Showing all newswire headlines

Each year ConsortiumInfo.org recognizes the most newsworthy standards organizations and the news services that did the best job covering that news. This year, we also recognize the best individual journalists, bloggers and community sites as well.

Texas Instruments (TI) and MontaVista Software announced in December they would pair TI's DaVinci technology-based products with embedded Linux, part of an attempt to more tightly integrate hardware and software in digital media, as the electronics industry looks to make the gadgets in users' lives more interoperable.

Linspire and Mirus Innovations announce the launch of Koobox, a new line of desktop computers that exclusively run Linux.

An online quiz that helps people choose between desktop Linux products is popular with companies and individuals, the designers say.

Novell's OpenSUSE.org project appears to be off to a solid start in its first six months of operation. The company reported Wednesday that it has recorded more than 750,000 verified installations of the free version of its Linux operating system -- an average of more than 7,000 installations per day.

WordPress 2.0 is out, and it brings a slew of improvements and new features, including WYSIWYG editing, user roles, easy database backups, and more. The WordPress home page describes the software as "state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform," but when you boil it down, WordPress is just damn good blogging software. WordPress is written in PHP, requires a MySQL database, and is available under the GPL. It's easy to use and fairly powerful.

As we return to work this first week of 2006, Linux users with the post-holiday blahs, cabin fever or seasonal affective disorder should be glad to know there is a lot to look forward to this year.

Taiwanese ODM Winston NeWeb Corp (WNC) is reportedly demonstrating a dual-mode cellular/VoIP phone that appears to be based on Linux and a branded version of Trolltech's Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE), at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.

Witold Wysota wrote in to inform us of the newly launched Qt Centre which is being billed as the ultimate Qt community site. With the support of Trolltech, Witold and former Qt Forum administrators, moderators and fans Axel Jaeger, Daniel Kish, Kevin Krammer, Johan Thelin, Jacek Piotrowski and Michael Goettsche have banded together to form the new site after learning that the Qt Forum as well as KDE-Forum.org had been hijacked for the purposes of boosting the Google Page Rank of unrelated external sites and have otherwise become neglected. If you had any public links to either Qt Forum or KDE-Forum.org please consider removing them or using the nofollow attribute. Let us hope that the new Qt Centre flourishes!

It's now open this new Italian Linux News Portal. It's url is www.spcnet.it and contains News in Italian language about Linux and Open Source.

Step forward for Oracle developers

Knowing how a BIOS works and how to configure the BIOS in your PC will hold you in good stead when installing Linux or any other OSes and doing many other things.

The Mozilla QA team has announced a community test day with focus on smoketesting nightly Firefox 1.5.0.1 builds.

For an application that isn't even publicly available, AllPeers – a Firefox plug-in being developed in Prague – is receiving a great deal of hype. Some are even predicting that this will be Firefox's killer app.

AllPeers is simply a peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that allows you to share digital content with a buddy list. Using Firefox as the front-end, AllPeers says that it will run cross-platform, allowing transfers between Windows, Mac and Linux, and possibly more in the future. And, like Firefox, it's going to be open source.

One of the arguments in Massachusetts against OpenDocument centered on the needs of the visually impaired. In this guest column, a visually impaired PC user explains that not only is using an exclusively Windows solution a crash-prone option, it is also far more expensive than equivalent technologies in OS X and, eventually, Linux. Scott Seder makes the case for more open source development in the Assistive Technology arena.

[Ed: I wish this argument had appeared during the original debate! Still, it is an excellent argument for Massachusetts - and other states - to consider. - dcparris]

Matthew Szulik stills remembers when, fresh out of college in 1978, he attended a meeting of the newly formed Massachusetts High Technology Council and watched Digital Equipment founder Ken Olsen bring out one of the company's PDP minicomputers and put it on a folding table.

"There was so much innovation occurring in the greater Boston area, and I was a 21-year-old kid, wide-eyed and impressionable. . . . [The experience] continues to have an impression on me," says Szulik, CEO of market-leading Linux distributor Red Hat.

At the beginning of his CES keynote, where I'm sitting now, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said"We expect a wifi connection at the coffee shop, and we're disappointed when we dont get it." Well, the same goes for the CEO keynotes at trade shows. And there's no wi-fi here. But I have a bluetooth bridge to the net through my cell phone, so these are my public notes about the keynote, live— or as close as my typing can get to it.

With a messagge dated 14 december 2005 the Ubuntu server team was officially created. This group of programmers has the task of creating a server-specific version of Ubuntu Linux. This is particularly interesting, since up to now the Debian-based distro has been desktop-oriented. That's why I decided to ask some question to Fabio Massimo Di Nitto server team "owner":

Open source software development firm Linux Center Latin America forecasts revenues of US$100mn in 2006, double what it expects to report in 2005, the company said in a statement.

In 2004, the Chile-based company billed US$10mn, Latin America sales director Carlos Muñoz said.

An ill wind is blowing near Microsoft right now. It's come and passed before, but this time seems different. I'm starting to get a lot of clients asking about this "Linux stuff." And I'm not even talking about the corporations trying to save money on software; I'm talking about individuals trying to save their home computers.

To begin with, I'm not alone in having my doubts about the "upcoming patch" that Microsoft has promised on the tenth of January. It's simply not going to be all it needs to be (even if it does appear on time).