Showing all newswire headlines

Following on the heels of the Firefox 2.0 beta in mid-July, Mozilla has released the first 2.0 previews of its Thunderbird email client. Firefox may get most of the attention, thanks to its flashier job, but it is the trusty email reader that conducts most of the killer-app conversations on a daily basis. Let's see what the new build holds in store.

Portland, Oregon-based technology company OpenSourcery is rapidly gaining substantial recognition for its quality open source development work. On August 15, 2006 OpenSourcery will unveil its eleMental Clinic 3.4, a free medical records management system, to an international audience at Linux World. Currently in active use across multiple mental health clinic sites, this notably stable system was designed to keep large and small clinics productive.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.4, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Even while KDE 4 is being prepared, improvements to KDE 3.5 have been made and this release makes them available. The new features were subject to rigorous quality testing so that KDE 3.5.4 is as stable as the maintenance releases that precede it.

With more than 10.000 downloads Palo (www.palo.net) is the most successful Open-Source BI-Tool in the spreadsheet OLAP market. The new release Palo 1.0c brings improved performance as well as some minor bug fixes to the popular Excel Database Add-In. The first Palo User Conference will be held on September 29th in Frankfurt/Main.

Open source software will become increasingly important for governments around the world as they look to reduce fixed-term licence costs and develop local industries. This was said yesterday by Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio who offered some suggestions on how governments can build the required ecosystem to grow their open source ambitions.

EnterpriseDB, open source database company, announced that it has closed a combined $20 million debt and equity financing. A $16.5 million Series B venture capital financing was led by Fidelity Ventures, a leading provider of “Go-to-Market CapitalSM“ to early-stage information technology and communications companies. Previous investors Charles River Ventures and Valhalla Partners also participated in the Series B round.

Yesterday, someone told me: “…do you realize that you have an SSL certificate problem at your site?”. Well, it still is a problem, or rather a minor annoyance, but the problem is with browsers, not with our site. Here are the explanations:

There was an informal presentation by OLPC at the Ottawa Linux Symposium, and the project looked quite impressive. The hardware had true peer-to-peer wireless networking, meaning that if two children happened to be near each other -- with no wireless access points or servers around -- that they could still share files.

GEMS strips out unwanted packages and modules of Gentoo Linux

OCS To Deliver ProtexIP Software Compliance Management Solution To Corporate And Legal Organizations

[Is there some FOSS in amongst all this gobbledygook? -- grouch]

The Mozilla Corporation and RealNetworks have entered into a multi-year agreement under which RealNetworks will distribute Mozilla Firefox with its products. During the installation of RealPlayer, users will be given the option to also install Firefox. In the near future, Firefox will also be an installation option with Real's Rhapsody music download service and RealArcade gaming platform. The public relations material issued by RealNetworks and the Mozilla Corporation does not say how much, if any, money changed hands as part of the arrangement.

There's a lot to think about in the land of Open Source these days, much discussion, and much discussiion to come. And there is much rethinking.

This is a discussion that readers of this blog should be following and, where it makes sense, contributing to.

IBM took the opportunity of the launch of its new AMD Opteron "Armada" servers to push an energy and heat efficiency message, introducing its Cool Blue concept of a cooler, energy-efficient data centre.

The linux.conf.au 2007 Call For Particiation is open for only one more month! Get your talks, papers and miniconf proposals in soon. Go ahead and do it!

All the details are below. Good luck and we look forward to getting some excellent submissions for lca2007.

-- The Seven team!

BitRock LAPPStack 1.0 is an easy to install distribution of Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, and supporting libraries. LAPPStack allows users to have a complete web development environment up and running in just minutes.

A new Linux-based phone is shipping to subscribers of China Mobile's "Go-Tone" GSM/GPRS service. The Samsung SGH-i858 features a large, 2.4-inch QVGA (240 x 320) color touchscreen, along with a slide-out hardware keypad. It runs version 2.5 of Mizi's "Prizm" Linux phone stack.

South Africa-developed document management application includes new workflow plugins, additional language support and a less restrictive open source licence.

LXer Feature: 3-Aug-2006

One LXer reader's quest to find and list vendors selling computers with GNU/Linux pre-installed leads to the development of a GNU/Linux vendor database.

Everyone is scared of Google and rightly so, says Gartner analyst Nick Jones. "Internetisation" is going to prompt as big a shift in the wireless market over the coming couple of years as will high speed technologies like MiMo and Zigbee over the coming decade, he predicts.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a new open-source middleware package that can be used to develop biometric applications.