Showing all newswire headlines

A protracted NSW government project to give its agencies cheaper and quicker access to Linux and open source software is reaching fruition with several vendors preparing to sign contracts as pre-approved suppliers.

Here is my second day take on the Google-Sun "news." As with Oakland, there's no there there. Parse the news release carefully and there's no Open Office, no direct competition to Microsoft at all. There's just Dr. Schmidt and his old boss, Scott McNealy, smiling with their hands in one anothers' corporate pockets.

"While Lenovo's "Think" brand is usually spotted waving the Microsoft Windows banner, the company does ship PCs with Red Hat Linux, but without any productivity software."

The University of Malta has launched the Mediterranean Virtual University (MVU), a European Union Euro-Mediterranean Information Society (EUMEDIS)-funded initiative which brings together 11 universities and institutions from across Europe and the Mediterranean region to provide high-quality online courses employing cutting-edge pedagogy and e-learning techniques all within the framework of a collaborative effort and administrative centralisation.

The Mall School for boys in Richmond, UK, has been around for 133 years, and to IT head Sue Warrington, it seemed like the prep school's Windows network was almost as old. Recently, the school got rid of its aging collection of "fat client" PCs and purchased a brand new network of Linux thin clients, including all the software a bunch of 4- to 13-year-old boys could possibly need, for a lot less than a proprietary solution.

Flock, the Web 2.0 browser sensation that hasn't even shipped its flagship browser to the public yet, got still more golden PR from another big media outlet, this time from Business Week. The buzz surrounding Flock seems to be reaching a fever pitch, and we common folk can only wonder whether all the hype is justified. I'm starting to think Flock will either be the biggest thing ever to happen to web browsing or the biggest flop.

OK, you one-click installers, listen up! In spite of the early dementia no doubt being brought on by living in a GUI cocoon, there's a chance you might learn something from this week's CLI Magic. Here's the thing: given the ease of installing free software apps these days, especially those installed outside your distro's package management, how do you get that the great game you installed from scratch last week when you learn it opens your system up to hostile takeover? Think that just removing the executable does the trick? Think again, oh rodent lover. Now you're ready to learn about Checkinstall.

Although some of manalaa.net’s coverage is dedicated to technology issues—Abdel Fattah is an IT specialist and a leading advocate of open-source software, notably as co-founder of the Egyptian Linux Users Group (EGLUG)—it is also highly political. Abdel Fattah and Bahei Eddin were part of the small group of “bloggers for change” that emerged last summer and organized several protests (alongside other movements) in Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. They can still often be seen on the sidelines of Kifaya protests, although they fiercely defend their independence from the movement.

Supported by the three main open source associations in Australia — Linux Australia, OSIA and AUUG — CeBIT Australia will provide visitors with an opportunity to gain hands-on experience with open source software.

If you're near Boston, Mass. and want to find out the development plans and design issues for the GNOME desktop, or just are curious to see an energetic collection of software developers from around the world interacting, head on down from now through Monday to the GNOME summit at MIT's famous Stata Center. Over one hundred people showed up for today's morning presentation, and nearly every one was a developer for GNOME or a related technology: X, Linux, or a desktop application.

Edditor's Note: Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in free software and open source technologies. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever published commercially in the United States on Linux, and the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer. His modest programming and system administration skills are mostly self-taught.

Bryce Harrington, Inkscape and Worldforge hacker (as well as super-friendly OSDL guy), recently opined that gaining lots and lots of users isn't the only -- or even the best -- gauge of success for an open source project.

chromatic is the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network, specializing in programming, Linux®, and open source development. He's also been known to evangelize to his co-workers toward better development practices, being the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide and the co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. -Ed

The rocky road for the once-mighty NOS could be running out

In the past year, development of the open source Xen virtualization platform (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/netos/xen/) has forged ahead at a rapid pace, adding support for hardware virtualization and large- scale enterprise server hardware such as symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) guests and physical address extensions (PAE). Simultaneously, the Xen project has amassed a substantial community of developers and refined the software to be stable and robust. Now with a third major release, Xen is ready for “The Big Show,” production use. Up until the recent release of Xen 3.0, a major obstacle to the adoption of Xen in some environments was the software’s lack of support for unmodified operating systems. Xen’s original approach of paravirtualization, modifying an operating system to facilitate virtualization, yielded great performance, but failed to host operating systems for which source code is unavailable.

In a stroke of irony, Microsoft's Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system.

In an interview with Computerworld, VMware President Diane Greene talked about emerging competitors and her company's strategy of partnering with friend and foe alike.

Known in KDE.nl circles as the documentation coordinator for the Dutch localisation project, this man is also a demon player at ultimate frisbee and a reader of Hercule Poirot.

This comment refers to "Open Source could use a face lift.".

Nobody knows for sure how many Internet cafés there are in the Philippines. But in every major city and in many small towns, there are such places where, for as little as P20 an hour, you can plunk down before a PC and roam the digital universe to your heart’s content.

The Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans developer community has released a beta version of the NetBeans 5.0 open source IDE, with enhancements for client development based on Java. The general release of Version 5.0 is due by the end of 2005. Sun is positioning NetBeans as a counter-balance to the rival Eclipse open source tools platform. NetBeans 5.0 features the Matisse GUI builder which offers visual, drag-and-drop capabilities for building desktop clients that can either work in a client-server or standalone mode, says Dan Roberts, director of marketing for developer tools at Sun.

Over the course of the Linux emergence into corporate America, one fear has repeatedly emerged -- that Linux would fragment, that there are too many distributions -- that customers and corporate managers would be confused by the myriad of choices on the Linux distribution landscape. Paul Ferris and Dean Pannell have taken sides on this issue. People need clarification. They need to understand the issues at hand. They need clear, concise, professional sources of information where decisions of this magnitude are at stake.

Are they likely not to get that kind of information here? You'll have to find out, as here comes another Penguin Counter Penguin.