Showing all newswire headlines

Open Source office suites have been in the spotlight recently with the current media frenzy about Massachusetts' decision to use the OpenDocument Format (ODF) for all documents created by state departments.
One of the office suites supporting ODF is KDE's KOffice.
KDE developer Raphael Langerhorst's talks about his experience with KOffice at home, university and in the business world, and the future of the suite.

Linux is on top, once again. On the bi-annual Top500 List, just released at the Supercomputing Conference in Seattle, IBM's Linux-powered Blue Gene/L retains the top slot. Blue Gene/L is not alone, as seven of the top 10 systems are running Linux. AIX, UNICOS, and Super-UX also appear in the top ten.

Open source software developers and users can now check the detail and depth of patent pledges from the likes of Red Hat, IBM, and Sun through a new Patent Commons site from the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL).

LXer Day Desk: 11-15-2005

Not to suggest that Bill Gates and Michael Dell have any influence on famed Gartner Distinguished Analysts, I tend to look skeptically at their pronouncements. Once Silver Lake Partners, a Silicon Valley private equity-investment firm took an increasing stake in the Gartner, I started pondering the effect of having Bill and Michael as investors in Silver Lake limited partnerships. So, when Gartner said, hold off on Vista until 2008 I started looking for a catch.
Diggable

Connection-Telecom co-founder and Asterisk developer Steve Davies is the first South African to be awarded the Digium Certified Asterisk Professional accreditation.

The French tax agency is planning to move 80.000 desktops to OpenOffice.org instead of upgrading them to Office XP, thereby reducing the cost of migration from €29.5m to a mere €200,000.

[ED.- Although the headline is slightly misleading, the article itself is great. Migrating to OpenOffice.org makes more than 99% savings! Talk about "Get the Facts" ;) - Tsela]

In some good news for KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, the famous African entrepreneur, announced at the Ubuntu Below Zero conference that he is now using the Kubuntu distribution (screenshots) on his own desktop machine and affirmed his commitment to the KDE-based distribution.

Fedora-netdev!

This message is to announce the availability of a new Fedora-based kernel repository. The kernels available there are based upon the standard Fedora kernels, with the addition of current upstream networking patches which are more recent than the Fedora kernel's upstream base.

Ruby Weekly News is a summary of the week's activity on the ruby-talk mailing list / comp.lang.ruby newsgroup, brought to you by Tim Sutherland, with contributions from Christophe Grandsire.

There you are all bright-eyed and eager, ready to roll up your sleeves and go to work in the exciting new world of Free/Open Source software. You have rosy visions of getting paid to do enjoyable, challenging work. Maybe even fat stock options that vest while you are still young, so you can quit the wage-slave routine and venture forth on your own and maybe even fund projects yourself.

Diggable

Due to an error I introduced into a publish script, the apt metadata information for RHL 7.3 and RHL 9 had not been updated since Sept 15 of this year. I have fixed this error and uploaded the latest information, which was generated on Nov 13. I apologize for any problems this may cause.

Patrick Tarpey writes: "Without ballyhoo or headlines, open source is eating away at the enterprise computing core and moving steadily outwards. Open source desktops are here already, but I believe it will be at least three years before we see any real effect on the Microsoft-dominated corporate desktop. So on the surface nothing looks untoward,..."

[Ed: I don't know. The idea of ingesting anything Microsoft sorta ruins my apetite. - dcparris]

Canonical seeks clean-cut, non-smoking businesses that preferably have some spare cash (but not essential). The open source software firm has introduced a partnership programme aimed at encouraging business development around Ubuntu. Will SA firms bite?

When Novell gave up supporting KDE, I expected something to happen. But what I didn't expect Novell to do, as one KDE supporter put it to me,"was to cave in so fast."

Kill Bill's Browser: 13 Good reasons to switch from IE to Firefox is pretty funny. (8. Mozilla has never made a talking paper clip.)

Is your server as secure as it could be? Sure, you use a firewall, mandate strong passwords, and patch regularly. You even take a proactive approach by performing security audits with tools such as nmap and Nessus. Yet you may still be vulnerable to zero-day exploits and privilege escalation attacks. If these possibilities keep you awake at night, you're not alone. The sleepless folks with the grsecurity project have developed an easy-to-use set of security enhancements to help put your fears to rest.

New software platform brings ease and interactivity of desktop applications to high-performance computers

The computing giant ventures takes on supercomputing with a beta of its first supercomputer operating system.

[ED - Linux commands 76% of the top 500 supercomputers. What can MS possible gain from this endevour? Wonder what their licensing scheme will be. Per CPU? bstadil]

...antivirus firms are already warning about a new trojan in the wild taking advantage of the rootkit. This story raisess some questions. These CDs with rootkits have been sold for 8 months. Where was Microsoft? Why didn't they and antivirus companies notice this rootkit themselves long ago? ...So, Symantec and "the big antivirus companies" already knew about the rootkit? According to this statement, it seems they did. Are they then liable as well as Sony?

Christopher Koch, CIO's Executive Editor, Investigations, presents good, honest conversation about what works and what doesn't for creating an enterprise IT strategy that aligns with the business strategy of the company. Do you have an issue you'd like to see covered here? Do you have some nugget of wisdom you'd like to share? Did you recently read something or hear a good presentation about the topic that would help other CIOs?