Showing all newswire headlines

Foreword -- Paul McKenney recently summarized seven approaches to real-time Linux, in an epic 6,000-word post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml). McKenney's original post is reproduced below; curious readers are invited to consult the lkml

While the headlines have been dominated by what Apple is bringing to the Intel platform and what Microsoft is taking out of Longhorn, Linux vendors Linspire and Xandros have continued to improve their business desktops.

As a software version-numbering aficionado, I have recently concluded that the FOSS world has gone mad and is hurling itself -- users and developers alike -- into a black hole of confusion and long-winded explanations.

Taiwanese network equipment manufacturer Planet used embedded Linux to build a small VoIP proxy server that supports 50 concurrent users. The SIP-50 is a standalone SIP-compliant proxy server with NAT traversal capabilities that can connect public and private VoIP networks, Planet says.

It seems that in its history former proprietary workstation maker Silicon Graphics has been in and out of the channel more times that a hovercraft. But now it is back, with a soon to be announced Suse Linux based Itanium II powered server and a storage product which will be reseller exclusive. Details in July.

While the federal government encourages agencies to consider open source, local and state governments will more aggressively push adoption in the long run.

The new ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Installer makes installing the ATI Linux driver a much simpler and user friendly experience. The installer provides for automatic and custom driver installations. Further, the ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Installer provides an option to generate distribution specific driver packages.

"We remain a Linux development company with 100 percent focus on the Power Architecture (IBM, Freescale)," Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats wrote in an e-mail to MacNewsWorld. "We will not transition to support an x86/ia64 architecture."

It seems there are moves afoot to get rid of open source software at the Beaumont Hospital -- one of the few institutions to wholeheartedly adopt this ICT strategy. The Irish Times got sight of internal correspondence which shows that IT project manager Tony Kenny is deeply worried about moves by hospital management to junk the open-source solution in favour of Microsoft, citing staff dissatisfaction with the open source software. Kenny claims the move could cost the hospital EUR2 million.

Power.org, a sui-disant open source organisation based around IBM's Power instruction set, has just expanded. It shows, said IBM, the health of the open source movement, this time in hardware not just software.

Recent research from IDC shows that Linux server sales grew to $1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2005, marking the eleventh consecutive quarter of growth for the open source server platform.

This ConcurrencyTesting tool can test your existing app for concurrency problems without creating new test cases. It does the magic with byte-code instrumentation. Interesting idea.

The Association of the Computer and Multimedia Industry of Malaysia (Pikom), will hold FOSSWorks, the free and open source works conference, for the first time on June 21, 2005 [KUALA LUMPUR] The event is expected to bring together leaders in the development of open source technologies around the world.

A Debian developer has warned around 30 percent of users upgrading to the new version of his project's Linux distribution would seriously disrupt their systems in the process.

Apple’s Safari team launched the WebKit Open Source Project Web site this week. The site provides source code access for the software Apple uses to create its Safari Web browser. The project will hopefully assuage the concerns of open source code advocates who felt Apple was taking too proprietary an approach with the development of its browser, which uses technology originally developed from the open source world.

As the first Debian release to use the new installer, version 3.1, a.k.a. Sarge, goes a long way to detonating the myth that Debian is hard to install. Moreover, because it includes -- for the most part -- up-to-the-moment software while conforming to strict free software guidelines and offering better than average security, 3.1 is easily the most accessible version of Debian ever released.

Asterisk runs on a Linux server and does the job of a costly phone system. It handles conventional phones (Digium makes connectors that fit PCI slots) and Internet Protocol phones. It can even run on Apple OS X and Windows servers, though only for voice-over-IP because Digium doesn't have drivers for its connector hardware for those OSes.

The open source Evolution mail application has been successfuly compiled and run on Windows. This is according to a Novell developer who wrote about it in his blog yesterday. Although Tor Lillqvist has managed to run the application and send email from a Windows platform he says a general-user version is still a way off.

Desktop Linux vendor Xandros has updated its Business Desktop distribution to version 3.0, claiming the new version provides seamless compatibility with Windows servers, and that Linux is now ready for enterprise deployments.

The GNU General Public License ("the GPL") has remained unmodified, at version level 2, since 1991. This is extraordinary longevity for any widely-employed legal instrument. The durability of the GPL is even more surprising when one takes into account the differences between the free software movement at the time of version 2's release and the situation prevailing in 2005.