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When people look around for reasons to say that Linux is just too hard, they will invariably arrive at software installations. The classic refrains include the difficulty of building from source, the problems with dependencies, and so on. Although there is some truth hidden in there somewhere, building from source is rarely necessary for mainstream packages because precompiled applications exist for most major distributions. Again, on the issue of package dependencies, most distributions use software installation tools that take care of the whole dependency issue for you, such as SUSE’s YaST, Debian’s apt-GUI, Synaptic, or Mandriva’s urpmi to name just a few.

This week, advisories were released for courier, osh, curl, ethereal, phpMyAdmin, Openswan, Xmail, Ethereal, perl, openvpn, thunderbird, xmovie, mplayer, and ffmpeg. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva.

Putting on its fedora hat, Red Hat recently released the first version of its free, open-source Directory Server.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Visto Corp., a maker of mobile e-mail technology, has sued Microsoft Corp. for allegedly infringing on three of its patents related to how information is handled between servers and handheld devices such as cellular phones.

The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction to stop the infringement, was filed late Wednesday — the same day Visto announced that NTP Inc. had acquired an equity stake in the company and signed a patent licensing deal.

Developers of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) have teamed with those at the OpenSync project to produce a graphical interface called KitchenSync to replace the KPilot PDA sync tool beginning with the release of KDE 4.

As the end of the year approaches, it appears that virtualization's time in the open source spotlight has all but come.

Whether it is because of the machinations of companies like Palo Alto, Calif.-based XenSource Inc. or analyst endorsement, emulating an enterprise-class infrastructure environment using open source has been on the rise in 2005. And, now, it looks ready to burst next year.

Two years ago, Joe Drouin, global CIO for automotive safety maker TRW, had a decision to make: whether to buy new hardware and continue running one of the auto parts supplier's major ERP systems from QAD on a proprietary Unix environment or standardize his system on a Dell cluster running Linux.

Here, thanks to jtiner, is the transcript of Microsoft's Alan Yates' remarks at yesterday's meeting regarding ODF/MS XML in Massachusetts. The audio from Dan Bricklin is here, if you wish to follow along. Yates also spoke in the Q & A session, if anyone is in a position to transcribe that part too.

I notice three salient things, from my point of view. You may notice other points, particularly if you are technical experts, but here's how it struck me.

When the first announcements came out that a new Sharp Zaurus would "run Linux," the Linux community was abuzz with fascination and rumors. Years later, there are still handheld devices running Linux that draw inspiration and ideas from Sharp's work, even though the Linux-based Zaurus has faded to obscurity in the U.S. market. In this article Peter Seebach dismantles the Zaurus SL-5600 to get a better look into history.

A paper recently written by two university professors offers a business model that would keep the software open and free, while allowing its developers to profit. The model would have open source software companies make money through royalty fees and sales of their newest innovations, then offer the complete software and source code for free after a predetermined period.

A new study on the major players in the Unix server market has declared IBM the clear customer favorite and brought to light some serious issues with Sun Microsystems' product line. Most alarmingly for Sun, the company appears to have lost its cachet as the dominant Unix player and done so while alienating customers. Sun finished last in almost every one of the Gabriel Consulting Group (GCG) survey's categories, spanning technology performance, customer satisfaction and software tools

The fedora kernel-devel package does not include the complete kernel headers. This is not a problem in most cases, but there are times that the missing headers are absolutely needed. This document outlines a method to obtain the complete kernel headers for your currently running kernel from the sources, without compiling the kernel itself.

KDE Dot News is now fully hosted and supported by the OSU Open Source Lab

For those interested, the OSUOSL server hosting has been provided to us in the form of a Xen virtual machine running Gentoo Linux. Xen is completely transparent to the typical VM user and if I didn't know better I'd think we had a dedicated machine

Proprietary software vendors sow fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about free and open source software licenses because those licenses are new and different. More notably, open source software licenses threaten their business modes—and they want their customers to believe that those licenses will somehow "infect" their organizations. The truth is that open source software licenses will almost always be more beneficial for consumers than proprietary licenses. Furthermore, open source licenses rarely (if ever) impose more terms on software users that are any more onerous than those imposed by proprietary licenses.

This article is about software licenses, which spell out the rules by which you must play to use the software. Agreeing to an End User License Agreement (EULA) by opening a shrink-wrap package, clicking "OK" for an installer or downloading software from a website means you agree to abide by the terms the software owner sets. If you have questions about the terms of those agreements, you can contact your attorney for definitive answers.

The year 2005 has been chock full of Power Architecture news -- from Apple's departure from the Power Architecture family to the up and coming Cell Broadband Engine processor; from Blade.org to Power.org; and from being named fastest growing semiconductor supplier of 2005 to being named 2005 Top Fab, find out why Power Architecture technology is having the best year ever.

IBM IS BUILDING a Novell and Red Hat Linux channel in the big emerging markets of China, India, Brazil and Russia with plans to roll out in the rest of Europe next year

Despite having a strong feature set and excellent performance and stability, PostgreSQL lags significantly behind MySQL in one key area: Many more open source projects support MySQL than PostgreSQL. That limits PostgreSQL adoption to some extent because many users choose MySQL not because it's superior to PostgreSQL, but because their favorite open source project supports only MySQL. Christopher Kings-Lynne wants to change that.

Meeting of minds?

To say that Mandriva has been quiet on the Linux front lately might just qualify as an understatement. The Paris-based Linux distribution company has had a rough road these last couple of years, having pulled themselves out of redressement judiciaire (the French equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US) in March 2004.

HERNDON, Va., Dec. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The OpenVZ project today introduced a website (http://openvz.org) to freely distribute and offer support to the open source project promoting operating system virtualization through a collaborative, community effort.