Showing all newswire headlines

Yesterday, in a press inquiry which ended up in my mailbox (as most KDE press inquiries do), I got asked wether KDE4 will be a revolution, or if it's just a hype. While there certainly is quite a hype around KDE4, the answer is not quite so simple. Let me try to explain. The Free Desktop and KDE have come a long way during the last years. There have been various huge changes in KDE's social structure, in it's infrastructure and of course in the sourcecode itself. I've split this into three different areas where I think a shift in paradigm has taken place.

Mr János Kóka, Minister of Economy and Transport, has sent a mail to György Pónyai, General Director of Hungarian Standards Institution (HSI), about its the Hungarian vote on OOXML issue. In this mail the minister informed the director, that the IBM Magyarországi Kft (the Hungarian subsidiary of IBM) signed concerns about the way how the Hungarian vote was decided on the OOXML issue (draft of ISO/IEC DIS 25900 standard) on the meeting of the Committee on 25th June 2007.

Novell, Inc. today announced financial results for its third fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2007. For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $243 million, compared to net revenue of $236 million for the third fiscal quarter 2006. Linux Platform Products revenue grew 77 percent year-over-year - Operating results improved year-over-year.

Mozilla, responsible for Thunderbird and Firefox, this week released a campus edition of Firefox, specifically geared towards students' needs.

Hewlett-Packard and Red Hat have started selling a new Linux-based desktop PC targeting small and medium businesses. The dx2250 HP desktop ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop pre-loaded, which includes Firefox, OpenOffice and the Evolution e-mail client. Red Hat will handle technical support for the system.

Back in April, a startup company called FastScale Technology came out of stealth mode with a different twist on the virtualization game. Rather than virtualize a whole software stack, FastScale Composer Suite builds a stack from the actual bits of software used by applications and puts it in a container; if an application doesn't use a library or application, it doesn't go into the DAB container. An Apache software stack running on Linux takes about 3 GB, including application code as well as Linux, drivers, and Apache. In a DAB, this Linux-Apache stack shrinks down to 20 MB.

This guide describes how to set up Tesseract OCR on Ubuntu 7.04. OCR means "Optical Character Recognition". The resulting system will be able to convert images with embedded text to text files. Tesseract is licensed under the Apache License v2.0.

Red Hat has launched an online version of Command Center, its integrated server and application monitoring service. It also brings new features and a free evaluation version. Red Hat Command Center is a Software as a Service offering that monitors the availability and performance of IT infrastructures around the clock, said Red Hat (RH). Command Center monitors Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss, as well as a range of IT infrastructure components including network devices, servers, business applications and websites, the company claimed.

Via's first motherboard in the tiny, 3.8 x 2.8-inch pico-ITX format appears to be available, and priced to appeal to device-builders with limited budgets. The PX10000G supports Linux and other x86 OSes, and ships with a reasonable complement of pin-header I/O cabling. Despite the form-factor having just been introduced in January of this year, the first pico-ITX motherboards are already showing up in the Web-stores of several board suppliers, priced below $300.

It's faster than Windows, it fights viruses – and it's free. (Ok, Ok, I know some of you are already reaching for the keyboard to rattle off a correction. Stay thine hand a little longer and read on...)

McBride says he was caught off guard by the judge's decision because SCO's position was backed by nine witnesses. "We believe this is a very appealable case," McBride said. McBride said he believes that U.S. District Court Judge Dale Kimball missed the mark when he ruled that Novell, and not SCO, holds copyrights over the widely used computer operating system. "We thought we had a pretty legitimate story," said McBride. Kimball ruled on Aug. 10 that a 1995 asset transfer agreement from Novell to SCO did not include Unix copyrights.

If your boss is awfully analytical, you'll be glad to know about AWFULL's web analytics capabilities. Blue GNU interviewed Steve McInerney, to find out how the project came about and what AWFFULL (A Webalizer Fork FULL of features) offers to the modern-day webmaster.

I sometimes think that certain people are either paid directly or ‘compensated’ (indirect payment) by Microsoft for sidling with a malicious and monopolistic agenda. Two individual examples would be the ZDNet bloggers George Ou and Ed Bought. Sometimes, however, a long-term strategy requires exploration. Yesterday, Linux.com published an article that contained another ‘red flag’ statement from de Icaza. Can you see it? Building a desktop that revolves around the Microsoft API was a goal since inception.

You won't find a single other company making a concerted effort to fight open source. Not a one. Larry Ellison (Oracle) says open source is not something to be feared, but rather something "to be explained." Only Microsoft fights. Why? It relies, more than most companies, on a big, upfront license fee. Microsoft's "house" is built on sand. The very factors that drove its success - easy-to-use, low-cost, integration between components - are the same things driving open source into the enterprise. Except that instead of lower cost, open source is free.

Thanks to a note from its creator, DesktopLinux.com learned about a new "release candidate" of Custom NimbleX 2 this week. This lesser known Slackware-derived project offers a Web-based tool that lets users concoct, and then download, their own customized live CD Linux images -- in minutes! One especially interesting feature of the NimbleX live CD is that it allows access to the hard drive on the system on which it boots -- making it a useful system troubleshooting tool, but also potentially dangerous.

Fluxbox seems like an afterthought in most distros. You can add it, sure, but it doesn't look or function that great without some work. I wasn't prepared for how great Fluxbox would be in Vector.

Nuxified.org launches with a better new look and a revised premise. It will blur the lines between operating systems and focus on Free Software everywhere.

More bad news for Microsoft: the world's largest PC maker, Hewlett Packard, has announced it will start shipping desktop PCs preloaded with RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 in Australia from as little as $AU600 ($US486). RHELD5 comes with OpenOffice, Firefox and Evolution included. The clear message from HP is that small businesses can now avoid the licence cost of buying Vista and Office on their PCs while retaining "big PC manufacturer" levels of support.

Thanks to a note from its creator, DesktopLinux.com learned about a new "release candidate" of Custom NimbleX 2 this week. This lesser known Slackware-derived project offers a Web-based tool that lets users concoct, and then download, their own customized live CD Linux images -- in minutes!

Ubuntu Xorg maintainer Bryce Harrington recently demonstrated the BulletProof-X feature that is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 7.10. BulletProof-X provides a failsafe mode which will ensure that users never have to manually configure their graphics hardware settings from the command line. If Xorg fails to start, the failsafe mode will initiate with minimalistic settings, low resolution, and a limited number of colors. The failsafe mode also automatically runs Ubuntu's new GTK-based display configuration utility.