Showing all newswire headlines

A Harvard study appearing in Health Affairs confirms what this Linux Medical News editorial entitled "RHIO's and the Illusion of Health IT Success" predicted in 2005:"...Electronic clinical data exchange promises substantial financial and societal benefits, but it is unclear whether and when it will become widespread. In early 2007 we surveyed 145 regional health information organizations (RHIOs), the U.S. entities working to establish data exchange. Nearly one in four was likely defunct. Only twenty efforts were of at least modest size and exchanging clinical data..." The 2005 Linux Medical News editorial gives hints as to why this might be. Kudos to the Harvard researchers for doing the heavy lifting.

Paldo Linux is a cross between a source-based and binary distribution. It installs as a binary system to provide a quick and easy desktop. Once it's running, users can either build packages from source as they would with Gentoo, or install binary packages, as is common with Debian, openSUSE, or Mandriva. Paldo's main features are an easy hard drive installer, GNOME desktop environment, and Upkg package management system. Stable version 1.12 was released last month. I found it to be one of the more interesting and promising distros to come along in a long time.

The GNOME Foundation is charged with several tasks, including serving as the official voice of the project, coordinating releases, deciding which projects fit under the GNOME umbrella, supporting events, and more. Once a year, a board of directors is chosen by the Foundation's members. This time around, there are ten candidates running for the seven available positions. This election may seem like another boring bureaucratic exercise, but its results are important: GNOME is the desktop used by a great many free software users, and it is the platform supported by the Free Software Foundation.

Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product. On Monday, Red Hat officially released JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS), based on the Exadel product as a 100 percent open source IDE (define). The new Eclipse based IDE offering from Red Hat's JBoss division will provide a development environment that will work on both Windows and Linux for Java middleware solutions from JBoss.

After releasing the multicore, multithreaded chip earlier this year, Sun plans to release the UltraSPARC T2's source code to the open-source community.

GNU Project and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman posted a message on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list titled, "real men don't attack straw men", suggesting that some comments he had made were being misrepresented. He noted, "one question particularly relevant for this list is why I don't recommend OpenBSD. It is not about what the system allows. (Any general purpose system allows doing anything at all.) It is about what the system suggests to the user." He went on to note that though he knew of no non-free software included in the base OpenBSD system, there was non-free software distributed via the ports collection, "if a collection of software contains (or suggests installation of) some non-free program, I do not recommend it."

Sometimes when I run ls to get a directory listing, I am looking for a specific file, but I want to see the whole context where the file resides. While you can pipe the output of ls to grep, that doesn't show you the whole directory with the matched files highlighted in a different color. I create a small script to do just what I want.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I will show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses.

CNN reports that "switching from a Windows-operated computer to a Linux-operated one could slash computer-generated e-waste levels by 50%." It's no longer about software freedom. It's also about environmental responsibility.

[ Indeed, green probably will be a marketing point for Linux in the future. It's one of the most important point Zonbu is using for selling their harddisk-less PC - hkwint ]

Thanks to a Filipino organisation, open source software is once again stepping in to help humanity with the release of a toolkit to assist human rights organisations in monitoring human rights violations.

In the past, I have been particularly hard on KINO and its choice of UI schemes. However, one thing I really appreciate is despite KDENLive 0.4 and 0.5/0.6 crashes and other mindless anomalies, it works.

On November 19, 2007, we sent a second letter to IBM where we insisted on implementing the stipulations contained in this petition because we believe that OS/2 is an important part of the history of the Operating System, and furthermore, it still contains values that the computer science field considers unique.

I just finished taking the latest version of Puppy Linux for a spin and was planning on doing a review. However, considering this was on my notebook, that meant connecting to the Internet, preferably via wireless.

Everex plans to introduce a competitor to Asus's Eee PC at the beginning of next year. The laptop will run the gOS, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, cost $400, and have a 7" screen that might even be a touch screen eventually.

This article provides guidance to DCE or DFS users who are migrating from DCE or DFS to Kerberos/NFS V4. During the transition period, these users need to be authenticated and authorized to use both DFS and NFS V4 directories. This article answers some basic questions, such as, "Can the DCE authentication server be used as a Kerberos server for NFS V4 with a Kerberos client?"

For months, I've been trying to get Microsoft to answer a few questions about the Unix technologies in its intellectual property portfolio. Microsoft agreed to an interview, then backed out. So the question remains: How much Unix code does Microsoft have its hands on?

Join the grassroots campaign to raise the awareness of all elected officials in Ontario!

We discovered back in September when running the Razer Barracuda AC-1 with ALSA 1.0.15 that this sound card was quite problematic with the initial CMI8788 ALSA driver. However, last month we reported that the driver was being rewritten from scratch with a much brighter outlook. We have retested the Barracuda AC-1 with its C-Media CMI8788 Oxygen APU using the latest snd-oxygen driver, which also works with other high-end sound cards such as the ASUS Xonar and Auzentech X-Meridian.

Discover an ontology toolkit for storage, manipulation, query, and inference of ontologies and corresponding instances. IBM Integrated Ontology Development Toolkit includes EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) Ontolgy Definition Metamodel, and an OWL Ontology Repository (named SOR).

It's good news, bad news situation when it comes to Adobe's new Flash player for Linux. On the plus side, Adobe Flash Player 9 Update 3, version identifier 9.0.115.0 was made available for Linux at the same time as Mac and Windows versions. It's nice to see Linux not being treated as the little brother who only gets the older, hand-me down programs by a major software vendor. An even bigger win for Flash Player users, regardless of their operating system, is that its supports H.264.