Showing all newswire headlines

With new software from O3Spaces added to its forthcoming Linux server, Xandros is targeting not just Windows server, but SharePoint servers in particular.

During the run up to Firefox 2, we released beta builds and release candidates for wide testing and feedback as part of a community beta program. Anyone who downloaded and installed these pre-release versions of Firefox became part of this beta program and was automatically updated to the Firefox 2 final release. To ensure continued improvement in the quality of Firefox 2, we are now applying the same program to our security and stability release process for Firefox 2. Starting within the next 24 hours, everyone who participated in the beta process will be offered a pre-release version of the next security and stability update.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Research in Information Technology (RIT) program has opened nominations for the 2007 Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (MATC). Prizes of $50,000 to $100,000 will be awarded to the winners in December. Any open source software project that assists educational or not-for-profit ventures is eligible to be nominated, and self-nominations are allowed. Last year's inaugural MATC awards awarded more than half a million dollars to winning projects.

SWsoft, with Novell, has brought its Virtuozzo virtulization software to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

On the ATI/AMD section of the forums there continues to be confusion among some readers and contributors over the legacy drivers along with Beryl support by ATI/AMD. Beyond what I have said in the forums, below are some additional statements.

Like many people, I have too many passwords to remember. To keep them straight, I wrote a simple password locker script using dialog and GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard). The script prompts the user for a master password using a dialog box, unencrypts a file that holds a list of passwords, and opens the file in a text editor. When the editor is closed, the script re-encrypts the password file.

Trolltech has released version 4.2.3 of Qt. This is mainly a bug-fix release, with updates to numerous classes across all platforms. Changes include a new unofficial Portuguese translation, three fixes to lupdate including one which brings a 400x speed increase, and a fix to a bug in QTextEdit which caused the bottom lines to become unreachable after adding the scroll bar. Meanwhile Qt 3.3.8 has been released, quite possibly the penultimate in the Qt 3 line with support for Qt 3 ending in July. Get them from the Qt download page; both qt-copy trunk and branch have been updated in KDE's repository.

While Debian has been around for over a decade, Gentoo for five years, and Mandriva/Mandrake for nearly nine years, in less than three years of existence Ubuntu has received the most attention and generated the greatest amount of publicity in the Linux limelight. Why is that? In this article we will be taking a look back at all of the Ubuntu releases to date and exploring how this Linux distribution has evolved so quickly over its short lifespan.

This new release, is firstly dedicated to someone that is not beside me anymore, my dad. The Beta testing team, Luca, our developers and me, agree that is the most perfect, complete and stable version ever released. It's faster, smarter, lightier and comes with a ton of exciting and highly awaited features. It's a tank and you can't do much against it.
[For those who don't know the rather new but very popular (9th on DistroWatch!) distribution SabayonLinux: Sabayon is to Gentoo like Ubuntu is to Debian: Even more bleeding edge than Gentoo, faster, looks better, as first main-distro includes new experimental technologies, like einit. Also, far easier to install than Gentoo. Be sure to keep an eye on this distro, or better, try the LiveDVD. Really a lot is changing at an incredible pace in this distro, and of the main distro's this one is probably the most innovative - hkwint]

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel back to Europe, visiting Italy to meet someone who wants to enable you to read your documents and help you to do the math, who's "fiery" passion for KDE may be linked to his location - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Pino Toscano.

Techalign has released version 2.0 of its Kubuntu-based Pioneer Linux desktop. The new version features a 2.6.17 kernel and the KDE 3.5.4 desktop, extensive support for multimedia, and Automatix, which automates the installation and uninstallation of many popular applications.

TheOpenMRS organization isannouncing they they are participating in the 2007 Google Summer of Code:"Computer science students, need a summer job? Have you ever imagined that writing code could save lives? Why not apply to OpenMRS for the Google Summer of Code 2007?..." Read On for the complete announcement and how to apply.

We've been notified today that Debian has been accepted again as one of the mentoring organisations for the Google Summer of Code[1]. There's now just over a week for students and mentors to find each other and work out the projects that will be worked on this summer. If you want to get involved as a mentor or a student, you don't have very long. We're also still actively looking for more project ideas - what would you like somebody to spend several months on, working full-time to help improve Debian?

Deval Patrick, the Commonwealth's new governor, yesterday introduced a $1.47 billion "emergency" bonding bill, intended to cover a broad range of local and statewide projects, including a measure of funding for upgrading the state's IT infrastructure. This is the funding that State CIOs Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez resigned over - and that the legislature failed to provide last year. But the new bill would only restore a fraction of what is needed.

Write optimal code for Cell BE processor’s synergistic processing unit (SPU) and have your programs running lightning fast. This installment of the Cell BE processor series covers SIMD vector programming, branch elimination and hinting techniques, loop unrolling, and instruction scheduling. Part 1 gives an introduction to Linux on the PLAYSTATION 3, while Part 2 shows you how to program the SPE’s of Sony PS3, and Part 3 dives further into the SPE’s of Cell BE.

Foreword: -- This article describes the floating point performance benefits of the ARM EABI (embedded application binary interface), which now has its own Debian port. The authors use an open source floating point benchmark to compare how compiling with EABI support can improve floating point performance.

With its announcements this week around virtualization and Red Hat Linux, Symantec is moving beyond a past strategy of providing tools for multiple OS to a new vision of managing multiple virtualization environments. In this emerging area of heterogenuous virtualization management, Symantec is also bound to face plenty of competition from companies ranging from Microsoft to VMware and XenSource. But Symantec is well up to the challenge, according to some analysts who are deeply steeped in virtualization technologies.

Ubuntu announced the release of 5.10 almost 18 months ago, on October 13th. The support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 5.10 will reach end of life on Friday April 13th 2007.

"This announcement marks the official launch of the third web site being added to Libervis Network, MobiLiberty.com, a project of promoting Free Software and Free Standards in the world of mobile devices, from phones to mp3 (and ogg) players to various other mobile gadgets."

The November 2006 agreement between Microsoft and Novell is delaying the release of the final draft of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3), says Peter Brown, the executive director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).