Showing headlines posted by dave

This is power that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and many governments could only dream of having. The power to control the press and the skills contained in this organization are likely capable of disrupting travel, power grids and other broad national infrastructure systems if their demands are not met.

South Africa's CSIR and the University of the Western Cape have been selected as research partners for a European Union-backed global study of free and open source software. The two-year project involves 17 partners from 12 countries around the world.

Jeff Garzik posted a step-by-step guide to using git to manage kernel sources.

First prize goes to: http://lxer.com/, a great site with no advertisements and no silly drill-down clicking to get to the root of the subject. It features excellent news updates with added user comments and discussion.

After Gartner the US American market researchers of IDC have now published an analysis of the server market. According to which in the first quarter of 2005 spending on servers world-wide was just under ten billion euros. In the eighth consecutive quarter of revenue growth this amounts to a quarter on quarter increase of 5.3 percent.

Unix systems and their derivatives, including Linux, these days have one major thing in common. They all use the same system as the back end for their graphical interfaces. This system is called the X window system, or more commonly X.

Researchers at a Dutch university are conducting a study for the European Commission on the effect of software patents on innovation -- but the Commission is pressing ahead with plans to introduce the patents in Europe without waiting for the results of the research to be published.

Have you ever had to work in a dirty server closet filled with man-eating dust balls and rats' nests of cables so big they look like they're about to become sentient? If you have, you almost certainly have an appreciation for neatly bundled and labeled cabling. Managed cabling is equal parts art form and science, and it is a must for the successful operation of a production environment. Managed cabling not only looks better, but the extra time spent now to ensure everything is neat and organized can save you hours later.

Several IT executives at the LinuxWorld Summit last week reinforced the idea that Linux now has the technical brawn and industry support to accommodate the most demanding business applications in environments such as finance, airline reservations and stock trading.

Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Last week, your DistroWatch staff had the extreme pleasure to meet with Dr Richard M Stallman, a truly fascinating, albeit controversial figure, dedicated to fight for our computing freedom; Robert Storey has summarised the experience. Also in this week's issue - a brief look at Libranet GNU/Linux 3.0 and a call for voting on which new packages you want to see tracked by DistroWatch from next month. Happy reading!

Last year IBM took a significant step forward in cooperation with the free software community, by offering blanket licenses for 500 of its patents to all free software developers. These are but a fraction of IBM's software patents, but still it was a substantial step. These 500 patents, at least, are no longer a danger to free software developers.

Our final interview in this series with the hackers at the on-going Dutch KDE PIM meeting is with none other than KDE-PIM module project leader of Cornelius Schumacher. Enjoy the interview.

The developer of PalmOS, PalmSource, Inc., has made a commitment to Linux with its recent acquisition of Linux smartphone software vendor China MobileSoft (CMS). This week at "Mobile Summit," PalmSource's annual developer event, keynote speaker Dr. Dave Nagel expanded on Linux's importance to PalmSource.

According to figures from w3schools.com which is a site frequented by the Browser elite, Netscape is not even a pimple on a mole. For them, the real browser battle is between Microsoft IE and Firefox. Microsoft makes up 65% of use while Firefox is now up to 25%.

“Public-funded software must be open to the public and sharing of knowledge only enhances its richness,” said Italian senator Fiorello Cortiana at a four-nation international conference on Free Software which began at the Technopark here on Saturday. The two-day conference is being organised by the Society for the Promotion of Alternative Computing and Environment (SPACE), Hipatia and the Free Software Foundation-India.

This article by Howard Fosdick, author of the Rexx: Programmer's Reference, tells you everything you need to know to get started using Rexx on your Linux desktop. Linux features powerful scripting languages like Bash and Perl, but these may not be suitable for end user scripting. Rexx, on the other hand, has proven ideal for desktop Linux users, according to Fosdick, yet it combines both ease of use and power, and is available in a three basic forms including procedural ("classic" Rexx), object-oriented, and Java-compatible versions.

A couple of weeks ago we were speculating about the possibilities of a Certified Novell Engineer educational track for Open Enterprise Server. I mentioned the possibility of somehow combining the NetWare 6 CNE with the Certified Linux Engineer certification Novell offers for SuSE Linux (NetWare and SuSE are the two components of OES).

O'Reilly has published a book on the classic Unix art of shell scripting. "Classic Shell Scripting" describes common Linux tools and shows how to use bash to combine them into scripts that can automate simple and complex tasks.

This installment in LinuxDevices.com's "Executive Interview" series explores PalmSource's plans with respect to morphing Palm OS into a middleware and application stack that runs on top of Linux, with an aim of targeting mobile phones and other wireless-enabled devices.

Founder Larry Lessig joins African counterparts to launch South African chapter of organisation working to challenge and re-define the notion of intellectual property rights.