Showing all newswire headlines

With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the second in a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Mandriva Free 2007 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

If you are reading this Web page you’ve probably been searching for a colour laser multi-function device that works with the Linux operating system. Well search no more. I’m pleased to report the Epson AcuLaser CX11NF - a combined laser printer, scanner, copier and fax machine - works like a charm. What’s more the drivers are all open source - how about that!

Ainkaboot's Octimod MPC7-1500 is a high density Gentoo Linux-based clustering platform based on Mini-ITX boards. Each processing module is hot-swappable, and contains a 1.5GHz C7 powered VIA EPIA EN 15000 motherboard.

Find out more about the killer feature that seems to provide critical mass for Spring and what the Spring Framework Inversion of Control buzz is all about.

Partnership will create over 1 million Open-Xchange hosted business e-mail and collaboration accounts

With open-source ERP deployments now starting to take more hold, Spanish-based Openbravo is quickly gaining international penetration, garnering as many as 20,000 downloads a month of its Web-based software from all over the world.

"I'm not interested in the more academic aspects of computing," says Brian Aker, director of architecture at MySQL. "I'm interested in solving problems." This approach has taken Aker from being a teenage hacker to today, when he spends an increasing amount of time thinking about where IT in general and databases specifically are heading.

More signs of legitimacy of FOSS in medicine with this press release: 'McKesson has joined with Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, to introduce the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, a cost-effective open source information technology solution with services designed to meet the mission-critical demands of healthcare. “The Red Hat solution offers our customers a reliable, affordable platform for delivering safe, high-quality patient care using McKesson’s clinical applications,” said Michael J. Simpson, chief technology officer for McKesson Provider Technologies. “The introduction of a high-value, open platform designed specifically for the needs of healthcare IT represents a major step forward in encouraging the use of open source technologies instead of closed, proprietary technologies that are costly to acquire, maintain and scale.”

A duo of open-source experts from Europe will give separate workshops in a conference next week organized by advocacy group Institute of Popular Democracy.

If you listen to music on CD much, you'll notice that some CDs sound much louder than others, and I'm not talking about Ministry's The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste versus Sarah McLachlan's Touch. Two CDs of the same genre, when played on the same CD player, at the same volume, can have drastically different playback volume. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3, and can be really annoying when you're going from song to song on your MP3 playlists on your computer or portable music player. One way to iron out the differences is to use MP3Gain to adjust your MP3s to have the the same volume.

Runtime Revolution revives the simple development model that Bill Atkinson pioneered with Hypercard back in 1987. Fresh from his triumph of building MacPaint for the Apple Macintosh, Atkinson brought together the concepts of object-based, event-driven programming and hypermedia to create a highly popular tool for rapid application development. Atkinson insisted that Apple gave it away free with the Macintosh which helped it to spread quickly in the late 1980s. Unfortunately the lack of a decent PC implementation and commercial changes at Apple meant that Hypercard eventually withered away. Further development was stopped in 2000 and, sadly, Apple abandoned it altogether in 2004.

Madan Sheina asks whether data warehouse appliances can really transform the way in which companies analyse their growing volumes of data, without breaking the bank.

Today's networking grab-bag contains iftop, ApacheTop, and sysctl. iftop is a nice realtime bandwidth monitor, ApacheTop is an almost real-time Apache monitor, and sysctl is used to control hundreds of kernel parameters in a most elite fashion. sysctl comes with all Linux distributions, and iftop and ApacheTop are just a Yum install or apt-get install away.

The No. 1 computer maker is reluctant to pick one distribution and alienate users of another distribution.

Dell is warming up to the idea of reintroducing Linux desktops and notebooks, but for now the computer maker plans to remain on the sidelines and wait until there's a clear winner among the various distributions of the open source operating system.

[Finally, a journalist read the announcement - AS]

Independent report from Info2 on Sun Microsystems' open source and middleware strategy says Sun's made solid advances, but must move beyond its low price services debut to demonstrate its potential as a serious, long-term partner for developers and ISVs. Info2 outlines where Sun is leading platform rivals and highlights five areas where Sun remains vulnerable to competitors.

A new UK think tank will analyse how open-source software can be used in government and the private sector. The National Open Centre, based in Birmingham, will be composed of working groups that will study issues around open source such as the use of standards and procurement guidelines, said Ed Downs, of the National Computing Centre, a professional IT membership organisation.

The Xara LX vector graphics editor took a big step forward last week. After months of gridlock between open source contributors to the project and its corporate owners, one of the contributors published his own fork of the code base -- and the company approved, offering to host it in the official Subversion repository.

Welcome to our issue number 78 of Fedora Weekly News.

African telcos have been forced to drop their international call rates by as much as 75 percent over the past year as VoIP operators start to bite into their market share, says a new report released this week.

The Faces of KDE takes a look at some of the developers working on KDE 4. "In this stage of development it’s a lot of pain for very little glory, re-designing the next generation KDE from the ground up. It’s a task that separates the core developers from the hangers on, and the architects of the new desktop are a pretty dedicated group. There are far too many developers currently active in KDE for me to introduce them all, but here’s a quick glance at what a small handful of them are working on for the next major version of KDE."