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A VMware Player image of KDE 3.5.4 with KOffice 1.5.2 running on SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available. The image is fully functional and can be upgraded and tweaked as needed. The VMware Player necessary to run it can be downloaded for free and is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux.

[VMware is not free/libre. See the comments following the announcement. -- grouch]

It's well known that Google runs its vast array of servers using a custom version of GNU/Linux. But this is only one aspect of its support for free software. Others include its Summer of Code, now well established as an incubator of both coding talent and projects, and more recently its open source code repository, which offers a useful alternative to Sourceforge.net. Similarly, in porting Picasa to GNU/Linux, Google has made contributions to Wine, while open source projects in Sri Lanka have been the beneficiaries of more direct help, to the tune of $25,000.

But Google is also operating behind the scenes to bolster free software in other ways.

Linspire Inc. was going to announce the release of Freespire 1.0 -- its free, Debian-based desktop Linux operating system that combines open-source software with legally-licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and applications -- next week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. Instead, this new desktop Linux distribution has emerged early.

For almost 100 years a group of women called the Sisters of Mercy have been instilling a spirit of excellence into Baltimore's biggest hospital, appropriately named Mercy. Right from the start, the Sisters have made it their goal to push the medical institution beyond the ordinary by creating teaching affiliations, feeding the hungry, building state-of-the-art emergency services, and launching a neighborhood health center for the inner-city poor. In today's world, all that excellence requires a solid technology infrastructure -- and one open source management package to manage a variety of systems.

EnterpriseDB, which has built an Oracle-compatible edition of PostgreSQL, will offer support to Sun's Solaris customers

As many of you know, we utilize Oregon State University's Open Source Lab for our hosting and support. They do a fantastic job of taking care of us here, as well as a number of other great projects including phpBB, Drupal, Gentoo, mozdev, the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation, and many others. The OSL is kicking off their 2006 Rackathon today to raise money in support of their efforts to provide great hosting support to the Open Source community.

In addition, the core services in Leopard Server, including Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, Cyrus, iChat Server and QuickTime Streaming Server, are now 64-bit.

There are more than a handful of education-focused Linux distributions available for parents eager to get their kids up to speed with computing, but there aren't that many applications focused on younger children. One of the best though is GCompris.

FROM zero to 200 million downloads. That's the record that the Firefox browser has achieved since Version 1 was introduced in November 2004.

[...]
Last February, I listed a couple of useful extensions, including Fasterfox, which speeds up the retrieval of Web pages. Here are a few other favorites that I've added since then:

Red Hat Fedora release engineer Jesse Keating announced the release Aug. 7 of the second test version of Fedora Core 6, which is based on a 2.6.17 kernel and utilizes the GNOME desktop.

While Steve Jobs shows off the new Apple product lineup and Leopard OS at the developer conference this week, the company also quietly extends its open source arm by releasing a number of its products into the open source community including kernel sources for Intel-based Macs and the launch of Mac OS Forge.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in ext3 when handling an invalid inode number. This can be exploited by sending a specially crafted NFS request with a V2 procedure (e.g. V2_LOOKUP) that specifies an invalid inode number.

SOLUTION: Grant only trusted users access to affected systems.

Okay, maybe not the beach - if you're spending a couple of weeks sunning yourself abroad you might want a break from technology, even in paper form. But if you're on the lookout for some more weighty reading matter on where all this technology is leading (or just want to make your own robot), we've picked out 10 recent books worth checking out. No, not including the Long Tail one - that's got quite enough recommendations online already.

The easiest way to sound like a professional when you talk about photography these days is to grumble about the deficiencies of RAW file converters. The ability to save pictures in RAW format rather than JPEG or TIFF is what distinguishes a "pro level" camera from a consumer device. But rather than mentioning your camera's specs outright, the shrewd move is the heavy sigh followed by lamentations about your tireless search for the perfect software to properly manipulate your beautiful work. Let's take a look at how to do it using Linux and open source.

We liked this version of Ubuntu, with its very fast, new graphical installer based on the Live CD Faster system startup and login, simplified menu organization, graphical shutdown process, easy access to power management settings with GNOME Power Manager It also now includes GNOME 2.14.1, OpenOffice.org 2.0.2, X.org 7.0 and a plethora of included application choices, but there's still no VPN wizard, and playing DVDs should be simpler.

[The author describes the act of installing: "After clicking on the Install icon, I followed the prompts until the installation was complete." Sounds like a real nightmare, doesn't it? Seriously, the author presents a very good review, complete with screenshots and "warts". One of the "warts" the author points out, DVD playing, is a problem in the U.S. due to the lobbying of the movie cartel. -- grouch]

As announced at the end of last year, Adrian Bunk has now taken over support of Linux kernel 2.6.16.x. Thus, a stable kernel series based on kernel 2.6 should be available for the long term. Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the two administrators of the stable kernel series, officially handed over administration to Bunk a few days ago.

As Linux servers continue to pervade data centers at increasing rates, one of the biggest challenges to strike IT managers is getting those servers to work well with their existing Windows systems.

As a result, technologies like Samba have made a market out of getting the two operating systems to play nice. However, Samba can be a bit complex for the everyday administrator, so companies like Centeris Corp., a Bellevue, Wash.-based startup, have spring up with products to minimize the confusion. Centeris and others produce software tools specifically designed to make interoperability as painless as possible.

Recently, Centeris CEO Barry Crist sat down with SearchOpenSource.com to talk about why the landscape for cross-platform server management is improving with the integration of Windows and Linux servers and how virtualization is already emerging as the next big technology in the space.

Format: PDF
Size: 188KB

Overview: This sample chapter, taken from MySQL Crash Course, discusses what joins are and how you can use them to create SELECT statements.

In the past weeks more than 90% of the first batch of bug reports filed by Pierre Habouzit for the Python transition are currently solved. These reports were filed mainly for packages providing public python modules.