Showing all newswire headlines

Mitchell Baker has written a weblog posting discussing the relationship between mozilla.org staff and Mozilla Foundation employees. In the pre-Foundation days, mozilla.org staff was the group that managed the Mozilla project. Today, the Mozilla Foundation has several paid employees who are increasingly taking on roles previously performed by staff. The Mozilla leadership is currently considering how the position of mozilla.org staff can be revised to reflect the way the project operates now that the Mozilla Foundation exists.

Linux still isn't ready for grandma, but it might be ready for your stoner friend who'll experiment with anything or for a curious type willing to put up with some discomfort. This doesn't get us terribly far past the technology savvy desktop Linux lovers around today, but it pushes up against a point that could be called Freak Mainstream.

As competition intensifies in the market for smart phone OSes (operating systems), PalmSource is looking at ways to carve out a piece of market share. Earlier this month, the company acquired China MobileSoft (CMS) in a move aimed not only at gaining additional smart phone expertise but also Linux know-how. At the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes, PalmSource unveiled four new applications that draw on its recent CMS acquisition. IDG News Service interviewed David Nagel, president and chief executive officer of PalmSource, shortly before the start of the wireless conference and exhibition, which runs through Thursday.

It's no longer a question of if Linux and open source will catch on, nor when, nor why.

HP and Fujitsu are expanding the Linux offerings in their blade server lines as well as some of their most powerful systems.

To say that the Linux Standard Base has a lot of confusion surrounding it could be a bit of an understatement. But that is the challenge Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Free Standards Group, has facing him these days.

This month in our series "Application of the Month" we show you the alternative FTP client, KBear. As usual we have an interview with the author and a description of this powerful but easy to use program.

Got datacenter? Are your servers feeling underutilized? Uncoordinated? There may be an answer for your problem, if today's announcement from Virtual Iron Software, Inc. is any indication. Find out how virtualization is being taken to new heights.

A project to create a Swahili version of OpenOffice.org has found that Microsoft's licensing structure can hamper open source development.

Miguel de Icaza defends Mono and talks about its future relationship with the Gnome desktop, in the latest LugRadio. [LXer editor note: the interview is excellent, if you can survive the first few minutes of teenage-style laughter at the beginning.]

"While many specific vertical channels have been early adopters of clustering technologies, costs and lack of general accessibility have proved to be speed bumps on the way to cluster deployment for basic open source technologies. Also, the perception that Linux and open source has not been ready for mission-critical applications has also proved to be a barrier..."

Conservative release cycles and a more exhaustive test cycle make Red Hat Enterprise Linux a safer bet for the business community--they don't have to chase the release of the week. So how does the newest release of the RHEL line hold up? Bill von Hagen reviews.

Zend Technologies Inc. on Monday introduced Zend Studio 4.0, a new version of their PHP integrated development environment (IDE). Zend Studio runs on multiple operating systems including Mac OS X.

At the annual gathering this week at LinuxWorld Conference& Expo in Boston, top-tier vendors from the Linux Nation will roll out a raft of enterprise-class products and services. A few will lay out road maps for how they plan to kick their open source strategies up even higher into the enterprise.

Microsoft is still the dominant company in high-tech, the cynosure of all those things people love and hate about computing, the defining company of our time. It is huge, powerful and confident. But if you sniff the air, you can just make out the first hints of rot.

Recently we had the chance to test out Red Hat's new version of its popular Enterprise Linux product, which Red Hat is officially unveiling today. The results were somewhat disappointing, as RHEL4 offers few compelling reasons for current RHEL3 customers to upgrade. For those considering new deployments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 will be a more attractive option than its predecessor, but how will it fare against rival products from Novell, Sun Microsystems, and Mandrakesoft?

A lot of good advice for novice administrators, plus a few tips and tricks for more advanced users.

Novell and HP are donating more software code to the open-source community, while IBM is beefing up solutions to get more users on Linux.

Finding a wireless PC Card network adapter that works with GNU/Linux can be frustrating, and involves three possible results: you find a card that works natively; you find a card that will only work through NdisWrapper; or you find a card that just doesn't work, but might eventually, you hope. The second approach involves using proprietary binary drivers, which disagrees with some distribution philosophies (as well as that of OpenBSD). If at all possible, you want to find a PC Card adapter that has an open source driver and works perfectly with GNU/Linux. Netgate has made that possible with its 2511 CD Plus EXT2 wireless LAN card.

Let's start off with some questions that may have answers that are harder than you would expect:

1. "In general, how do you react to outsiders that offer to present at your Linux User Group (LUG)?"
2. "What about commercial interests presenting to your LUG?"
3. "What would you do if a Microsoft employee showed up at your LUG?"
4. "If you allowed a Microsoft employee to present, just what kind of topics would you allow?

Now for the really tricky part: The questions, especially that last one, aren't hypothetical.