Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Amid intense lobbying and politics Microsoft has moved closer to achieving its goal of having Office Open XML (OOXML) ratified as an International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) standard. But, it now seems, the company may have to wait until next year before getting the official thumbs up.

KnowledgeTree, the Cape Town-based open source document management company, has partnered with Novell to offer their system to SUSE Linux Enterprise customers.

Here's what we know beyond doubt. First, the Linux desktop is gaining in popularity. Second, it's doing so at the expense of the Windows desktop. After that, things get muddy. For example, our recent DesktopLinux survey results, clearly show that there is simply more interest in Linux desktop. After all, more than twice as many people filled out our survey this year when compared to the 2006 survey.

Standards expert and attorney Andrew Updegrove has predicted that on Sept. 4 the International Organization for Standards will announce that the draft ISO specification based on Microsoft's Office Open XML formats failed to make the standardization grade.

Currently, GNU/Linux users with Nvidia graphics cards have two choices: Either use the proprietary drivers and violate their free software principles, or use the free nv driver and do without 3-D acceleration. The Nouveau project is working to overcome this dilemma by producing its own set of fully functional free Nvidia drivers. We talked to Stephane Marchesin and Ben Skeggs, two of the active developers in Nouveau, about the history of the project and the current status of its work.

Ingo Molnar reviewed Roman Zippel's Really Fair Scheduler code, suggesting that much of the work was similar to that which was being done by Peter Zijlstra, "all in one, we don't disagree, this is an incremental improvement we are thinking about for 2.6.24. We do disagree with this being positioned as something fundamentally different though - it's just the same thing mathematically, expressed without a "/weight" divisor, resulting in no change in scheduling behavior. (except for a small shift of CPU utilization for a synthetic corner-case)"

As with Firefox, you can extend Thunderbird's functionality by installing extensions. Mozilla's official extension repository has quite a few nifty tools on offer, and which ones you choose to install depends entirely on your needs. There are, however, a few extensions that you might find indispensable no matter how you use Thunderbird.

With his older notebook starting to show its age, Alastair Otter decides to upgrade to a ThinkPad X60 running Ubuntu and learns how far Ubuntu has come in the past two releases.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to take shape. Continued improvements in KGPG and KDevelop. More KVTML format conversion work across KDE-Edu applications. Theme improvements in KDE Games. A new game, KSimili, is imported into playground/games. Initial work on a Kalzium KPart for 3d molecular viewing. A redesigned configuration module for colours in KDE. Support for autodetection of gphoto2 cameras using Solid in Digikam. Annotation DRM support in okular. Work on threading in Mailody. Orca screenreader support through Kross scripting in KSpread. Continued development on KChart 2. Initial work on a Sonnet-based spellchecker for KOffice. Development on Eigen 2 is restarted to follow a different implementation strategy. Blitz is renamed QImageBlitz. The release schedule for KDE 4.0. is officially pushed back two months. KDE 4.0 Beta 2 tagged for release.

The open source instant messaging (IM) program Pidgin is now available in Afrikaans, thanks to the efforts of Translate.org.za.

There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too. OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But...But I find that my resolve is being sorely tested.

LXer Feature: 02-Sept-2007

Microsoft is under the microscope with the FSF looking into GPLv3 violations, and news that there will be a Gnome Desktop for the Windows API, Carla Schroder writes about 802.11n, HP launches Linux desktop in Australia, Mandriva Benelux is launched and I finally start getting tired of of the constant FUD coming from Matt Hartley. All this and more in this weeks LXer Weekly Roundup.

The Ubuntu Linux team last week announced Hardy Heron, the next release of the popular open source Linux operating system to include long-term support.

People Behind KDE releases the third interview in its series of four interviews with students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - meet Leo Franchi, Juan González Aguilera, Andrew Manson and Marcus Hanwell!

Linux Gazette is a volunteer-run monthly web magazine dedicated to two simple ideas: making Linux a little more fun, and sharing ideas and discoveries.

OpenBSD project creator Theo de Raadt detailed his concerns regarding BSD-licensed code and Dual-BSD/GPL-licensed code being re-licensed under only the GPL as previously discussed here, "honestly, I was greatly troubled by the situation, because even people like Alan Cox were giving other Linux developers advice to ... break the law. And furthermore, there are even greater potential risks for how the various communities interact."

So, you want to be a kernel hacker. Before you go down that path, or get involved with any other free or open source development project, you should know that it's often a wild, raucous place where -- no matter what level of coding skill you possess -- your tolerance for criticism or rejection might constantly be tested. Even Linus Torvalds isn't immune to criticism.

Set aside an hour on September 11th or 12th and learn how to debug those complex Linux applications without leaving your desk. Linux application tool vendor MontaVista has scheduled a live online 'webinar' to show off the debugging features of its DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE) for Linux. It says the IDE will help developers build better Linux applications and deliver them to market quickly.

Gartner Webdev has published an interview with KDE's very own marketing renegade Wade Olson. Wade talks about KDE 4, what makes it special and what KDE's role in the software market is. He sheds some light on the user's point of view and discusses his vision about the way the computer and software industry is moving.

Red Hat has announced the beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio, the new Eclipse-based IDE for the Red Hat family of solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.