Showing all newswire headlines

This excerpt from Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop teaches you how to instant message friends and colleagues from your desktop system.

Have you ever bid in on eBay auction item and thought you were going to win, only to see it go at the very last second for a bid just slightly higher than yours? Congratulations, you've been sniped. Luckily, you can fight back by getting your own sniping tool, courtesy of the open source community, which provides JBidwatcher, one of the best ones gunning.

There is a Native American proverb that says, "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may not remember, involve me and I'll understand." These words are the mission statement of a new scheme for certifying IT capability -- the International Grades in Office Technology (INGOTs) program. To obtain their certificates, students must demonstrate an understanding of free and open source software (FOSS) issues by actually contributing to the OpenOffice.org project. INGOTs creator Ian Lynch contributes to the OpenOffice.org as education lead. We have asked Ian to explain the main features and advantages of the program.

The software patent saga continues, with adoption of the CIID now scheduled for next week.

Use this free Diagnostic Tool to help you better understand information provided by your JVM (Java Virtual Machine) garbage collector. It will analyze critical issues in great detail such as quantities of heap memory involved, frequency of the garbage collection, time spent in different phases of garbage collection, and much more. Recently updated to manage very big heap sizes.

Many mission-critical applications have been built on Internet Explorer, and most organizations don't have the budget or resources to recode them. In addition, PCs' application loads need to be properly tested to ensure that nothing breaks with the addition of a different browser. In the near term, many business users will be better served by keeping Internet Explorer and installing security updates as they're released.

"Open Source is an opportunity for small, local companies to position themselves against offshore providers", says Gerhard Havlik of OSCON co-organizer incite. The Open Source Business Conference (OSCON) was held last Friday in Vienna. Danese Cooper, a proponent of Open Source at Sun Microsystems, spoke about what she had seen in India: a large section of the economy was working solely on applying standard software and linking various standard components to each other.

In the open source PBX world, Asterisk is king, but it’s no longer the only game in town.

UK local authorities are far less likely to use open-source software than those of some other European countries, according to findings from a Dutch study. The study has so far found that 32 percent of local authorities in Britain use open-source software, compared with 71 percent in France, 68 percent in Germany and 55 percent in the Netherlands.

Following on from the developer roadshow held at the University of the Western Cape last month, free software developers from nine African universities are again meeting at the university this week. This time they are learning about and developing software for the Kinky application framework.

It appears that the two-way OpenPower 710 will be IBM's latest Linux-powered server.

Company plans new division, software release aimed at luring government users

my ears perked up when I heard that the live-CD Mepis Linux distribution was built on Debian. That meant that all the slick things that my friends raved about in Debian are rolled into Mepis. And Mepis is a breeze to install. Once Mepis is running from the CD you have the option of installing it on the hard drive, which took about 20 minutes on one of my prehistoric 266-MHz laptops.

Ross, now 19, a sophomore computer science major at Stanford University, has an even more impressive resume than most of his peers. Before graduating high school, he helped develop Firefox.

Last week unbridled joy entered your life when you got coLinux running on your Windows PC without any kind of virtual machine monitor and without the aid of a safety net. Several of you have already written in to tell of your coLinux exploits, and this week - can you believe it? - it gets better!

Patch management vendor New Boundary Technologies is expanding the range of its software beyond Windows to answer user demands for cross-platform support that will address vulnerabilities, regardless of where they exist on the network.

No one wants to spend money on something they can get for free. If you're building your own computer, or upgrading an old one, a major expense is going to be Windows itself. This can cost upwards of £100 and, if you want to add other programs, you'll find that the project can become rather expensive. There are alternatives to Windows and its compatible programs, however, and we're not talking about illegal copies of software.

On November 9th, the highly anticipated Firefox 1.0 arrived. If you'd been using Firefox Preview Release or a Release Candidate there was no news at all feature-wise, since most changes were related to bug fixes or under the hood improvements.

When you have 20 or more windows open across nine virtual desktops, the complexity of window management can become overwhelming. A number of new tools are now available to facilitate effective window management.

Today dawns a new era of discussion. In the past, Paul Ferris and Dean Pannell (FeriCyde and DinoTrac) sparred impromptu in the talkbacks of many a respectable (and otherwise :) website. Today, for the first time, they make it official. The format is called Penguin Counter Penguin, and the subject random. Today the debate is on the slighter side of the Linux Desktop. Is the Linux desktop really ready for prime-time? Who knows for sure, but you can bet that Paul and Dean have their flamethrowers tuned for the finer points of the debate!