Showing all newswire headlines

Apple has fired a cease and desist order against the developers behind the open-source Hymn Project. Hymn develops software that strips Apple's FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) technology from user's iTunes purchases, allowing music fans to play their music on devices other than those from Apple. iTunes customers can legitimately lose FairPlay DRM in order to play their music on other devices by burning a CD of their songs, and ripping that CD into a different format.

The Renoise Team is pleased to announce the first ever public Renoise demo for Linux. As a Linux user you may come to appreciate Renoise’s hands-on and fundamental approach to music production. For those on other platforms, now is the chance to experience Renoise on the operating system that has become famous for its flexibility and stability.

Red Hat has revamped its strategy here to work more closely with partners, both local and global, putting more resources to focus on Thailand. Thailand is one of the ASEAN countries with the highest potential for Red Hat which, along with its partners, will develop more applications on top of both Linux and its JBoss enterprise middleware suite, according to Teong Eng Guan, Red Hat's general manager for ASEAN countries.

Thanks to the colleagues at credativ for this nice romper suit.

[Note: It's a Debian baby! -- Steven]

"The job is to remove obstacles in the way of the community," says Paul W. Frields, speaking about his new position as Fedora Chair. After only a few weeks in the position, Frields is still learning his way around and getting to know his colleagues, but already this vision is a common refrain in his comments, underlying all his comments about what he hopes the Fedora project will achieve while he is coordinating its efforts.

Adobe Systems has confirmed it will help sponsor the work of the SQLite database project, joining a new consortium alongside Mozilla and Symbian. SQLite, which is an embedded SQL database engine with core source code in the public domain, has been built into the firm's newly released Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software.

kFlickr is a standalone Flickr uploader for KDE. It allows for easy upload of photos with drag and drop from other applications (Konqueror). This tutorial describes how to configure KFlickr and to start publishing your photos.

One of the leading PHP experts is the Netherlands-based Ivo Jansch, Technical Director and CTO of the specialist PHP and Zend company Ibuildings. Here he talks here about his initial scepticism when confronted with open source, what he views as the strengths – and weaknesses – of PHP, and how he would like to see it evolve.

I was already mourning the destruction of my Saturday, thanks to some blown deadlines, and was resigned to spending at least part of the day working. Then I made a fatal error: I read my email. There were two messages from readers that said, in essence, another article about RAID 5 was about as interesting as yet another fawning review of Ubuntu Retching Rabbit or Pooping Penguin or whatever the newest coolest release is, and RAID 5 has some serious flaws anyway, and if I really wanted to be hip and helpful I would write about RAID 10.

digiKam 0.10 is not only a port of the application to KDE 4. It also brings a few new features, including 'Timeline' applet. PolishLinux.org has a screenshot tour.

Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs). The news was slipped out on the Emacs developers' forum and Stallman explained his reasons in a later interview.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2008.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphic that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems, and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Instant messaging helps us connect with people online in real time. Many Linux users IM with either Pidgin (formerly Gaim) or Kopete, two applications that handle multiple IM protocols. Here are three alternatives to the top names that each focus on one of the major IM protocols, and offer some pretty cool options.

This report is an update to the risk report published in Red Hat Magazine in April 2007. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first three years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimize the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped.

OpenProj 1.0 was recently released by Projity, which offers a related commercial product called Project-On-Demand. OpenProj is written in Java and licensed under CPAL 1.0, and versions for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux can be downloaded from SourceForge.net. CPAL -- the Common Public Attribution License -- is a relatively new open source license, submitted to the Open Source Initiative for approval last July. It is recognized by the Open Source Initiative as an open source license, but the FSF has not yet classified it. In spite of its approval by the OSI, I found the license difficult to parse, and recommend you have a lawyer review it so that he can advise you on what you can and cannot do with the application and the code before making a major investment of time and effort working with CPAL licensed code.

Competitors should keep a weary eye on newly minted Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose fresh face masks a certified executioner who has a plan to grow the open source leader into a billion-dollar juggernaut supplying data center infrastructure software. The 40-year-old Whitehurst left his position as COO of Delta Airlines to replace Matt Szulik and brings with him a business savvy he intends to soak into the corporate culture of Red Hat.

What's on the tips of everyone's tongues this year? Change. One change everyone should consider is making the switch from proprietary, expensive software to the world of open source and Linux.

If you haven't heard, Linux is taking a leap forward. It's becoming available at many stores as the primary operating system on several computers. Just recently I was shopping online at best buy and saw they have a $400 laptop that comes completely suited with Linux as its ONLY operating system. What caught my attention was the 4GB SSD. This technology is becoming more and more available. I know what everyone's firsts thoughts are when they scan over the 4GB Hard Drive. That's ridiculously small. I can't even fit all my operating system programs on that amount of space. But you can with Linux.

I’m in Geneva this week because I’m taking part in the Open Forum Europe conference “Standards and the Future of the Internet.” In addition, of course, the ISO/IEC OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting is taking place this week. To be clear, I’m not participating in the BRM but there is a tremendous buzz and a lot of murmurs about it. I hope that people who are taking part in the meeting will be blogging throughout the week.

[The OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting is this week, so expect a lot of coverage on it during the next two weeks - Sander]

Sean Daly was at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. While there, he interviewed Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe about Firefox 3, the Thunderbird spin-off, FOSS in general and the future of web browsing and web standards.