Showing all newswire headlines

Three years ago I built my own computer and installed Mandrake v9.1 on it. It was a joy to learn and use Linux, to not worry about spyware and viruses any longer, and to graduate to a stable operating system. Not long afterward I became involved with a small charity that refurbishes older computers to donate to people who normally would not be able to afford their own computer. The donated computers we work on are generally 133MHz to 500MHz Pentium II vintage, often with less than 128MB of RAM. Mandrake proved impossibly slow to use on these machines, but VectorLinux impressed me with its speed, ease of install, well-chosen lightweight applications, and stability.

Rough justice, Russian style

Network Sees Double-Digit Gains Among Core Demo of Adults 25-54

Jack Messman sounds off on Novell's present and future, and where the company is headed with its Linux products.

Red Hat Inc. a leading distributor of open-source Linux software, said on Tuesday quarterly profit more than doubled on the back of strong subscription sales from corporate customers.

First-ever Recipients of the Educator of the Year and Student of the Year Will be Honored at the EE Times ACE Awards Gala

What are all those little orange RSS buttons and XML buttons you see everywhere including the site you are on right now? Why do you see code when you click on them?

There are a number of open source IT monitoring and management tools that enterprises should be keeping an eye on. In a recent InfoWorld blog, GroundWork Open Source CEO Ranga Rangachari highlights the Ganglia project. The Ganglia Monitoring System is an open source cluster monitoring technology started within UC Berkeley's Millenium Clustered Computing Labs. It has been downloaded over 110,000 times from 145 countries and currently has dozens of contributing developers. As large companies are increasingly creating server farms of thousands of servers, new server management and monitoring requirements are surfacing. On the monitoring side, polling breaks down after a few hundred servers, so you have to go to an interrupt-driven architecture with "list and announce" protocols. Also, aside from the technical issues, traditional monitoring solutions are prohibitively expensive when you roll out hundreds of servers at a time. As clustering continues to become more pervasive in enterprise IT, Ganglia will be one to watch.

Red Hat's quarterly profit more than doubled on the back of strong subscription sales from corporate customers.

This year I went to the FOSDEM for the first time, and like the last few years, I will most probably also visit Linuxtag. But what I missed so far, and where I also cannot go this time, is the Debconf, which will be in Mexico. So I searched around a bit and found almost the whole conference of last year (in Finland) on 2 DVDs, which you can download for free.

The UK's Open Source Academy has launched a new Certified Open branding scheme that it hopes will enable organizations to judge the openness of their potential suppliers and their own internal skills competency.

The company reported that its annual subscription revenue was up 53 percent from the prior year. The numbers are based on Red Hat holding onto its top customers, officials said. (Linux-Watch)

Most books on Linux software package management limit themselves to one or perhaps two distros. After all, each flavor of Linux seems to use a different tool for package management on the system. Michael Jang decides to take on all the major systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora, SUSE, and Debian, plus several others. The range of this book goes from patch management on the individual computer to updating software packages on entire networks.

Once only vending machines for the free toasting of open source distributions, Freedom Toasters could soon have user upload and content-sharing capabilities. Richard Frank spoke to lead developer, Jason Hudson, to find out where the Freedom Toaster is heading in 2006.

Yesterday my son Jeremy sent an email. He is about to rent a root server together with a friend, which they want to use as a gaming server. Their OS of choice: Debian GNU/Linux.

The CSIR's Meraka Institute has developed an open source IVR designer for Asterisk, DialogPalette, which it hopes will make IVRs more locally and culturally relevant.

Smart font technology, which automatically inserts advanced typographical features in the right context, has existed for a decade, but it is still only partly implemented in most operating systems and programs. Now, a project called Graphite is not only introducing smart font technology to GNU/Linux, but offering it in a form more advanced than any previous implementations. For typographically straightforward languages like English, Graphite delivers a higher level of sophistication in document design without any effort by the user. However, for non-European languages, Graphite's smart font technology is even more important, because it simplifies their use on computers.

Today Norbert Tretkowski, one of the Debian Developers, posted about his experiences with his new iRiver T10 USB device, and his conclusion is the same I would have:

Apparently, Microsoft's next release of its flagship operating system, called 'Vista', has been delayed yet again. This really isn't surprising news, due to the fact that it's been delayed quite a number of times already.

What is surprising, however, is that according to reports, some Microsoft developers are now in open rebellion.