Showing all newswire headlines

OTTAWA -- The 8th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) kicked off Wednesday in Ottawa, Canada at the Ottawa Congress Centre. Jonathan Corbet, co-founder of Linux Weekly News, opened the symposium with The Kernel Report, an update on the state of the kernel since last year.

Against this background, the EU's fine is a little more than an accountancy rounding error.

[...]

Thus Microsoft's brinkmanship with the European Commission is driven almost entirely by its need to react to free software. It turns out that this is by no means the only sphere where Microsoft has ceased to be master of its own destiny, and finds itself constantly responding to open source initiatives, and playing catch-up with free software projects.

"We think we have a pretty unique product," WSO2 co-founder Paul Fremantle says of his company's new Tungsten application server package. He calls it "the first pure open source SOA application server."
[...]
For complete details, listen to the podcast.

Gimmie is Alex Graveley's re-imagined desktop panel project, coded in Python and integrated with GNOME services. Though still a prototype, Gimmie has spawned discussion about the uses and usability of panels, task lists, and menu bars in today's desktop environments.

It's hot and you're melting? The KDE.org hardware infrastructure owned by KDE e.V. is melting as well! Out of the desperate need to upgrade our current disk RAID, we need new hard drives. If you have visited bugs.kde.org any time the last couple of months, you've noticed that this site often responds extremely sluggish. To improve the situation, we need to employ a new server, but need some more money for the hard drives for this beast! If you can help us with that, please consider to donate to the fundraiser. All amounts happily accepted through Paypal and other means.

WebSideStory analyst Geoff Johnston explained that Germans have always liked to use alternatives to Microsoft's browser. During the 1990s, for instance, the Netscape browser was especially popular. Johnston believes that the Mozilla Foundation is also taking a strong foothold in other countries in Europe, generally at the expense of Microsoft.

As of this week, the System z9 EC 109 sever running z/OS and the PR/SM LPAR hypervisor was rated at EAL5, while pSeries 630, 650, and 690 servers using Power4 processors and running AIX 5.1 and 5.2 were certified at the EAL4+ level. Both machines use a remote Hardware Management Console--basically a glorified PC running Linux and a chunk of the hypervisor microcode--to link into a service processor on the mainframe or Unix server and to allocate hard and soft resources to logical partitions.

The next-generation protocol, Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), is becoming widely accepted as the future of the Internet and networking world. This acceptance has encouraged various IT companies to develop applications that support and talk with each other through the IPv6 address format. In this article, learn to configure the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server for IPv6, and to communicate with FTP servers through a simple Java program that uses the IPv6 address.

Design patterns are just for Java architects -- at least that's what you may have been led to believe. In fact, design patterns are useful for everyone. If these tools aren't exclusive to architecture astronauts, what are they, and why are they useful in PHP applications? This article explains.

The Dutch municipality of Groningen (180.000 inhabitants) recently announced to migrate to OpenOffice.org. The municipality expects to save 330 thousand Euros, of which 160 thousand will be used for the migration. Groningen isn't ready to switch to Linux yet, but it is currently busy to make the applications it uses OS-independent.

Whole article in Dutch only

Embedded VAR (value-added reseller) Mistral Solutions is supporting Linux and other embedded OSes on a digital receiver PMC (processor mezzanine card) from Pentland Systems that targets high-speed analog data acquisition applications. The RAD-2 PMC features an unspecified processor and user-programmable FPGA.

Closed source drivers for video cards have been a vexing problem for free software enthusiasts for some time. Open source drivers for most video cards exist, but fail to take full advantage of the cards' ability, leaving users with a choice between free and high performance. The good news is that the Open Graphics Project (OGP) is making progress toward a completely open video card. The bad news is that it will still be a while before free software enthusiasts will be able to use a completely open video card.

The Linux Incompatibility List is an attempt to catalog and document hardware/peripherals of all kinds that do not work with the Linux operating system.

A WEE SPAT has broken out between virus-busters over the security merits of open source software.

While McAfee reckons open source's very openness makes it easy to fiddle with, rival Trend Micro reckons it's the openness that makes dodgy code easy to spot.

Thousands of wildebeest are making their way to Angola from Zambia in a little-known and expanding migration that is a sign of renewal for the war-ravaged African country.
[...]
"It is like nature reasserting itself, a really positive sign for Angola," said Boote.

[Kinda like that for GNU software, too. (Hey, we have to keep track of the mascots.) -- grouch]

Paying independent security researchers a bounty for responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities is not the best way to protect users, according to Microsoft.
[...]
Numerous companies offer a "bug bounty" including Firefox maker Mozilla.

[It's a matter of supply and demand. MS supplies so many vulnerabilities that no one could afford to pay more than pennies apiece to find them. -- grouch]

The first CCHIT certified EMR products have arrived with the announcementhere.'On July 18, 2006, the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) announced the first ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) products to attain CCHIT Certified status.The following CCHIT Certified products have been tested and passed inspection of 100 percent of a comprehensive set of criteria for: Functionality...Interoperability...Security... Is this a good, bad or indifferent development?

IBM has announced that its portfolio of middleware and systems platforms will support Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 offerings. The new SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings incorporate the open source Xen virtualization software to help businesses increase server utilization and lower management costs.

Some eight days ago, Joe Barr asked in Newsforge about Tremulous: The best free software game ever?

Today I stumbled upon a number of essays from Dominic Humphries. I found them useful, especially for new users of Free and Open Source software, and probably Linux (or any of the BSDs).