Showing all newswire headlines

Learn how Team Integrator for Eclipse-Based Tools enables collaboration between developers using different tools. This package provides team integration for business process management, an exemplar implementation of the package, and projects built using WebSphere Business Modeler and Websphere Integration Developer.

After a few instances where the keyboard and mouse locked up in Ubuntu 8.04 on the $0 Laptop, I decided to write my weekly column for the Daily News' Tech Talk space entirely in Ubuntu. I've got about 10 Firefox windows open, I'm switching between them madly, doing searches, writing and generally beating the hell out of the keyboard and touchpad (I didn't connect the USB mouse today). No crashes, no freezes. Nothing but trouble-free computing.

There was clearly a transaction of money made by Microsoft in Norway, which passed it on to ISO. Good catch. Watch the picture inside this page and recall our old entry about soft briberies.

BIOSLEVEL.com reviews Sapphire's take on AMD's new 780G chipset. The board proves to be surprisingly powerful in Linux, particularly the onboard ATI graphics.

While some people will want to use the ASUS Eee PC for work, a little entertainment never hurts, and that includes games. These tips are designed for people new to Linux, with Xandros the default operating system found on many 2 GB and 4 GB models. Read on for how to add games to the ASUS Eee PC.

Man pages are excellent resources for learning the specifics of a Linux command. After all, who can remember all the nitty gritty of a command? One annoyance of reading man pages on some Linux distributions is that after you quit reading it, the contents are cleared off screen. The man page contents simply don't stay around after you quit man. If that happens to you, it means that the default pager for viewing man pages is the less command.

What's the next best thing for Linux users who can't attend an open source community conference in person? Online workshops like last week's Ubuntu Open Week, where upwards of 300 participants per session showed up to learn more about the popular Linux distribution, the community, and its teams. Organizers presented more than 40 events in a dedicated IRC channel over the course of six days. Session leaders spoke to the group in the "Ubuntu classroom" while a second channel was devoted to collecting questions from the group. This kept the learning channel free of chatter and allowed the speaker to proceed without interruption.

There are few people who would deny that autoconf, automake and libtool have revolutionized the free software world. While there are many thousands of Autotools advocates, some developers absolutely hate the Autotools, with a passion. Why? Let me try to explain with an analogy.

In our article earlier this week looking at the status of X.Org 7.4, one of the features originally planned for integration in this X Server release was MPX, or Multi-Pointer X. While it's been in development for over two years and has been at an experimental state, it's been featured in popular YouTube videos as this is the technology on Linux that allows multiple keyboards and mice to be attached to a single system and MPX allows these input devices to function independently on the same windowing system. For those of you interested in this desktop technology, it's been announced that MPX will finally be merged into the mainline X.Org tree later this month.

Todd Fast, chief architect in Sun Microsystems' Java Enterprise tools group, took a big gulp of Web 2.0 Kool-Aid at JavaOne while telling professional developers they must embrace a broader definition of "application" if they are to take advantage of the current sea change in the way software is built and delivered. Fast told a packed session - Applications for the masses by the masses: why engineers are an endangered species - the application development model is changing, opening up to a broader audience, thanks to new tools and platforms that support non-engineers, or "casual developers."

In this opening salvo, I will reprise the technical terms and history of DRM and thereafter I will try to keep you abreast of the issues for computer users in general and free software in particular. Hopefully, I will in fact be chronicling the death throws of DRM. Read more at the FSM website.

For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development. A few months ago, Gilbert Ashley, the author of src2pkg (Slackware's "magic package maker") invited me and two other people to help him manage the user documentation for his program. The process we used to create the src2pkg wiki may be a useful example for other free and open source software (FOSS) application developers.

A new release of Sun's xVM VirtualBox provides Macintosh users with a fresh virtual machine option, and delivers improvements for other host operating systems. Available for various Linux distributions including Debian, Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu as well as Solaris, Mac OS X on Intel and Windows, xVM VirtualBox allows "practically any x86 based OS" to run as a guest. The main exception is Mac OS X, but Apple's licence only permits Mac OS X Server to be used as a guest operating system (not the regular desktop version), and even then only when the host operating system is Mac OS X Server and the hardware is Apple-labeled.

This document describes how to set up and use Sabayon on Fedora 8. Taken from the Sabayon page: "Sabayon is a system administration tool to manage GNOME desktop settings. Sabayon provides a sane way to edit GConf defaults and GConf mandatory keys: the same way you edit your desktop. Sabayon launches profiles in an Xnest window. Any changes you make in the Xnest window are saved back to the profile file, which can then be applied to user's accounts."

Sun Microsystems has backtracked on previous plans to release important backup features for its MySQL database under a proprietary license, following widespread criticism from the open source community. "MySQL Server is and will always remain fully functional and open source," said Kaj Arno, MySQL's vice president of community relations, in a statement released on his Web site on Wednedsday. "So will the MySQL Connectors, and so will the main storage engines we ship."

The company Los Alamos Computers is now offering systems preinstalled with gNewSense, the fully free GNU/Linux operating system distribution. We often get asked where people can buy complete systems with GNU/Linux preinstalled on them. People want to avoid paying the Microsoft tax, but they do want the convenience of their operating system already being installed and working with all the hardware they're paying for. While large vendors like Dell and Lenovo have made commendable steps toward offering systems preinstalled with GNU/Linux, they have stopped short of offering fully free distributions as an option.

In this video an Italian TV program, NeaPòlis, talks about ubuntu as a very stable, high performance and easy to install operative system.

[I normally don't post links to videos but I thought this one worth it because of it being on mainstream Italian Television. - Scott]

This paper surveys Linux's suitability for use by owners of very small businesses and the self-employed. It was written by Howard Fosdick, a self-employed database consultant who finds Linux fairly well-suited to his needs, and reckons it has saved him thousands of dollars in recent years.

I'm out at JavaOne in San Francisco this week and one discussion I've heard popping up with some regularity is, "Do we need to do something to protect open source in a cloud computing world?" I've written about aspects of this topic at length previously. However, given that this is an area that is buzzing up a bit, I thought it would be useful to boil down the key issues and give my personal take.

A senior Debian developer, Australian Anthony Towns, has left some core teams of the project and gone quiet in the last couple of weeks, according to project sources. Towns made an oblique reference to his decision on April 18 with an entry in his personal blog which read, in part: "One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don’t you know), reality these days seems to be otherwise."