Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

KDE 4.0 continues to edge closer to completion with today's announcement of the Beta 2 release. Improvements have been made to Bluetooth support and blogging functions, and a freeze is in place so developers can begin working on bug fixes. Beta 2 also includes KOffice 2.0 Alpha 2 and a complete overhaul of remote desktop client KRDC.

Get a chance to meet the man in charge of managing government's free and open source software (FOSS) migration at this month's Open Tuesday event in Joburg. Arno Webb will talk on the opportunities that this migration will open up for those involved in open source.

MEPIS has released Beta3 of SimplyMEPIS 7.0, its full-featured Debian-based Linux, and Beta 2 of MEPIS AntiX (pronounced "Antics"), which is designed to run on very old 32-bit PC hardware. MEPIS 7, unlike Ubuntu-based MEPIS 6.5, is built on Debian 4.0. This beta boasts kernel version 2.6.22.5 which contains minor patches from the Kernel Development Team as its heart.

Microsoft has extended its controversial partnership with Novell to make the Silverlight cross-platform, cross-browser media player run on Linux desktops.

The Southern California Linux Expo is proud to announce the second annual Demonstrating Open-Source Health Care Solutions (DOHCS). The event will be held on February 8, 2008 in Los Angeles, California in conjunction with the Sixth Annual Southern California Linux Expo.

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering Team, it is my pleasure to announce that the first release candidate for NetBSD 4.0 has been released," Liam Foy posted to the NetBSD -announce mailing list. The release has been a long time coming, first announced in August of 2006 by Jeff Rizzo,"NetBSD 4.0_BETA was branched on August 8, 2006 (UTC), and the beta-testing process has officially begun."

Microsoft today released version 1.0 of Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform multimedia plugin, to the Web. The company also confirmed that it is working to make Silverlight available for Linux users.

New release of connectivity security standard-bearer includes host of bugfixes and a long list of new features.

PhpGedView is an open source application that lets you post your genealogy records on your Web site. It has a lot of interesting features, and makes viewing and editing all aspects of your genealogy easy and fun.

Those who have been paying close attention may have noticed a number of changes to the LWN site over the last few weeks. Most of those changes are not visible; our quaint early-90's table-oriented HTML is slowly giving away to a more contemporary design which makes use of the features of cascading style sheets. This sort of work involves a lot of change-and-reload cycles in an effort to figure out why something is not rendering as your editor intended. CSS is a powerful but sometimes obscure technology. One tool your editor wishes he had stumbled across earlier is Firebug, a Firefox extension designed to help with just this sort of work.

The countdown is on to Ontario Linux Fest and we couldn't be more excited. Here's some news from inside the organizing committee. Since our last note we've added some speakers and topics, and a couple of prominent sponsors. And a bunch more of you have registered in advance from our registration page at http://onlinux.ca/olfreg

Wireless operator says its telecommuter services package won't be confused with OpenOffice.org's open source suite.

"Slab defragmentation is mainly an issue if Linux is used as a fileserver and large amounts of dentries, inodes and buffer heads accumulate," Christoph Lameter explained when posting the fifth version of his patchset. He continued,"in some load situations the slabs become very sparsely populated so that a lot of memory is wasted by slabs that only contain one or a few objects. In extreme cases the performance of a machine will become sluggish since we are continually running reclaim. Slab defragmentation adds the capability to recover wasted memory."

Sit on the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) task force committee, write editorials, participate in government. These activities are of supreme importance for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in medicine to succeed. If FOSS advocates are not present or do not speak up at the table when decisions are being made, guess what direction the decisions will go? The power of advocacy works only when exercised.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan announced the cancellation of the company's Foleo mobile companion today in a post on the company's official blog. Colligan cites the need to focus effort on Palm's next-generation smartphone operating system as the reason behind the decision.

I usually carry my laptop everywhere and do work on it, but I do also need to work at my desktop PC, so I need to synchronize the files on the two machines. I have used several sync tools in the past, ranging from simple commands like scp and rsync to utilities like Krusader, which includes a way to synchronize directories on different machines. Recently I started using Unison.

Discussion continues on the Linux Kernel mailing list about the legality and morality of re-licensing BSD/GPL dual-licensed code under only the GPL. Alan Cox replied to Theo de Raadt's comments suggesting he was encouraging people to break the law, "re-read my email and then apologize. I do question the .h files where they are BSD licence and no changes were made to the work. I also point out that the dual licence on that code appears to give permission to distribute under one of those licences by choice." In response to Theo's request that code be shared both ways rather than converted to a sole GPL, "that's about the first thing I would agree on - its somewhat rude and not something I personally would usually choose todo."

The multi-billion-dollar market for CRM software is hotly contested by closed source vendors like SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.com among others, all of whom spend tens of millions of dollars marketing their wares. Can open source compete?

What springs to your mind upon hearing the words"Tahiti" of"Fiji"? White sandy beaches? Spectacular sunsets? Blue lagoons with colorful marine life? While natural beauty is indeed one of the most attractive aspects of the South Pacific, you might be surprised to learn that on some of these paradise islands there are active Linux user communities and even officially registered Linux user groups (LUG). New Caledonia, which I had the pleasure to visit last month, is one such place.

While the ISO hasn't made its official announcement, Microsoft conceded that it had been unsuccessful in its attempt to make Open XML an ISO standard.