Showing all newswire headlines

At times one really wonders why established Linux distributions such as Red Hat ever take the trouble to pursue the consumer desktop market. In the case of Red Hat, you tend to be even more puzzled that it considers doing so.

The Dutch NLnet foundation aims to financially support organisations and people that contribute to an open information society. Some time ago they decided to help KOffice in two exciting ways: to sponsor the design of a new logo for KOffice, with matching logo designs for all KOffice applications, and to sponsor Girish Ramakrishnan to improve the ODF support in KWord 2.0. The KOffice team is deeply grateful to NLnet for this support!

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit on April 9 at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

Microsoft has "dramatically" changed because of open-source software, the company's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft's mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.

At least three industry consortia are attempting to ease development efforts for mobile application builders with Linux-based, open mobile operating system development initiatives. These efforts carry noble and productive intentions. But if there are multiple ones, leaving one "open" platform to differ from the next, will we be back to where we started?

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from May 19th to May 21st.

I’ve been testing the latest release of Firefox since my last article, which discussed the areas Mozilla needed to work on. Overall, it looks and feels like the last release.

I never thought I would see the day when a hard drive manufacturer would go from indifferent to outright stupid all with one drive release. Apparently, it has happened.

In the last article, we talked about the new Zonbu notebook, what it features and a few of its benefits and drawbacks. However, we were far from done with our analysis, and with that, here’s part II of our Zonbu review that presents our verdict on the low cost Linux notebook.

Most people these days think of Everex as the company that’s looking to bring Linux-powered desktop PCs with their own brand of Linux to the masses.

Linux distributions have relied on the venerable Sendmail package since the early days of Slackware. But Sendmail's rich mail server features aren't an ideal solution for the typical desktop user whose primary mail support is delivered through a remote ISP. That's the perfect place for a simpler solution: sSMTP.

I wrote yesterday that RAND terms can be discriminatory, and that in fact due to the Microsoft OSP, OOXML is discriminatory against the GPL and Open Source licenses, despite being made available under RAND terms. Microsoft's Jason Matusow responded with a blog entry suggesting I need to bone up on standards and licenses. Why Microsoft folks can't be polite is a mystery to me, but I persist in responding with decency. He thought it would be helpful to hear from lawyers on the subject. So, I did some research for him, and I find that there are quite a number of lawyers who agree with me. So here you are, Jason: what is wrong with RAND from folks whose credentials you will respect.

At LugRadio Live this past weekend, Novell developer Miguel de Icaza gave a presentation on Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight web framework. During the presentation, he described the current status of Moonlight and showed some of the ways that it can be used to create richer applications for the Linux desktop.

Red Hat has recently announced that they have "No plans for a traditional consumer desktop". Let me explain why I think Red Hat needs to change their business strategy. First, a short history lesson. Before the arrival of Windows NT Server, Novell Netware claimed 90% of the market for PC based servers. However, Netware made a near fatal mistake when they did not provide a GUI interface soon enough. So server administrators became familiar with Windows 95 on their desktop, and they naturally preferred Windows NT 4.0 which included the same interface.

It’s funny how some people react when I tell them I use Linux. Sometimes they express the sentiment that I must be very computer savvy. Other’s get caught up in all the brand loyalty hype and still some have never heard of Linux! I kid you not! The truth of the matter is that I switched partly because Windows no longer offered me any challenges and reliability became an issue. The most common question I get asked whenever I present a public speaking seminar is “Why did you switch to Linux?”Well… for all those who asked, here’s the long winded answer.

Novell carries on assisting Microsoft's fight against a member of the Linux Foundation (Adobe) by promoting an anti-Linux, anti-GPL Silverlight

Google has released Picasa version 2.7 for Linux, which promises many of the same improvements of the PC version, including (drum roll, please) uploading and downloading from Picasa Web Albums.

In many ways the Debian GNU/Linux project is unique among all the distributions that dot the Linux landscape. Apart from putting out a high-grade distribution, it has served as the base for a number of others - Ubuntu and Knoppix, to name just two - which have had a big impact on the growth of the Linux ecosystem. A few days back, the project concluded its elections for the year and Steve McIntyre emerged as the victor in a three-cornered contest. McIntyre may well be the most watched elected official of a non-profit group - the direction the project takes is of vital concern to a great many businesses. He was quick off the blocks when approached for an interview; his prose was clear and concise, his reactions swift.

There's patching work ahead for users of alternative browsers. Mozilla updated its Firefox web browser on Wednesday in response to the discovery of a vulnerability involving its Javascript Garbage Collector function. The security bug means that memory corruption might be caused through specially-crafted Javascript code. Successful exploitation creates a means to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems.

Despite their prominent position in the world as leaders of technology, we hear from oriental countries quite rarely in the free software world. To find out what happens to KDE in the East, we asked some questions to Daisuke Kameda (亀田 大輔) of the KDE Japan Users Group.