Showing all newswire headlines

Having established itself as the leading enterprise Linux vendor, Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle. It's a tall order, and among other things it will take a business plan that lets the company move smoothly through this make-or-break stage.

I've used Ubuntu Linux now for the better part of a year; there have been some stumbles along the way, but for the most part, I'm sold. I find myself having to do a bit more maintenance than I would with Windows, but I also like the flexibility that it affords me, along with knowing that I'm not being forced into using software in ways I don't want to (DRM), and not having to pay multiple hundreds of dollars to use it.

On this special edition of the_source, Aaron goes to a Sun Microsystems open source summit. Interviews with Simon Phipps, Alan Coopersmith (X.org), Ian Murdock (Project Indiana) and Glynn Foster (Gnome, et al).

November 1st has come and gone, and that means that Asus has begun shipping the Eee PC, a $399 ultra-light laptop that could give both the OLPC and major laptop makers a run for their money. We're going to focus primarily on the software side of things, but in a nutshell, the first widely available model packs a 900MHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of solid state memory. It weighs just 2.1 pounds, has a 3.5 hour battery, and a tiny power adapter, making it a perfect machine for stuffing in your bag whenever you leave the house. But it also has a tiny 7 inch 800 x 480 pixel display, which can cause some problems with certain web sites and applications.

A six-person startup is readying a modular, open source hardware/software system resembling a set of electronic Legos. Bug Labs claims device developers can build "anything" using "Bug," which comprises an ARM11-powered base and various modular add-ons. Boldly suggesting that "CE" could someday stand for "community electronics" instead of "consumer electronics," Bug Labs invites hardware and software developers to contribute to the "open source" project, designing hardware and software modules of their own, and sharing their work back into the community. One suggested mix-and-match combo is a GPS/digital camera device that acts as a mobile, standalone Web service for publishing geo-tagged photos.

When deploying Red Hat Virtualization, the host operating system is domain0 or dom0, and the virtual machines that run on top of domain0 are domainU or domU. Installing SystemTap on domainU is no different from installing SystemTap on non-virtualized machine or domain0. Here's how to do it.

It is not uncommon for those who write about Linux or other FOSS software to be inundated with feedback from users. At times that feedback is a bit unbalanced, a trifle raw and, occasionally, plain silly. It is, however, uncommon for a writer to set out to deliberately provoke Linux users with over-the-top stuff - just to prove his contention that said users are a bunch of ferals. This category of writers are called trolls; one surfaced recently in the shape of Infoworld's Russell Kennedy, who, in a three-part series titled "why Ubuntu (still) sucks", managed to rouse people enough to invite sufficient bile to prove his claim - which he laid out in the last part of that series.

NoMachine NX is a Terminal Server and remote access solution based on a comprising set of enterprise class open source technologies. NX makes it possible to run any graphical application on any operating system across any network connection at incredible speed. FreeNX application/thin-client server is based on NoMachine’s NX technology. It can operate remote X11 sessions over 56k modem dialup links or anything better. FreeNX package contains a free (GPL) implementation of the nxserver component. The following workshop describes the FreeNX installation on a Mandriva 2008 Free server. Additionally it explains how to access it using a Windows XP and an OpenSuse 10.3 client.

"Linux really wouldn't have gone anywhere interesting at all if it hadn't been released as an open source product. I also think that the change to the GPLv2 from my original 'no money' license was important, because the commercial interests were actually very important from the beginning. The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers and pushed people to improve usability," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

Google has unveiled its phone platform, Android. It's yet another Linux OS, freely licensed, that will appear in devices in the second half of next year. Google has signed up over 30 partners including Qualcomm, Motorola, HTC and operators including Deutsche Telekom for the "Open Handset Alliance".

When you listen to digital music, your software or hardware player usually shows information about the current song, which it gets from MP3 tags or Ogg Vorbis comments. Most ripping software supports acquiring this metadata from the CDDB or FreeDB services based on a CD's disc ID. But you can also can fill in and edit metadata with tools such as EasyTag and Picard.

Regular readers will know that my interest in standards is not limited to those that help make information and communications technology work. Over the years I've written about standards created to address concerns more directly relevant to the human condition, such as human rights standards, social responsibility standards, and much more. The world being what it is, I think that it's time I did so on a regular basis, and that's what this blog entry is all about.

For a number of reasons, I have opted to leave my cube spinning days behind me, as it just did nothing for me. Certain applications ran poorly in Beryl, and while no fault should be placed on its development, I was finding myself booting into Metacity more and more for my GNOME desktop.

Okay, lets get one thing straight… Repeat after me : “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format” “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format” “The Open Document Foundation has nothing to do with the Open Document Format”

If you're using TiddlyWiki as your note-taking tool, you ought to give TiddlySnip a try. The idea behind this Firefox extension is simple: it allows you to add the currently viewed Web page or selected text snippet to your TiddlyWiki as a new tiddler. But TiddlySnip adds a few clever twists to this basic idea, which turn the Firefox/TiddlyWiki combo into a powerful and extremely useful tool.

Has anyone really, and I mean really, spent hours researching the issue of using libdvdcss in Linux to watch DVDs? What would you say if I told you much of what you are reading about this issue is complete bunk? Want the truth? Using libdvdcss is only illegal if, and I say if, it needs to implement DeCSS to allow for encrypted DVD viewing.

Vodafone Mobile Connect Card driver for Linux is a tool that allows you to establish a connection to the Internet using 3G cards. It also allows to send and receive short messages from your computer. The cards currently supported are: Huawei E620, Huawei E220 and Option GlobeTrotter 3G+ EMEA.

The longer I program, the more structured my programming methods have become. Currently I am busy playing with generated documentation and unit testing. Generated documentation is an all round great idea, but it has a drawback: You need to generate it all the time. So I set out to use Subversion’s post-commit hook to generate fresh documentation for my PHP projects using phpDocumentor. I have written a little Python script that you can call from Subversion’s post commit hook. This script scans your subversion project for files that have the phpdoc property set. If any of these have changed, then it regenerates your documentation using phpDocumentor. It can also deal with files that are not kept in your Subversion repository and supports anything also supported by phpDocumentor.

The Angolan government, which is firmly in favour of open source software (OSS) solutions, has implemented an OSS enterprise content management system.

For the most part, I have been fairly content with the release of Flash 9 for Linux, with the possible exception of occasional Flash-related browser crashes. Even with this bug, just the move from Flash 7 to Flash 9 has made the usability of any modern browsing experience a lot more attractive, especially when watching Flash video.