Showing all newswire headlines

Heard of ODF? Sure you have. Since the Open Document Format got ISO approval, earlier this month, it’s been getting a lot of incomplete and inaccurate media attention. It’s about time someone set the record straight.

LXer Feature: 17-May-06

New users of GNU/Linux must be handled with patience. Most come from years of a consistent user experience that trains them to consider computers to be magic boxes. They typically have strange beliefs, such as restarting the computer as a magic pill to cure the imbalance of software humours, which must be gently removed and replaced with logic.

[Contributing Editor, Terry Vessels, guides the experienced hacker through the sometimes patience-testing task of assisting GNU/Linux newbies. - dcparris]

InQub Ltd offers personal remote KDE desktops on Kubuntu using NoMachine's NX technology for bandwidth savings and connection encryption for a small monthly charge. Each account is comes with 1 GB of home directory storage and is customisable by the respective user. This service represents an interesting approach of working with KDE without installation and maintenance issues, especially for GNU/Linux newbies and users travelling a lot. Users can get a week's free trial of the service.

Imagine you cannot speak, or move your hands. Now imagine your only means of communication is through a proprietary voice synthesiser that only speaks in European languages, cannot be localised and costs a fortune. Researchers at the CSIR are currently developing open source technology and a web-based portal that aims to empower and enhance the lives of over four-million people with disabilities in South Africa.

It's hard to imagine that Sony, a company that continues to actively block unlicensed applications on the PSP, will welcome the homebrew community with open arms when it ushers in the PlayStation 3. But, according SCE network system development manager Izumi Kawanishi, the console will ship with a built-in Linux OS, complete with compilers and other tools.

[Not to sound cynical or anything, but just be on the lookout for rootkits... - dcparris]

MIT's "$100-dollar laptop" has created a huge buzz, but does it make sense for the developing world? Linux International executive director, Jon "Maddog" Hall, offered an alternative for South Africans at LinuxWorld Johannesburg on Tuesday.

San Francisco-based StumbleUpon, which has four employees, makes a recommendation engine. When its users don’t want to trust places like a search engine, Google News, or Boing Boing to surprise them with fun and interesting sites, they ask the free service to throw something new their way. Then the company incorporates feedback to better deduce appropriate fits for each user.

At JavaOne, CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Senior VP Rich Green say they will look to the community to determine how best to open-source Java.

[Now I can breath a little easier. Just make sure it's an FSF-approved license so they can start focusing on other important projects. - dcparris]

A live CD Linux distribution can offer a full-fledged computing environment on a CD or DVD, but if you have access to a Windows-based machine, a removable storage device with Windows portable applications might be a better option. Luckily, using a Windows machine doesn't mean you can't use open source software. Many of the most popular portable applications are, in fact, open source: applications like OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Gaim. Let's take a look at some of the lesser-known and most useful portable applications you can put on your USB flash drive or mobile hard disk.

Statistics Canada has responded to concerned free software users by adding GNU/Linux support to the online census. While other free operating systems remain unsupported and issues about security and policy remain, this response is an important first step in ensuring open access to Canadian government online services.

RMI activation daemon and persistent naming service tools are now included. Print service discovery, single document print jobs and support for client-formatted print data through CUPS has been added. Support for custom mouse cursors, system clipboard and selection access has been implemented.

The problem: you've taken the trouble to hand-build your finely tuned 64-bit computer, and you've installed your favorite 64-bit flavor of Linux -- but the cretins who run the World Wide Web are still putting up content viewable only on 32-bit Intel-compatible Web browsers, either designed for their in-house plugins that they supply only as 32-bit binaries, or in compressed media formats for which players are available only as 32-bit binaries. What are your options?

The Kororaa Live CD project has been temporarily shut down by questions over the legality of its distribution. The highly popular Live CD included the Xgl features which apply 3-D eye candy to the desktop. It also included binary only versions of Nvidia and ATI drivers, and that is the bug in the ointment.

Limp-vkk-ver1.sourceforge.net reports - Linux Multimedia Player is a tiny Linux-based Live distribution that converts your computer into a multimedia player. It supports most of the known formats (MPEG 1 and 2, DivX, WMV, qt-mov, Real, MP3, WAV, WMA, and Ogg, VCD and DVD). It has auto-detection of harddisk (IDE, SATA, or SCSI) and sound, video, and network cards, USB storage device and supports all cards as of kernel 2.6.15. It identifies the filesystems and mounts them in the folder “START”.

OSDir has some nice shots of LiMP in the LiMP 2.2 Screenshot Tour.

The challenges for IT in places like Africa, where a number of developing nations reside, are formidable: power grid issues, metered telephony in many cases, and the heat, sand, or storm conditions that make hardware difficult to maintain. One group in Nigeria, the Fantsuam Foundation, is partnering with expLAN Computers, Ltd. of Devon, United Kingdom, to developing a computer that addresses hardware issues. The effort is called the Solo Computer Project.

This article -- focusing on the database developer role -- presents the basic data types you can use to store data in an Apache Derby database.

"Oracle announce new free product for Linux/Windows users":

Mayandar: Personal note - It's possible that Oracle is moving to Free/Open Source?? or It take a chair for GNU/Linux big game? -

Welcome to this year's 20th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. With a successful SUSE Linux 10.1 release freshly behind us, the attention of distribution watchers can once again turn to Ubuntu, as the project's final two weeks of "Dapper" development focuses on bug fixes and polish. Has Kororaa broken the GPL by including proprietary kernel modules on their live CD? Nobody knows for sure, but even if it hasn't, the controversy means that the project's developers might stop all work on their Xgl edition.