Showing all newswire headlines

SUSE root is a nice evangelist-type site about Novell's SUSE -- specifically openSUSE, that tries to answer the questions that could be asked by a potential user of this extremely popular distro. Looking at The Distrowatch top 100 distributions, there's Ubuntu at No. 1, followed by openSUSE and Fedora. I'm thinking of trying openSUSE because it's so darn popular, is meant for business use -- and I just want to see how it runs.

GoblinX Premium 2007.1, a bootable live CD distribution based on Slackware Linux, was made available this week by its Brazil-based project team. It is the first release of an "new generation of the distribution, full of news, special features, and upgrades," according to the team.

IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality is a functional and regression testing tool that enables the creation, comprehension, modification and execution of testing GUI-less Web services

Internet application testing vendor RadView plans to migrate its flagship product to an open source model using the General Public License (GPL), internetnews.com has learned. The announcement is expected to be made on Wednesday April 11. The move to open source its products could have implications for commercial vendors in the sector, such as Hewlett-Packard's Mercury Interactive and IBM's Rational Software division.

With Palm attempting to migrate its OS to Linux and Symbian working to begin a degree of interoperability with Unix, Linux-based phones are gaining ground, and a recent ABI report suggests they will make up 14 percent of the market by 2012. They face an uphill battle, however against an array of difficult obstacles.

The del.icio.us blog announced an upgrade to their Firefox extension that enables the easy bookmarking of pages.

If your GUI-based calculator is not up to the challenge, is your next alternative a spreadsheet? If yes, you would do well to look at GNU bc. It is, indeed, a superb replacement. You might find that you never go back to using the clunky GUI equivalent.

The eighth annual Linuxfest Northwest takes place from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., April 28 and 29, 2007 at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. Exhibits, presentations, and parking are free. All ages are welcome. The Fest is an informative, low-key way for people to explore Linux and other open source products. LFNW features internationally recognized speakers from leading companies and well-known open source projects, as well as exhibits and demonstrations for a wide range of interests and technical abilities.

Nagios is a GPL-licensed framework that allows you to intelligently schedule little monitoring programs written in any language you choose. Nagios lets you monitor hosts, services, and networks. Here are a couple of examples of real-world monitoring scenarios.

IceWM is perfect for Windows’s “emigrants” especially for users with older computers. IceWM will be suitable for advanced users who are looking for a lightweight and simple window manager.

This article shows how you can make your scanner (SCSI or USB) work with SANE/XSANE from a normal user account without getting permission errors.

No Starch Press has published a book about integrating embedded hardware, Linux-based operating systems, and custom applications to create Linux devices. "Linux Appliance Design," by four authors, is the first book to tackle both the hardware and software components of device design, the publisher claimed.

Here's a plug for Geany, the primary text editor in Puppy Linux. I've been using Geany for a few weeks now, and it's really a nice piece of software. For one thing, it's not foreign to someone who primarily uses full-fledged word processors -- and Windows ones, at that.

SysMaster used embedded Linux to build a set-top box with a dizzying array of audio, video, networking, communications, and data capabilities. The Tornado M10 Digital Media Center runs Linux 2.6.19, and targets phone and IP network operators wishing to offer a wide range of services.

Suppose you want to let a friend thousands of miles away listen to a song from your computer. Perhaps you just want to open up the music library on your computer to a select few while you're on another client on your local area network. Enabling file sharing might be overkill. Instead, you can use a streaming server such as GNUMP3d. Streaming servers are useful for more than Internet radio; they can let people choose individual songs from your music library and play them -- no need to configure NFS, SSH, or Samba.

Mandriva this week made available the third release candidate of its Mandriva Linux Spring 2007 distribution, nicknamed "Beijing." It features a 2.6.17.13 kernel, choice of KDE, GNOME 2.18, or Fluxbox desktops, and the distro's usual full feature set, the project team said.

It sounds unlikely, but Novell and Sun Microsystems have partnered to bring SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 to Sun's Ultra Workstations: the Sun Ultra 20, Ultra 20 M2, Ultra 40, and Ultra 40 M2.

System Reviews It's been quite a while since I've published a review of the workstation platforms from AMD and Intel, but, with all the changes in both platforms recently, it's high time. This brings us to this review of the Intel Xeon 5300 series processors and the AMD Opteron 2200 series processors. Intel's Xeon line has gone through some major changes that provide us with a new quad-core chip and a refined chipset, designed to maximize many different aspects of the systems' communications. AMD's line has stayed fairly steady, and the biggest change the end user will notice is a move to DDR2 memory and a refined processor core.

As the Web 2.0 model of extreme interactivity gains ground, Mozilla Labs is working on a new prototype called "The Coop," which adds collaboration and social-networking tools directly to Firefox. The Firefox add-on not only will let users keep track of what friends are doing online, but also will let them share content and integrate other Web services.

Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney and a partner at DLA Piper, also serves as outside counsel to the Open Source Initiative on a pro bono basis. Tuesday, he was a guest blogger for InfoWorld, where he discussed the key changes in the GNU General Public License v3 from the previous draft to the latest.