Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Some years ago the idea came up to fork KWord and refurbish it to be more stripped down, and have simpler and bigger buttons. The effort was applauded by many but in the end didn’t really work out. It was a great heads up and I took it with me for the next generation of the applications. As I’ve been working on KOffice2 high-level design I had 2 user groups in mind, the lawyers office and the Kids “office”. The two extremes that I wanted to be able to both have a real use for KOffice. In the last days I finalized a plugin for KOffice that is targetted directly to the “kids office”. I reused the artwork that was created for the kids-office by Dannya well over 2 years ago and ended up with a simple replacement for the more complex standard interface. I hope that kids, and many parents, will appreciate this new user interface.

Red Hat is partnering with Amazon to offer Linux-based computing power as an on-call computer resource, letting companies scale up applications without building a bigger data center. That Linux-on-demand idea has sizzle, but there are other interesting pieces in Red Hat's latest batch of products, including more virtualization support and one audacious goal. The Amazon partnership is part of Red Hat's Linux Automation initiative to make it easier for companies to deploy Linux applications. With it, Red Hat will have its version of Linux powering over half of the world's new servers by 2015 while doubling its current market share, says Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's VP of enterprise Linux business.

Gimmix, however, is not an ordinary audio player. It requires a lot more than running it and pressing the play button to listen to music. Gimmix is just a front-end to MPD (music player daemon), which will require to be installed, configured and started in order for Gimmix to run properly. MPD is basically a server which allows remote access for playing audio files, streams and managing playlists. What's really impressive about this design is that the client used for controlling the server doesn't need to run on the same machine MPD runs on. This enables you to play the music files on your home server from work, a friend's house or wherever, as long as you have Gimmix with you.

Renewed proceedings have been brought against the SCO Group GmbH [Ltd.] and its apparent managing director Mike Olson by the Bonn-based Tarent GmbH as well as the Bremen-based Univention after derogatory remarks about Linux had re-appeared at the URL http://www.sco.de/scosource/letter_to_partners.html. The German Linux companies had already successfully protested against statements made at the same URL in 2003. In case of recurrence, SCO's lawyers had already undertaken to refrain from repeating statements in the course of business that Linux would be an unauthorised derivative of Unix. The incriminating pages at SCO, which has become particularly known for its legal proceedings over alleged copyright infringements in Linux and the copyrights to Unix in the past, cannot be accessed any more since yesterday.

Linux, the free operating system that's a perpetual underdog in the desktop market, will get another chance this holiday season at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The chain was taking orders online Wednesday for a computer called the "Green gPC" that is made by Everex of Taiwan, costs $199 and runs Linux. A comparable Everex PC that comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and more memory costs $99 more, or $298, partly because the manufacturer has to pay Microsoft Corp. for a software license. Both computers come with keyboard, mouse and speakers, but no monitor. It will be available in about 600 stores, as well as online, Wal-Mart said.

[Not news anymore, but fun to see it's even made Fox News - Sander]

For any parent, myself included, setting your kids loose on the net is a daunting prospect. We have to do it because the net is a fact of life - it's in our schools, the workplace, public libraries and in many if not most homes of the developed world. Therefore, do we really have any option but to give them Linux?

Many companies could successfully partake in open source projects without adversely affecting their business, according to open source activist Bruce Perens. Perens told delegates at the Open Source Summit in London that companies need to hold on to their business differentiators in order to remain competitive. But he insisted that they can effectively share software development with the rest of the world without affecting their company in a negative way.

Manufactum, a German web retailer, has released a portable PC that is sure to delight Linux users. Weighing in at only 2 pounds, with dimensions of 7.1x4.4 x1.9 inches (180 x 112 x 48 mm), the "Manuscriptum" comes pre-loaded with Debian Linux with a KDE desktop environment, and other essential software like Firefox, Open Office and the Foxit PDF reader. Available for around $650.

