Showing all newswire headlines

With the news of Linspire's CNR coming soon to Ubuntu, and Automatix now offering a limited number of closed source, commercial applications, what possible consequences will this have on the Linux community and open source as a whole?

Free software gives everyone the freedom to run, study, change and redistribute software. It is these freedoms, not the price, that is important about free software. Free software advocates make the distinction between free, as in speech, as opposed to free, as in beer. Though many people would gladly accept a free beer, it is not one of the fundamental principles of democracy.

There is a very interesting back-and-forth going on between Linux creator Linus Torvalds writing on the Linux kernel mailing list and Jonathan Schwartz, President and CEO of Sun Microsystems writing in his blog. Despite the different fora the two actually seem to be talking to each other as well as their respective audiences.

"Do you offer a program like Microsoft Publisher?" Some version of this question appears regularly on the OpenOffice.org mailing lists. Many people automatic answer "no," and say that Scribus is more suitable for desktop publishing. But, in fact, OpenOffice.org boasts two mid-level layout programs -- Draw and Writer -- each of which is far more versatile than its name suggests.

I'm attending the Linux Foundations' first annual Linux Collaboration Summit from the Google campus in Mountainview California today and tomorrow, and will add periodically to this post as the day goes along.

In A Race to the Bottom: Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies,Privacy International spray-paints the façades of landmark companies that line today's Main Street on the Web. The painted colors are assessments of each company's performance on privacy issues. Though the rankings are colorful, what they say isn't pretty. Nobody in the"interim rankings" (.pdf) gets the top (green) mark for"Privacy-friendly and privacy enhancing". The bottom (black) mark, for"Comprehensive consumer surveillance& entrenched hostility to privacy", goes to just one company: Google.

Xubuntu 7.04(Feisty Fawn) Screenshots Tour

Open source document management system plans to user rPath's appliance platform to offer KnowledgeTree as a software appliance as it looks to expand its market share and reduce support costs.

Last time, we discussed Microsoft, their approach to protecting patents and why the enforcement of this is going to cost them much more than just some market share. Today, we will be taking this a step further by examining what they are losing out on by continuing with their dinosaur approach to creative property.

Turbolinux's Linux-based wizpy music player is a beautiful device. It's slick, black, and slightly smaller than the smallest cell phones. Unfortunately, its value and functionality doesn't live up to its good looks.

The top leader of Linuxchix resigned yesterday in the midst of a controversy over her leadership style. In a statement released to all Linuxchix mailing lists, coordinator Mary Gardiner said her decision was a difficult one, but because of a "mismatch in goals, LinuxChix should be run by someone with a better relationship with its current (implicit) goals."

This tutorial shows how you can install eyeOS on a standard Linux system. EyeOS is a kind of operating system which works online, i.e. it manages files on the server and enables the user to upload, download and edit files.

If you can't beat em...Tom Hanrahan has left the Linux Foundation, where he was director of engineering, to work for Microsoft instead.

You let us know--in no uncertain terms--which apps should have been on our list of the most important open-source apps of all time.

I decided to connect the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) drive today, and I've spent quite a bit of time using it for work. Now this isn't the highest-spec machine (only 256 MB of ram, 1 GHz processor), but it's doing pretty well. Even IE under Wine performed swimmingly (as good as or better than on my Xubuntu setup). Same for the GIMP. I had a GIMP crash in Windows today, but the GIMP is generally rock-solid on both platforms -- and certainly was in 6.06 today.

The Linux leader is still skeptical about GPL 3, but open-source Solaris could be a draw.

MUSCLE is a project to coordinate the development of smart cards and applications under Linux. The purpose is to develop a set of compliant drivers, API's, and a resource manager for various smart cards and readers for the GNU environment. Source code is now distributed by this site that supports the Schlumbeger Reflex 60 line of reader and all ISO-7816-4 compliant smart cards. I would like to see a Linux resource manager for smart cards and other cryptographic tokens such as Ibuttons or SecureI d. A good standpoint for this is the PC/SC specifications written for Microsoft OS. I try not to conform to Microsoft but it is VERY important that security tokens work in conjunction with other OS's. If you would like to contribute efforts to MUSCLE please contact me here

Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community.

Save time and headaches, and create a more easily maintainable set of pages, with the Ruby on Rails ActiveScaffold plugin. ActiveScaffold handles all your CRUD (create, read, update, delete) user interface needs, leaving you more time to focus on more challenging (and interesting!) problems.

With this tip you will be able to work from home using VPN and that too from Linux / FreeBSD system for the proprietary Microsoft Point-to-Point vpn server.