Showing all newswire headlines

Xbox-Linux Project has announced that they have startd a hacking project against Xbox360 – The Free60 Project, by porting Linux and Darwin onto this brand-new gaming console.

[ED: I dont know if this will be as easy as the old XBoxes were, but it will be interesting to watch. I am looking forward to seeing a lot of first gen XBoxes converted to doing something useful.]

The EII (enterprise information integration) market is going through interesting times. This article discusses a number of the things that have happened or that have been reported to me.

Large companies and analysts that work with open source are fond of talking about vendor "sensitivity" when they are explaining why some customers are reluctant to go public about migrations away from proprietary software.

Diggable

Who gave the Globe writers the tip on Peter Quinn's Trips? How did they know he didn't file internal reports? Is an inexpensive trip exempt? Will it ruin his career?

Perhaps it's time to step up the struggle against Microsoft.

Related story:
Slashdot Article Reference 1646243

While the authors of the study admit it uses a small sample set, the conclusions support contentions that the DMCA has been used to hobble expression on the Internet, even among security researchers, who have an explicit exemption in the law.

It was on the front page of the Boston Globe newspaper today, and the lead article on their web site--an investigation that normally would be buried in the City & Region section of the paper. So you can't miss it: IT manager Peter Quinn of the Massachusetts state government is criticized for not fully reporting trips he took during his promotion of the OpenDocument format.

Microsoft, after a late start (like most technology companies) has poured millions into lobbying over the past decade. Rumors even suggest that several government IT managers who dared to consider open-source alternatives to Microsoft heard promptly from both the company and their own bosses to pull back. So it would be highly gratifying to Microsoft and those trying to maintain the status quo if someone could turn the tables and try to smear the proponents of open source with similar influence.
[Ed: Made the Front Page of Digg and Accepted by Slashdot. Thanks Lxer! -tadelste]

The Romney administration has launched a review of several out-of-state trips that its top technology officer took to conferences sponsored in part by companies who stand to benefit from a change in computer software used by the state.

Diggable

If Microsoft is the big cat prowling the Serengeti of software with its Windows operating system, companies that promote Linux are playing the part of elk, banding together in protective herds. In a 30-day span, four groups backed by a number of companies pledging their allegiance to open source software launched with an emphasis on propagating Linux in a world where Windows reigns.

It's amazing to see the advancements of BSD on the desktop in 2005. This I believe is in a large part to a few very successful BSD products, namely PC-BSD, FreeSBIE and now DesktopBSD - all of which are based on FreeBSD. It's interesting to watch this play out.. Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris and Darwin all shooting for the desktop. Only Darwin has made it so far within Mac OSX.
Read more at Distro Reviews

From the list of attendees, it was obvious that open source in Europe is A Really Big Thing(TM) - several hundred delegates from the UK and continental Europe converged on Amsterdam's classiest hotel to receive the wisdom there imparted....In each standalone terminal, the server runs FreeBSD while the client runs Debian Linux with the KDE windows manager. All user software is free or open source, and KDE language modules have been added for isiZulu, isiXhosa, tshiVenda, Setswana, and Afrikaans.

DistroWatch reports - The development of Fedora Core 5 has finally begun: The Fedora Project announces the first release of the Fedora Core 5 development cycle, available for the i386, x86_64, and PPC/PPC64 architectures. Beware that Test releases are recommended only for Linux experts/enthusiasts or for technology evaluation, as many parts are likely to be broken and the rate of change is rapid. Notable features of FC5 Test1: Modular X.Org; vastly improved Asian language input support with SCIM; kernel based on 2.6.15-rc1; GCC 4.0.2; GNOME 2.12; KDE 3.4.92; Xen 3.0 snapshot for i386; improved Open Source Java...

OSDir has some great shots of Fedora Core 5 Test 1.

New or Refurbished, Windows or Linux

Stores these days move directly from back-to-school sales to animated Santa displays, but the official kickoff of the holiday shopping season -- the day after Thanksgiving, dubbed Black Friday for retailers whose businesses get into the black with fourth-quarter sales -- is the time to find some tremendous savings on desktop PCs. Combine seasonal savings with ever-lower component costs, and the $1,000 price limit of HardwareCentral's regular Grand Openings reports looks much too lavish. In fact, you can find a good PC for well under $400.

References to free software and Linux were removed from a UN document after Microsoft claimed that such software aims to 'make it impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product'

According to data from e-mail security firm MailFrontier, only 4 percent of users can spot a phished e-mail 100 percent of the time.

Koders, Inc. has introduced new plug-in enhancements that have the potential to transform the way developers write code, the company says, by actively providing recommendations for code reuse while they work.

South African news site Tectonic is reporting how KDE terminals are Giving South African Farmers a Leg-up.

In today's Walkabout, Marcel Gagne shows you how to set up and run your own IRC server.

Embedded Linux play LynuxWorks is tackling migration with a new partnership announced this week with embedded software solutions provider MapuSoft. LynuxWorks will use MapuSoft's OS Changer and OS Abstractor applications to help embedded developers port code from proprietary embedded operating systems to Linux.

Is your business ready to take the open source plunge? We test five leading desktop Linux distributions and come up with one winner.

There has been a lot of attention to the legal encumbrances in Microsoft's new MS XML format. In this article we'll look at the technical side, and try to show you how the design of these formats affect interoperability. After all, that is the purpose of open standards.