It's not surprising that Billy Marshall, former Red Hatter and current CEO of rPath, would be dismissive of Red Hat's new appliance operating system, given that he will be competing with it. But what I did find surprising is how dead-on his assessment is of enterprise software. We talk about certification a lot (i.e., "Yes, we are certified to run on SQL Server"). The customer takes this to mean, "It will work well with SQL Server." But this isn't always the case. In fact, as Billy points out, it is often not the case:

Once again, more than 2 weeks have passed and it is time for yet another issue of the TiNDC. So we are fighting to get a first "stable" release of nouveau out as soon as possible. This release will include 2D, Xv and EXA acceleration for all cards from NV05 to NV4x. Owners of NV04 won't get EXA due to hardware limitations, while NV5x cards (GeForce 8x00) won't get much more than working 2D and hopefully working mode setting for the common cases.

A decision to wipe 11,000 machines of their shipped Mandriva Linux operating system and replace it with Windows XP for Nigerian schools received a reversal that should please Mandriva's CEO. Someone break out the champagne for Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva. He had blogged his anger with Microsoft counterpart Steve Ballmer over what Bancilhon suggested were dirty tactics in gaining business with Nigeria.

The KDE project has released the fourth beta of KDE 4.0, and with it a call for end-user testing. The project faces a major challenge in getting this major release stable and functional enough to meet users' expectations in time for release. The reason for this lies not only in the extent of the changes made to the underlying platform libraries that we looked at last week, but also in the collision of ground-breaking new development and a mass user base.

primary desktop operating system since 1997. But for most people around the world, this is the year of the the Windows desktop, same as it was last year and the year before. But if we each spent one day telling others about GNU/Linux, could we make a difference in the lives of at least a few people? I think so. That's why I'm promising -- right here and right now -- to spend at least one day in the next three months handing out free GNU/Linux install CDs, and why I invite you to join me in this effort.

Mark McVey, the owner of McVey Creative Group, has a long history in the advertising and marketing business. He's used to helping people create product brands, and for the last seven years or so, creating a brand has automatically included creating a Web site. Because McVey is no stranger to working with Web developers, and because he knows what he likes, when he decided to launch Oohgaboohga.com, he called Bruce Kroeze, an active coder for the Django project and a fan of the Satchmo e-commerce framework for Django.

It wasn't long after Google announced its long-anticipated mobile plans this week that a debate emerged about the prospective security of the project's Linux-based platform. Can the open-source model for the platform, now known as Android, produce secure code? Will phones based on Android, dubbed "Gphones" by many, be more or less secure than Apple's iPhone, which has been developed using proprietary software? What will Android's developers be able to do to stop authors of malicious code from capitalizing on its openness?

The US Navy's research and development and acquisition policy site at acquisition.navy.mil uses eZ Systems' open source content management system to help civilian and military users access the Navy's myriad policy documents. Before the switch to eZ Publish in November 2003, the site was an unorganized collection of hard-to-navigate static HTML pages. Today, IT project manager Tina Minor, who manages the system for DOD contractor Automation Technologies, says she really likes the customizability and low price of open source software.

As of 2.6.23, virtualization is quite well supported on Linux, at least for the x86 architecture. Containers lag a little behind, instead. It turns out that, in many ways, containers are harder to implement than virtualization is. Full container support will get quite a bit closer once the 2.6.24 kernel is released. The merger of a number of important patches in this development cycle fills in some important pieces, though a certain amount of work remains to be done.

Our conference in Spain, Akademy-es, will be held in Zaragoza this year on the 17th and 18th November. We have a very interesting schedule with talks about CMake, KOffice, KDE programming, KDE 4 among other interesting topics. Of course, entry to the talks is free, only limited by physical space.

On Nov. 7, Red Hat joined the cloud and software as a service market by announcing the beta availability of RHEL 5.1 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable server capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of RHEL 5.1, including the Red Hat Network management service, technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's network infrastructure and data centers.

This month Open Tuesday will take a look at how a government tax incentive scheme can be used to the benefit of open source developers and companies. Representatives from the department of science and technology, will present on the research and development (R&D) tax incentive programme at November's Open Tuesday, with a particular reference to how this can be used to assist in funding research and development in information technology.