Showing all newswire headlines

Sometimes it's the simple ideas that produce powerful applications -- like a terminal emulator that provides several shells side by side in a single window. A few days ago, I was looking for a way to split windows in Konsole when I ran across QuadKonsole, a program that embeds several Konsole instances in a single window, making it easy to switch between shell sessions and keep an eye on all of them at once.

This is the first major release in almost two years and provides users a leaner, faster Mambo with greatly improved scalability and stability – and more choice.Version 4.6 is available in two configurations: “4.6 Complete” includes the core system as well as an assortment of the most popular extensions and templates. “4.6 Lite” is a minimalist distro comprised of only the core files.

The JBoss-based stack is aimed at small Linux and Java developers

Neuros Technology — makers of the MPEG4 Recorder 2 “digital VCR” — has introduced the OSD, which it bills as “the first open source Linux-based embedded media center.” It costs $229.99.

Pentaho has acquired the Weka open source data-mining project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand. The Pentaho and Weka teams will soon announce a road map covering their plans for enhancements including extension of Weka's analytic techniques to additional vertical industries, and integration of Weka with Pentaho's platform, data integration, and information delivery capabilities.

Speak out, or face the consequences

BEAWorld 2006: A senior Citigroup techie today called on customers to make their voices heard in the debates over software standards - or else.

McObject has just released a micro-footprint version of the Perst open source, object-oriented embedded database for embedded systems and intelligent devices developed on the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME).

Computer software systems are now among the most complex, expensive artifacts ever created by humans, and some of the most sophisticated are being built by teams of volunteers as "open source" projects, where any programmer can read the code and suggest changes. A group of UC Davis researchers has just received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study how open source software such as the Apache Web server is built.

More than 200 members of the KDE community, industry partners, and interested users will be gathering next week for aKademy 2006 at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland to work on the next-generation desktop, KDE 4, and desktop standards.

When I was kid growing up, the Sears & Roebuck catalog was called the "Wish Book." Sears doesn't publish those three-inch thick catalogs of consumer yearnings any more, but I still collect a different kind of wish book. I must own half a dozen volumes devoted to leaving Microsoft operating systems behind and converting to Linux. For me it's the same sort of fantasy as people who buy travel guides and dream of moving to Bali. Someday, I keep promising myself, I'm really going to do it.

It's either the Microsoft way or the highway for computer users according to a survey about the economic impact the Vista operating system could have in Europe.

Teradata, a unit of NCR Corp., has introduced Teradata Warehouse 8.2, a suite of software, hardware and consulting services, that builds on capabilities to infuse real-time intelligence into front-line operations, customer service and strategic planning supporting both strategic decision-making and thousands of daily operational tasks.

[Warning: 2 of the pop-ups got past Firefox when I checked it out. Just so you know. A politely worded e-mail from a large number of readers urging them to reconsider the usefulness of pop-ups would be a good thing. - dcparris]

A B.C. post-secondary institution said it intends to grow the number of Linux machines in its data centre as it replaces older hardware infrastructure with blade servers.

This interesting article gives a visual introduction to a couple of new features in the latest version of Vim (7.0). The USP of vim is that you can do everything using the keys on the keyboard and need not even touch the mouse. More over, this is a universal text editor which runs on a variety of OSes.

The Emeryville email security company hired Donald Massaro as president and CEO -- he was previously CEO of Mountain View-based Reconnex Corp., a company he helped to start.

September 21st, 2006: KnowledgeTree has launched a new reseller program to promote its open source document management solution.

The sendfile facility allows a regular file to be sent out to a stream socket. The system call was first implemented in FreeBSD 3.1. This provides many performance benefits for various server appliances. Andre Opperman has implemented an improved sendfile facility for FreeBSD that has so far shown 45% less CPU usage without TCP segmentation offload and 83% less CPU usage with TCP segmentation offload. This is a great improvement over the previous implementation.

[O.k., so it's FreeBSD, not GNU/Linux - but few stories are cuter than "Penguin and the Beastie" - dcparris]

Neuros Technology is offering Linux hackers first dibs on beta units of its next-gen DVR (digital video recorder). The Linux-powered device can record MPEG-4 video from cable or broadcast TV, DVDs, etc., and transfer it to portable media players, or serve as a network music player.

Groovy's concise syntax frees developers from typical Java constructs that are required for code compilation but don't facilitate expressing what a program is really trying to accomplish. In this revival of the Practically Groovy series, focus on the important aspects of coding as Groovy developer J. Scott Hickey walks you through a series of comparisons between the exciting language normal Java code and the same Groovy code.

An updated live CD version of Dreamlinux, a Debian-based distribution with a Max OS X-like interface, was released Sept. 20. It sports a 2.6.14 Linux kernel along with an XFce desktop, according to the project.