Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Chris Bailey, UK ICT Hub FOSS in the VCS project, writes: As part of the work for the UK ICT Hub's FOSS in the Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) project we are developing a new certification for FOSS use by not for profits, Free and Open Source Knowledge (FOSK). We are doing this in partnership with the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) whose certification for Linux system administrators has world wide recognition.

East African cellphone company, Simba Telecoms, has introduced an innovative local money transfer service in Uganda. Tectonic speaks to Cape Town-based Jeshurun Consulting's development manager to find out what was used to build the system.

Achievement Awards Group, a South African motivational organisation, has implemented the open source voice over IP solution, Asterisk, to upgrade the capability of its specialist call centre and to react quickly to the needs of clients.

When it comes to anonymous Web access, Tor is not the only fish in the sea. If you are looking for a lightweight utility that allows you to navigate the Web anonymously, JAP is more user-friendly. Similar to Tor, JAP sends a user's Web page request through multiple intermediary servers called mixes. Unlike Tor, however, JAP uses a predetermined sequence of mixes called a mix cascade. According to JAP's documentation, because each mix cascade handles multiple connections, it's virtually impossible to trace a particular connection to its user. If you are interested in a more detailed description of JAP's inner workings, take a look at the Architecture of the Anonymization Service article on JAP's Web site.

Assembled open source enthusiasts last night heard the programme manager for SITA's open source migration project, Arno Webb, speak about his role in directing the migration of government's many departments to open source.

Canonical hopes its Jeos--"just enough operating system"--will be used as a foundation to package software for virtual machines.

Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and Linspire, a Linux distributor, thinks the world is ready for a 'virtual' desktop on the Web. Is he right? Whatever else you can say about multimillionaire technology entrepreneur Michael Robertson—the founder of MP3.com; Linspire, a Linux distributor; and SIPhone, a VOIP company, to name but a few—he has chutzpah. In each of his business ventures, he's taken on giants, such as the music industry, Microsoft and Vonage. Now, with AjaxWindows, he's at it again, with Microsoft once more in his sights.

Sun Microsystems upgraded the Solaris 10 operating system today, most notably enabling its OS to run Linux and its applications on x86 systems.

Michael Kerrisk, the Linux man page maintainer since 2004, gave a talk on the value of documentation during the first day of LinuxConf Europe 2007. While documents are useful for end users trying to get their job done, this use was not Michael's focus; instead, he talked about how documentation can help in the creation of a better kernel in the first place. The writing of documents, he says, reveals bugs and bad interface designs before they become part of a released kernel. And that can help to prevent a great deal of pain for both kernel and user-space developers.

The first public Pseudo (alpha) release of Vector Linux 5.9 is now available. Normally a release like this wouldn’t be worth blogging about. It’s early development code. If you’re used to Ubuntu then think Tribe 1. It’s at that level. OK, it seems to be usable at this point but it’s not something I’d recommend for a system that has to do real work.

This Saturday (15.09.) will see the first KDE-EDU 4.0 Polishing Day. The aim is to allow direct communication between users and developers. Issues, doubts and new ideas can be discussed, solved and coded in real time. For this purpose, a meeting will be held in #kde-polishing from 8:00 to 15:00 UTC. KHangMan, KGeography and blinKen will be this first meetings subjects. In order to participate, KDE 4.0 Beta 2 or newer is required, but using the precompiled KDE 4.0 Beta 2 packages for Kubuntu, Mandriva and openSUSE or the "KDE Four Live" CD is fine. Join in — you can make a difference!

Linden Lab, the creator of online virtual community Second Life, released its viewer earlier this year with a GPL 2.0 license, adding a clause called the "FLOSS exception," which releases developers using certain open source licenses from the requirement that any derivative works be licensed under the GPL. Linden added the exception to make it possible for many more developers to create new applications from Second Life viewer code. "We had the sense that Second Life has the potential to be much bigger than Linden Lab alone," says Rob Lanphier, Linden's director of open source development. "We needed to figured out a way to let the world build this into a much bigger thing."

The team behind the OpenVZ project will announce today the availability of its operating system virtualization software for the latest stable release of the Linux kernel. OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 now supports user ID namespaces for improved security, and has new process ID namespace code that makes live migration possible.

Every few years, I check in on how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. The first comparison came in 2002, the second in 2005. In those two comparisons, OpenOffice.org emerged as superior, not least for its greater stability. With Microsoft Office 2007 now out for six months and OpenOffice.org 2.3 about to be released, what's the situation today? To find out, I compared the two programs on the tools that most intermediate to advanced users are likely to use.

According to GPLMedicine.org and a company letter,AcerMed is officially dead. Fred Trotter opines:"The important thing to note here is what did NOT matter. The AcerMed people seemed decent enough: did not matter. AcerMed was CCHIT certified: did not matter. AcerMed was recommended in the industry press and by industry experts: did not matter. Companies get sued, people get sick. When will the medical community wake up to the fact that proprietary medical software is incompatible with medicine, incompatible with free thought and dangerous to patient data?"

South Africa's minister of public services, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, this week accepted an invitation to be a patron of FOSSFA. On her acceptance, Fraser-Moleketi emphasised that she did not want to be a figurehead for an inactive structure, but rather wanted to be involved with something that was going somewhere. Tectonic spoke to FOSSFA to find out what the foundation has planned.

When the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) sought Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validation for its OpenSSL toolkit last year, it was anything but smooth sailing. In fact, the whole process took so long that by the time it eventually wound its way through the validation process, it was already technically outdated. OSSI has just submitted a new OpenSSL update for FIPS validation but, according to Executive Director John Weathersby, things are bound to go much more smoothly this time around.

If you manage a system that's accessed by multiple users, you might have a user who hogs the disk space. Using disk quotas you can limit the amount of space available to each user. It's fairly easy to set up quotas, and once you are done you will be able to control the number of inodes and blocks owned by any user or group. Control over the disk blocks means that you can specify exactly how many bytes of disk space are available to a user or group. Since inodes store information about files, by limiting the number of inodes, you can limit the number of files users can create.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Colour Picker and Welcome applets appear for Plasma. Many bugs fixed, especially through the merge of the Summer of Code project "KRDC Revamp". A KPart created, amongst other improvements in Marble. Support for XESAM UserLanguage queries in Strigi. More work, especially in playlist handling, for Amarok 2.0. Improved search interface in KSystemLog. A return to work on KRecipes. KVocTrain is renamed Parley. Restart of development on a successor to the Eigen math library, Eigen2. Start of a port of KMLDonkey, a file sharing frontend, to KDE 4. Parts of the Cokoon decorator infrastructure ported from Python to C++. Security fixes in KDM. Work on page effects in KPresenter. Kross bindings for the Falcon programming language. Import of PyKDE4, new Python bindings for KDE development. KDE SVN housekeeping sees the move of a variety of unmaintained applications to more relevant locations with regard to the KDE 4 release.

IBM joined OpenOffice.org on Sept.10, and the company is bringing its programming muscle with it to improve the popular open-source office suite. While IBM has long used OpenOffice.org code, licensed under the LGPL (Lesser GPL), in its own programs, such as the groupware program Lotus Notes 8, this has been IBM's own fork of the code. Starting now, IBM is directing its OpenOffice development efforts--involving about three dozen programmers--to the public, open-source OpenOffice suite.