey will juice AJAX applications and guarantee that developers can use web standards for rich internet applications with Microsoft's browser. The Screaming Monkey project began almost a year ago to have the ECMAScript-4-compliant Tamarin virtual machine plug-in to IE.

Unfortunately because of space constraints in a liveCD, you can’t squeeze all those ‘nice to have’ packages into one spot, so you have to download and setup xVM manually. A few things are broken, too so some minor tweaking is required. Here’s a list of steps required to get xVM setup as a Dom0 in OpenSolaris

Hello to all, my name is jeinner campos, i am from Managua, Nicaragua, i am new at the linux world but i use Mandriva, why? JUST BECAUSE IS THE BEST DISTRO I HAVE TRIED!!! Now, in my country, there are linux groups, SUSE, UBUNTU, FEDORA, DEBIAN and when i went to an install fest, i didnt see any MANDRIVA TEAM... so i say... I GOTTA DO SOMETHING. I got in contact with the linux comunity in my country and i started a project, of a mandriva group. now we have the Mandriva Nicaragua website.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan said the company's long-awaited operating system of the future will center around the Internet, and be distinct from the familiar Palm OS that's currently available. Palm has been somewhat tight-lipped about the future of its operating system development, but Colligan gave an interview to APC in which he described the "Nova" OS as a "next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications." Nova will be based on a Linux core and is scheduled to arrive next year.

Fotox comes with a small but useful feature set, including red-eye repair, sharpen, bend, stretch, noise reduction, cropping, and resize. It only supports the JPEG format. It fills a neglected niche in Linux photo editing, and that is an easy-to-use photo editor that includes the most commonly-used functions. It also comes with two useful features that a lot of bigger image editors don't have: panorama and HDR.