Showing all newswire headlines

Mark Twain once said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." However, the sun was shining and it was beautiful the week of August 8th in the Golden Gate city for IDG's semi-annual U.S Linux event. As Linux continued into the mainstream, there were a host of vendors at the Moscone Center exhibiting their wares at this year's west coast event.

David writes: "The City of Mannheim is following the lead of its neighboring southern German city of Munich in moving away from Microsoft software and toward Linux, but the city's IT officials this week are calling the move a 'soft migration.' "

"Mannheim is gradually moving its 110 servers to open-source software before it tackles the job of moving its 3,700 PCs, according to media reports. The city has commissioned a study on OpenOffice."

So, open-source is just now gaining favor in Germany? Really.

The Race to Linux is over, and the coding contest's sponsors have declared the winners.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the creation of a new annual award, "Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit".

ITTIA, which offers database solutions for platforms where limited memory, storage, and processing power make software development a challenge, said its db.* database has been tested on MontaVista Linux Pro 3.1

But if you watched the video replay of the conference, you'd see something interesting: Sun (Research) co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim handing Google CEO Eric Schmidt one of the new Sun Fire servers that Schmidt himself helped design. Google (Research) spokeswoman Lynn Fox confirmed that the agreement includes a commitment by Google to buy Sun hardware.

Mozilla Firefox is rapidly catching on with Mac users, and for good reason: It’s free, fast, and flexible, and it does an outstanding job of displaying most Web pages. (This cross-platform browser is also increasingly popular among Windows users, largely because of its excellent pop-up-blocking features). And beneath Firefox’s simple interface are some surprisingly powerful features. The following tips will help you maximize this up-and-comer’s potential. (All these tips were tested in Firefox 1.0.6 but should also work in newer versions.)

Joris Evers writes: "A Microsoft patch meant to fix critical security flaws in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is causing trouble for some users, the company said Friday.

"The patch was released Tuesday to fix four Windows flaws, including one that experts predict will be exploited by a worm in the coming days. The flaw, tagged "critical" by Microsoft, lies in a Windows component for transaction processing called the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator, or MSDTC. "

Lange Flugzeugbau GmbH has used embedded Linux to build a battery-propelled self-launching sailplane that it says is more reliable, quieter, and easier to operate than similar gliders powered by combustion engines. The Antares glider uses a Geode-powered PC/104 Linux system to monitor and control battery levels.

What is all this K stuff? That's often the question when people that have never used Linux and KDE ask when logging in to the environment for the first time. The K naming convention is often portrayed as confusing and cheesy, lacking professionalism. This article discusses the KDE audio mixer. It is the first in a series, each one devoted to a different KDE application. editors note: That is the blog's name.

Operating systems for mobile devices will go through a change as well. Linux will emerge as an operating system, giving businesses greater control over what's available on their devices.

Shafer writes: "I don't hate Apple. I don't even hate Apple-lovers. I do, however, possess deep odium for the legions of Apple polishers in the press corps who salute every shiny gadget the company parades through downtown Cupertino as if they were members of the Supreme Soviet viewing the latest ICBMs at the May Day parade."

The ClearQuest plug-in for Eclipse enables you to perform ClearQuest activities (tasks) in an Eclipse environment. While many of you are familiar with Rational ClearQuest and/or Eclipse, this article is aimed at bridging the gap to provide you with a good understanding of the ClearQuest Client for Eclipse. For ClearQuest fans, this is an offer that is hard to refuse - save a significant amount with this sepcial deal on Rational ClearQuest Licenses.

Open-source group plans to launch effort to push the operating system for the ever more powerful mobile gadgets.

The lowest form of "browser" out there is the search engine. The search engine is about the equivalent of a version 2 browser. It can't read flash, DHTML, JavaScript, dynamic pages, - even having trouble at times with frames. Search engines may have difficulty crawling, indexing, and extracting the content of your site if you have broken HTML.

peekj writes: "There are sites that currently count the number of Linux users, but I thought, why not map Linux users on a map? I found this great service by Frapper! and set up a map. So add yourself here!!"

NEW YORK - It’s been a rough week for Marten Mickos, the chief executive of open source database maker MySQL AB. First his most dreaded rival, Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ), acquired a company that supplies a key piece of MySQL’s software, a move that could make life difficult for Uppsala, Sweden-based MySQL, which has the most popular open source database.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Mickos is being denounced as a traitor by noisy fanatics in the open source software community because last month he dared to make a deal with SCO Group (nasdaq: SCOX - news - people ), a company reviled by fans of Linux and other open source software.

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research will promote the use of open source by government agencies.

It shouldn't be surprising that Google aggressively goes after the best talent in the business. Google's nascent IM business is apparently no exception.

To that end, Google has hired the lead developer of the GAIM instant messaging project, one of the most popular open source projects on the planet, to help its IM development.

Sean Egan publicly broke the news on the GAIM Web site this week, revealing that he has been working in Google's Seattle office for a month and a half on the company's GoogleTalk IM application.

It gave the Linux-based voting system a trial run in January, when about 600 people voted online in a referendum in the capital, Tallinn. The plan is to allow online voting in the next parliamentary elections in 2007.