Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

With no vendor support, Elcot's decision to switch platforms was a daunting task but the opportunity to bypass yearly software licensing fees was an irresistible incentive.

[And this tidbit is halfway down page 2. Interesting! - Sander]

Elcot [...] is also looking into the possibility of taking legal action against vendors who refuse to release Linux drivers for their products.

The Open Document Format Alliance has released a paper refuting the recent Burton Group's Report on ODF and MSOOXML. I asked for and received permission to publish it here on Groklaw. The ODF Alliance response takes 18 points from the Burton Group's Report and answers them point by point. I think you will enjoy it. And I have a few impressions of my own to share with you, and then you can tell me what you think of it all.

The Xen hypervisor may be the poster child for open source virtualization, but it's not the only option. Since its launch in late 2005, the SWsoft-backed OpenVZ project has been gradually growing its presence. This week, OpenVZ set out to expand its reach by adding support for Ubuntu Linux 7.10. The same technology that powers SWsoft's flagship offering, Virtuozzo, also powers OpenVZ. OpenVZ provides users with access to the code, and in turn anticipates an open source community will grow around the product and contribute to the testing, support and development of the Linux-based virtualization effort.

Linux is gaining. It’s almost impossible to miss, even for non-techies. Not only that, those non-techies are demanding it. Linux interest is spreading, perhaps driven by the dissatisfaction with the latest OS from Redmond. They’re tired of the viruses, the worms, the trojans, and all the other malware that they have to spend an additional $100 of software to keep out of their systems. On top of that, Vista has gotten bad reviews. All of this seems to indicate Microsoft has seen its peak of glory. They are not going to disappear (soon), but it seems that they aren’t going to regain the monopoly that they once had.

With the global crusaders on the march, with every politician spewing factoids about his or her campaign saving the Earth with new environmental measures, with hybrid cars being constructed in droves, with new energy saving light bulbs all the rage, isn't it time to look at the greener alternative in the PC World? I'm talking about the Linux computer, and it's becoming clear that it's the green monster.

Want to find open source tools? Linux distros have long had the tradition that software is bundled into easily-installed packages. Yet, finding packages can be less than intuitively obvious and even then they may not appear to be available for your flavour of choice. Here’s how to get the most out of Linux packages.

sshfs is a file system in userspace (FUSE) and can be used to mount a remote ssh account locally in a folder. This is absolutely great - If I need to work on files from my server I can use a simple command and mount the remote file system over a encrypted connection. None of the programs are aware the files are remote and working on a file in the folder sshfs/ is the same as for local files - at least if the connection is fast enough. The great thing thing about autofs is that the commandline is no longer needed. The mounting of the remote file system is done in the moment I try to access the folder by the autofs daemon.

Mandriva and Turbolinux announce a partnership by creating a lab named: Manbo-Labs. This Lab is the result of an agreement between Mandriva and Turbolinux to share resources and technology to release a common base system on each of the Linux distributions. Mandriva, the leading European editor of Linux distributions, and Turbolinux, a leading Linux client and server distributor in Japan and China, signed the agreement about Manbo-Labs last October and have been working together since then. Both companies decided to wait until first internal delivery to issue this announcement.

John Palmieri of Red Hat is developing a new D-Bus debugging tool called D-Feet. D-Bus is an interprocess communication protocol for the Linux platform that is used extensively in the GNOME desktop environment and KDE 4. D-Bus allows users to call methods and trap signals from other applications and services that are running on the computer. D-Feet is very useful for Linux desktop application developers who are attempting to write programs that integrate with existing software through D-Bus.

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Corte dei Conti, an Italian government institution that safeguards public finance and guarantees the respect of jurisdictional order in Italy, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server farm, consisting mainly of HP BL20 G3 and BL20 G2 blade servers. Corte dei Conti’s Red Hat solution is integrated with multiple different internal systems, including Oracle software largely used in the Court’s IT system.

Last year, an industrious hacker known as Penguinbait provided instructions that described how to install the KDE desktop environment on Nokia Internet Tablet devices. As we noted at the time, the instructions required extensive use of the command-line and were not really geared towards a mainstream audience. Fortunately, the availability of recently released unofficial KDE Maemo port packages vastly simplifies development.

If only laptops could run on qi—the spiritual energy that, in traditional Chinese philosophy, pervades all things. Well, if anyone has come close to making that happen, it’s Mary Lou Jepsen, founding chief technology officer at the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC). On New Year’s Day, Jepsen’s long-planned departure from OLPC became official. But she hasn’t gone far: the next gig for Jepsen, former CTO of Intel’s display division, is Pixel Qi, a Hull, MA-based startup she has created to design and build components for low-cost information devices that could be sold to consumers right here in the United States, as well as to people in the developing world.

This document describes how to set up TrueCrypt with GUI on Ubuntu 7.10. TrueCrypt is a free open-source encryption software for desktop usage. This howto is a practical guide without any warranty - it doesn't cover the theoretical backgrounds. There are many ways to set up such a system - this is the way I chose.

Shuttle is doing some very nice boxes, and its CES showings were proof of that. The prototypes shown off at Computex were now working models, and more importantly, they contained some amazing surprises.

I think this is a temporary offer only, and I don't have many more details than what is in the product page, but it looks like Acer is making a limited laptop series available now with Ubuntu Linux pre-loaded. What's more interesting is the price: NZ$699, making it a great value when compared to the ASUS Eee PC, which has only a 4 GB flash memory for storage and costs the same.

"I do hate doing -rc's for so long, but I hate releasing when not feeling it's simmered enough even more. And the changes since -rc7 are bigger than the changes between -rc6 and -rc7 were (partly probably because people were still on vacation between -rc6 and -rc7, so we had something of a small trickle come in afterwards)," Linus Torvalds began, explaining why he posted another release candidate rather than the official 2.6.24 kernel. He continued, "that said, the changes here really aren't that big, and the shortlog is fairly boring. So I'm pretty sure this is the last -rc"

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

Ever since the dawn of commercial software, piracy has been a problem without a realistic solution that meets the needs of both the software vendor and the end user. Due to the overall negative reaction from many end users with regard to DRM, a number of open source advocates have pointed out that if software companies simply adopted one of the many open source licenses, the need to concern themselves with anti-piracy efforts becomes completely unneeded. But making this kind of business model switch requires more than simply switching licensing models. There are revenue streams to be concerned here.

I have borrowed a headline from an earlier posting by Shane Schick to discuss something I saw this week. McAfee filed a report last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission that made a few statements about risks associated with their use of some Open Source software. These statements received quite a bit of media attention.

KDE 4.0.0 has been released on January 11th, after a number of delays; the months preceding the release, the KDE developers tried very hard to downplay expectations. KDE 4.0.0 was just the first release in the KDE 4 series, and such, should not be seen as the best possible representation of the KDE 4.0.0 vision. So, when I installed KDE 4.0.0 on my Ubuntu Gutsy installation last Friday, I knew what to expect: KDE 4 Developer Release 1. Read on for a few quick first impressions.