Showing all newswire headlines

There are a number of reasons someone might want to run a local DNS server/cache. Maybe your ISP's DNS servers are wonky, maybe your on dialup and just wanna get things a bit faster, or maybe something completely different.

It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going.

Metrowerks Corporation, founded in 1985 as an independent subsidiary of Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., has introduced ‘automotive-grade’ Linux technology specifically engineered to meet automotive industry requirements. It is claimed to make the Linux operating system viable for the telematics market, and responds to the performance requirements that automotive original equipment manufacturers demand.

The President of the Linux Professional Institute attended Linux World Expo in London to announce the launch of a quality assurance program for Linux training in the UK.

Three recent reports agree about one thing: Open source can save enterprises up to 30% over proprietary alternatives in areas such as office applications, servers, content management systems and databases. So open source saves the enterprise money, what else is new? Is the appeal of open source simply a matter of dollars and sense? Will this be enough to keep the momentum going strong? What else do open source applications have that will keep open source in the limelight?

Computer users generally enter data on electronic systems through a broker in the form of a keyboard, but this mechanism can be cumbersome or insufficient when compared to capturing data through the more natural process of handwriting. Many people can write more quickly and easily than they type. InkML is a specification developed by the W3C whose intent is to standardize the capture and representation of data written by electronics pens or styluses.

In July Zend Technologies announced the latest version of PHP, the widely used scripting language for Web programming. Version 5 incorporates a series of substantial enhancements over previous releases. Here's an introduction to some of the new features.

ORLANDO, FLA --Gartner holds a yearly conference here called Symposium/ITxpo, one of four similar annual events it holds around the world. Yesterday I attended a Symposium/ITxpo presentation titled Does Open Source Deserve a Place in Your IT Portfolio? given by Gartner vice president Mark Driver. Most of the information he put out was correct, which was good.

here is a press-release about the success of wide-audience personal computers pre-loaded with the Mandrakelinux operating system, sold in a nation-wide store chain. For the first time, a major brick and mortar retail chain has widely marketed a low cost PC bundled with Linux. Previously, such sales had been limited to e-commerce. Metro Group, one of the largest retailers in Europe, is selling PC's with Mandrakelinux through their Planete Saturn subsidiary. Using a strong marketing campaign, including print, radio, and billboard advertising, sales have far exceeded expectations.

Here's a telling faux fas: A veteran Netscape developer, surveying the floor of LinuxWorld Expo 2004, found vendors running a mix of Windows, Linux and other OSs. She says in her blog review: “Sun was the worst, with only one Linux box I saw, and the rest all Windows: no Solaris that I saw.”

Welcome to this year's 41st issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Raphaël Hertzog has written the first French book about Debian to honour the growing French speaking Debian community with a sample chapter online. Joey Hess has contacted submitters of older installation reports to retry and received a lot of promising responses. Carla Schroder reported about using Knoppix for system recovery.

Martin Taylor, global general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft, talks to vnunet.com about how the company is handling the open source threat.

JBoss on Monday released jBPM 2.0, an open-source workflow engine, which it developed in collaboration with the open-source project of the same name. Sacha Labourey, European general manager at JBoss, said this is the next stage in the company's strategy to build a full open-source middleware stack.

The Mozilla Foundation is getting ready to take the browser wars to a new front: the advertising pages of The New York Times.

Using Innovation to Introduce the Desktop Challenger.

OpenOffice.org continues to grow in India. The Linux community in particular sees OpenOffice.org as vital to localization (translation) efforts, which will reach new users. Our report on the recent meet in Mumbai illuminates the issues.

A small French company has started shipping Mandrake 10 on laptops for under 750 € (euros). The 1200X-ERX laptop runs on AMD's Athlon Mobile 2000+ (or optional 2600+ processor), has 256 DDR memory, a 20G hard drive, and a 15-inch TFT XGA screen. The notebook supports PCMCIA, hosts a Firewire port, and has a DVD reader/writer. The unit is covered by 2 year warrranty.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the official 2.6.9 kernel today, following what he referred to as "naming confusion" in which a test release named "-final" was first uploaded to kernel.org. Linus went on to add, "excuses aside, not a lot of changes since -rc4 (which was the last announced test-kernel), mainly some UML updates that don't affect anybody else. And a number of one-liners or compiler fixes. Full list appended." Official releases and test kernels can be found at a kernel.org mirror.

Part 1 in a series on embedded development explains the purpose of the project and outlines hardware options

An OpenOffice.org macro is a saved sequence of commands or keystrokes that are stored for later use. An example of a simple macro is one that "types" your address. Macros support commands that allow a variety of advanced functions, such as making decisions (for example, if the balance is less than zero, color it red; if not, color it black), looping (if the balance is greater than zero, subtract 10 from it), and even interacting with a person (asking the user for a number). It is common to assign a macro to a keystroke or toolbar icon so that it can be quickly started.