Showing all newswire headlines

In the "Christmas and Winter Holiday Gift Guide" category plus a light review of Knoppix, MozillaQuest Magazine (MozillaQuest.Com) asks and answers: "Would you like a better computer operating system than Microsoft Windows -- plus hundreds of great applications and an easy to read and follow user's guide for less then $30? Then grab a copy of Knoppix for Dummies . . . [It] is an excellent introductory tutorial for the Knoppix distribution of the GNU-Linux operating system. It includes a live DVD with a bootable version of Knoppix.

Joy to the world, the browser has come.

Such is the holiday sentiment that nonprofit Mozilla Group is asking its customers to share in the name of promoting its latest open source Web browser, Firefox 1.5. The Mountain View, Calif.-based organization launched its first official marketing campaign ever on Wednesday, an initiative that will ask existing Firefox users to make short films about their experiences using the software to convince other people to try it.

The deadline arrives for SCO to file with the courts whatever evidence the company has found that there's Unix code in Linux.

This article presents a view on some of the biggest events of 2005 with comments by Bruce Schneier, Howard Schmidt, Dr. Gerhard Eschelbeck, Mikko H. Hyppönen, Ira Winkler and Fyodor.

Shares of computer-related companies Research In Motion Ltd. and Red Hat Inc. gained after they reported results that exceeded analysts' estimates. Albertson's Inc. fell after the New York Times said the grocery chain rejected a takeover bid.

The SCO Group's revenue continued to fall in the fourth quarter and during fiscal 2005, as Unix sales slumped. Management, however, tried to put a positive spin on the results, released after Thursday's market close, saying that cost-cutting measures have made SCO's Unix business profitable again and adding that plenty of cash remains to continue a legal battle against IBM.

Linux Networx announced last week that it had signed an OEM agreement with IBM to distribute IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS).

Stephane Eranian posted an overview of theperfmon2 interface, highlighting key features. He begins, "the goal of the perfmon2 interface is to provide access to the hardware performance counters present in all modern processors." He goes on to explain, "the interface is designed to be builtin, very generic, flexible and extensible. It is not designed to support a single application or a small class of monitoring tools. The goal is to avoid fragmentation where you have one tool using one interface. Because we want the interface to be an integral part of the kernel, special care is taken to make it robust and secure. The interface is uniform across all hardware platforms, i.e., it offers the same level of software functionalities on each platform." The full document can be found below.

2.6 maintainer Andrew Morton reviewed the document commenting, "thanks for putting this together. It helps." He included comments throughout, then noted in summary, "overall: I worry about excessive configurability, excessive features." Stephane acknoweldged these comment explaining, "in general I am not a big fan of putting stuff in the kernel just because it's cool to be kernel developer. Quite to the contrary, if I could get out of the kernel development, it would certainly make my work easier. Every feature that is supported by perfmon was put in there because of user needs and because there was no better way to implement them in user space and yet provide the same level of efficiency or simplicity."

Q&A: OSDL spokesperson Bill Weinberg shares insight on the organization's new MLI (Mobile Linux Initiative).

A review of Belenix - a Live CD based on Open Solaris kernel.

Although most liveCD Linux distros are generally meant to be used for evaluation or demo purposes, such as trying the particular distro before installing it on your hard drive, some can be used quite successfully as a Linux desktop, without ever installing them to your hard drive. Why do this? Which ones are best for this purpose?

To find out the answer to these and other interesting questions, read this informative DesktopLinux.com article by guest columnist Frank Richards:

Even with the best recovery systems in place accidents can still happen. When you've terminally trashed the file system of your drive after a 4AM coding marathon more drastic measures than a backup restore are called for. Enter Foremost.

A good Web browser can interpret all kinds of coding and deliver to your computer screen a page that looks pretty much the way its creator envisioned. Choose the wrong browser, and you'll find yourself stuck or unwittingly vulnerable to strangers with bad intentions.

Our choice: Mozilla's just-updated Firefox 1.5, which looks and feels a lot like the original Firefox that made its debut in November 2004. It suppresses pop-up ads, thwarts spyware and loads pages faster than Internet Explorer, the browser used by about 85 percent of Web surfers.

There is little disagreement about the opportunities for Linux on mobile phones, but it will take some work to give Linux its legs. While Linux today is one player among the many operating systems in the mobile handset market, finding its stride will be a matter of operating system enhancements, the formation of standards by the Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS), and use of the open source platform by a major manufacturer with a winning product, analysts said.

KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006, and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation!

Do you remember the day when Linux users had no Internet browser? Under the conformities of MSXML Document Standard, those days would return.

[ED: Kind of repost but it's important to understand the threat -bstadil]

The newest version of the popular open-source IM client supports more IM protocols, but not VOIP or video.

Mozilla Corp. has rolled out the second Release Candidate (RC2) of Thunderbird 1.5, the e-mail client intended to complement the popular Firefox browser.

When Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli agreed to deliver a seminar on "Open Source in Government" to parliamentary staff members and representatives of local government in the United Kingdom earlier this month, he planned to introduce his audience to some basic concepts. However, when he got there, he found that most of the audience was already familiar with the concepts. As a result, instead of educating people in public life, he may have done more than he hoped -- he may have helped to create an ongoing forum in which the free and open source software (FOSS) communities, political lobbyists, and members of the governing Labour Party and the opposition Conservative Party can work together to promote the use of FOSS in the governments of the United Kingdom.

A lot of people ask about the real savings that Open Source can bring to school districts. Noxon Schools has used Open Source software for 6 years now and so I wanted to demonstrate the actual savings and philosophy of Open Source in a real life setting.

Noxon Schools is a rural school district in remote northwest Montana with a student body of about 270 students. The school uses 4 Linux Terminal Servers on separate networks to serve 125 Linux Thin Clients. In addition, the school has a Web server, DNS server, 2 Proxy Servers, Backup Server and a Samba server to provide all of the services the school needs in house. 60 computers run Windows 2000 or XP.

[Ed.] Don't you just love it when schools adopt FOSS and save some money? I certainly DO.