Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Unless you have been living under a rock, by now most of you have likely heard about the trouble between Debian and Mozilla with regards to the Firefox logo. In many ways, the argument is stupid and valid at the same time.

On November 17, Boston University Law School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology hosted the "Software Patents: A Time for Change?" conference. A unique gathering of geeks and lawyers, the 10-hour conference consisted of a series of panels ranging from the perceived problems with software patents to possible solutions.

The website for the Saipan Linux Users Group or SLUG is already up, with website address http://groups-beta.google.com/group/saipan-linux.

[On behalf of LXer and Linux User Groups everywhere, I would like to extend a warm, hearty welcome to the newest penguinistas! - dcparris]

Earlier this year, members of Chinese and Taiwanese IT associations announced broad plans to work together to jointly develop and promote Linux as well as home-grown standards for certain IT components.

Sony has been saying that it sees its new next-gen machine, the PlayStation 3, as more of a computer than a console. Terra Soft Solutions is now making Yellow Dog Linux 5.0 available for download for the PS3, taking that idea a step closer to reality.

Beaverton, Oregon-based uXcomm, a provider of systems management platforms, said today that it is supporting the popular Nagios open source hosting, service, and network monitoring program.

Up until now, Mac OS X and Linux users had been left out of the social—that is to say they haven't been able to use the Microsoft Zune with their operating system. "Until now" because the library libmtp is actually able to read the Zune's crazy filesystem on other, non-Microsoft OSes. How big a deal is this?

[O.k., so if a loved one or acquaintance is unfortunate enough to receive one of these for Christmas, you might stand a chance of getting it to work with GNU/Linux. True, they'd be better off exchanging it for an iAudio, but hey... - dcparris]

The old bilingual switcheroo: Microsoft has taken another slap from the authorities in Korea, after a court decision in a patent dispute raised the prospect of Office being taken off the shelves in the country.

[The story addresses a patent issue. First, Miscrosoft threatens to withdraw Windows. Now the Koreans are threatening to pull Office off the shelves. There's more than one way to skin a cat - and the Koreans seem to be trying a few of them. - dcparris]

Bruce Perens, a prominent figure in the open source movement and to some extent in the free software movement, has shot an open letter to Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian accusing the company of betrayal.

Is it right for free and open source projects to capitalise on the dissatisfaction created by the Microsoft-Novell deal and try to attract developers who work for Novell to jump ship?

Here is a new video of the "Sugar" user interface for the $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) laptop. As you may know, the mission of this non-profit association is to develop a low-cost laptop—the "$100 Laptop"—a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children.

While many analysts are busy tearing down Sony PS3's and Nintendo Wii's, a few insiders are taking a closer look at the first batch of $100 (eventually) laptops to roll off the production lines in Shanghai as part of the One Laptop Per Child program backed by Nicholas Negroponte and MIT's Media Lab.

Richard Bloor recently caught up with Lee Epting, vice president of Forum Nokia, Nokia's global developer program, and took the opportunity to find out how she views the changes in S60 over the last year, including the increasing role of open source software.

In part 1 of this entry, I discussed how to use Calc's page styles to control how spreadsheets print. However, although page styles are one of the most useful tools for the task, they are far from the only ones. How you setup pages for printing and the printer or export options are also part of the arsenal. None of these tools is useful on every occasion, and you may have to mix and match them to get the results you want, but, the more you know about them, the less of a nightmare printing a spreadsheet becomes.

OpenIT is a fresh Romanian Linux and OSS magazine. Free for all, for the people, by the people. The PDF (in Romanian) is downloadable from openitromania.org and has 14 articles about Linux and open source software. This is a product of a handful of people that met on the http://www.myl.ro Linux Forum and decided it was time to start an initiative like this. A free magazine for the Romanian public. Enjoy.

David Johnson's hobby is flying, but his obsession is open source. In true geek fashion, he merged those passions to create a better membership management solution for the Buttonville Flying Club, which led to money-saving options for his clients.

Red Hat has announced that strategic members of Red Hat's broad ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) are already supporting and testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Beta 2 to prepare for Red Hat's next major subscription milestone.

There are hundreds of gift guides this holiday season filled with junk you can buy - but a lot of time you actually don't own it, you can't improve upon it, you can't share it or make it better, you certainly can't post the plans, schematics and source code either. We want to change that, we've put together our picks of interesting open source hardware projects, open source software, services and things that have the Maker-spirit of open source.

[What's not to like? - dcparris]

Microsoft has insisted it did not slash its software prices to encourage Birmingham City Council to abort its Linux project. Birmingham pulled the plug on its open source desktop project after it found an upgrade to Windows XP was cheaper. The city council had planned to roll out 1,500 Linux PCs across its libraries but in the end converted just 200 PCs.

The Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Spanish Canary Island's regional goverment have released mEDUXa 1.0. mEDUXa is a Free Software GNU/Linux distribution developed for educational purposes based on Kubuntu. It will be deployed on 35,000 computers in 1100 schools, which represents 325,000 possible users (25,000 teachers and 300,000 students) in the Canary Islands state schools. mEDUXa comes with different profiles, configured thanks to KDE's Kiosk mode. One of mEDUXa's major feature is the profile for young pupils (from 4 to 8 years old).