Showing all newswire headlines

The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has announced completion of the LiPS Release 1.0 specifications, fulfilling the commitment announced in earlier of this year. With this release, LiPS enables mobile industry players to achieve basic interoperability for applications and services deployed on Linux-based phones, benefiting Linux-based software stack suppliers, mobile device OEMs and regional and global telecom operators.

New Enea Linux Competence Center Established to Address Growing Demand for Reliable Linux Systems and Services.

Can eBay hold the SourceForge secret to making money out of open source software?

The WINE project is going on 15 years in existence, and two years ago, it finally went into beta. Through the beta stage, there has been a consistent release about every two weeks, which often brings a fair number of improvements to this software for running Windows programs on Linux (and other operating systems). Sparked by curiosity as to how the performance of WINE is affected release by release, we have gone through and benchmarked the past seven releases. While this only represents the past four months of work by the WINE community, the results may surprise you.

Comparing a list of gadgets that run Windows and a list of gadgets that run Linux I noticed that while the Linux list was populated with mobile devices, the Windows list was mostly... obscure junk, including an automated bartender that runs Windows XP. You know Windows XP is not stable enough for your desktop, so do you think it is stable enough for your bartender?

The Mozilla-based, single-site "Web app" browser Webrunner, which we covered in July, was rebranded Mozilla Prism in October and moved to the Mozilla Labs site. Initially, Prism was only available for Windows, but Mac and Linux builds are now available.

University of Washington - A former assistant professor from Harvard, now at UofW, Dr. William Stein, and several students, have created a new open-source complex math solving tool called Sage. It is an Internet-based graphical tool which allows the user to do basically anything mathematically, from "mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming."

For Navicron, a wireless technology company launched in Oulu, Finland, in 2004, open source development means it can move products to market quicker and cheaper. Navicron is just beginning to reach out to the United States in search of a larger market. The company, which creates hardware and software for cell phones, recently opened an office in Texas so company representatives could be closer to potential vendor partners and venture capital in the States.

Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

GWT Conference Just as Microsoft wasbrushing aside claims that Volta, its latest .NET programming toolkit, is a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) clone, Google has disclosed how it plans to open the gap on rivals with the next release of its popular AJAX toolkit.

A Win/Mac developer recently asked me what I thought about his plan to create a binary of his application and sell it to interested Linux sound and music people. He asked with some trepidation, having already received a rather critical chorus of objection from some overly enthusiastic Linux users. This man's work is excellent and his software already runs nicely under Wine.

The BusyBox developers, with the SFLC, are suing Verizon on the grounds that it is illegally distributing open-source software to its FiOS customers. The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) announced on Dec. 7 that it has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Verizon Communications on behalf of its clients, the two principal developers of BusyBox, alleging that Verizon has violated the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License version 2) in its fiber-optic Internet and television service, aka FiOS.

When I hear "mail merge," I usually think of personalizing letters and printing envelopes. However, many other projects can make use of mail merge. This year I tackled a new Christmas gift project by using mail merge in OpenOffice.org (OOo) to create a tear-off daily calendar, personalized with holidays and family events. Here's how.

Those of you that read my writeup about “Finding the right distro for my ThinkPad” may wonder how things went with the distros I ended up choosing after a few days of use and if I was able to resolve the few issues that I had found with them. So, as a follow up and for the benefit of those interested in trying out those distros I decided make this post.

It's one thing for a vendor to claim that Linux is ready for the embedded development market. It's quite another to have a multi-year study involving hundreds of projects and over 1,300 developers report it. Embedded Market Forecasters (EMF) has revealed in a new report how effective embedded Linux has been for developers to develop projects. The report contrasts the use of non-supported, roll your own Linux, supported Linux efforts, as well as proprietary embedded operating systems like Symbian and Windows CE.

Knowledge Tree is an open source document management system (DMS) that helps enterprise users categorize, store, index, and share documents. It offers features like metadata editing, versioning, and WebDAV access, which make it a better choice than a simple file server for sharing documents. The open source edition of the PHP-based Knowledge Tree ships under GPLv3; a commercial version with some additional features and support bundled is also available. You can run Knowledge Tree on Linux, Windows, or any platform that can run Apache, MySQL and PHP. The commercial application also has a Windows client for non-Web access to the repository.

Multi-trade International Corporation for Research of Office Software Open Format Technologies (MICROSOFT) has announced their surprise decision, that they cease to support OOXML document format (Office Open XML), acknowledging at the same time, that the ANSI-developed & supported TXT format will be a better, universal, solution. (Got it Microsoft? Got it Jasow Matusow? Any misread acronym can make sensational headline.)

E-mail clients are often loaded down with too many features. Rather than one big groupware package like Outlook or Evolution, sometimes a simple e-mail client is all you need. We look at three Linux e-mail-only clients and see how they fare against today's standards . The e-mail clients we'll look at include Balsa, KMail, and Sylpheed.

This review aims to provide readers with an in-depth treatment of the Eee, using an actual retail unit, instead of a pre-production model. This is important in a number of respects. Earlier models had a different BIOS, which, for example, did not provide full speed USB2.0 ports. Hopefully, having tested an actual retail model, the review should give a true representation of what this machine can actually do.

Moving to Linux used to be a big deal. Sure, it was cheaper, more reliable and more flexible — but who did you turn to when things went wrong? In an enterprise world that had grown up with the idea that Unix needed to be complex and expensive — and that Windows was a quick-and-dirty plan B — the idea of getting a robust, scalable operating system for free just didn't click for many years. Fortunately for Linux, the support structure that gradually built up around this rogue operating system — which is now the favourite son of one-time Unix diehards HP, IBM, Novell and Sun — has dispensed with that fear.