Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, "The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?" at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here. For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it."

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian explained rather than defended his company's deal with Microsoft in his keynote address at the annual LinuxWorld Conference here Aug. 8. "I know our deal with Microsoft is controversial, but it is necessary for our customers who have to deal with both Linux and Windows in their data centers. Virtualization is also going to have to deal with both of those operating systems," he told attendees.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) pushed out a prototype application at LinuxWorld yesterday to demonstrate interoperability between open source applications. The Common Customer View (CCV) prototype integrates data between open source products from JapserSoft, Centric CRM, Adaptive Planning, Talend, and other OSA members, and includes a new single sign-on (SSO) piece contributed by SpikeSource and released under the Open Source License (OSL).

MySQL quietly let slip that it would no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball, not quite a year after the company announced a split between its paid and free versions. While the Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), MySQL is making it harder for non-customers to access the source code.

For those who like living on the cutting edge, Mandriva Linux 2008 Beta 1 (code name Cassini) and Fedora 8 Test 1 ("for 'alpha' users") were both released this week.

The alpha version of Mozilla's community-driven Firefox support site offers how-to and troubleshooting documents directed toward new users -- a crucial audience if the browser is to capture and maintain additional market share.

Trolltech have announced the release of Qt 4.3.1. This release adds bug fixes and performance optimisations. More significant however is the new licence exceptions added to their Free Software edition. This means Qt software can be used along with a larger range of other Free Software libraries and dependencies. The Trolltech blog is celebrating the release with photos of the Trolltech support teams.

The OpenSUSE project celebrated its second birthday on Aug. 7 by making the first beta of OpenSUSE 10.3 available at the LinuxWorld trade show here. OpenSUSE 10.3 is a bleeding-edge Linux operating system based on Linux kernel 2.6.22.1 with a large variety of the latest open-source applications for desktops, servers and application development. Novell is OpenSUSE's corporate backer, and uses OpenSUSE as the foundation for its SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) line.

Lenovo announced that it will be preloading Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system on select ThinkPad notebooks. Although exact dates could not be confirmed for South Africa, these machines are due to be released worldwide in the last quarter of the year.

When Fedora 7 was released, one of its standout features was Smolt, an opt-in program for collecting data about users' hardware. Since then, Smolt has provided a publicly available snapshot of systems running Fedora, and is in the process of being ported to other distributions. With features being rapidly added, Smolt has the potential to offer an unprecedented wealth of information, and to aid in quality assurance, tech support, and advocacy, not only for Fedora, but for GNU/Linux in general.

The PC maker has finally released desktops with pre-installed Linux in the United Kingdom, but users will have to pay a premium compared with the United States.

Not everyone needs to work with music scores on their computers, but if you're someone who does enter, edit, or store sheet music electronically, you can choose among many free software options.

One of the nice things about the X Window System is its ability to display X apps running remotely on a local machine. One of the not-so-nice things about Microsoft Windows is the complete lack of native support for displaying X applications. If you find yourself working on Windows but wanting to use Linux apps at the same time, Xming can do the job. Xming is a port of X Window System to Microsoft Windows that's free and easy to use.

Linspire, developer of the Linspire commercial and Freespire community desktop Linux distributions, and CNR.com, a free Linux software delivery service, announced on August 8 the immediate availability of the controversial Freespire 2.0 distribution -- the Linux distribution that embraces proprietary software.

At LinuxWorld the Dell CTO says the two will make running multiple operating systems on a single computer easier.

The personal health record (PHR) is different from an EHR. The PHR is an electronic, lifelong record of health information that is maintained by individual citizens. These individuals own and manage the information in the PHR, which comes from both their healthcare providers and the individuals themselves.This article recently published in Virtual Medical Worlds describes the current state of affairs with regards to the development and implementation of PHR systems in some detail. Here are just a few of the many collaborative projects, activities, and organizations involving the development and implementation of personal health record (PHR) systems that are described in the article. Many of these are open source solutions, e.g. AHIMA and myPHR; MyHealtheVet ; Eastern Maine Healthcare; and MyOnlineHealth; and iHealth Record.

Dell and Ubuntu fired the first shots. Together, they delivered the first mainstream consumer Linux desktops and laptops. Then, on Aug. 6, Novell and Lenovo blew open the business laptop market with the first regular listing of a Linux-powered business desktop, the T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Then, just to underline the point that we're seeing a Linux desktop revolution, Dell announced that it too would be offering SLED on business systems. In Dell's case, the company will start by offering SLED in China.

Google Code for Educators, announced during Google's Faculty Summit last month, offers tutorials, sample course content, video lectures, and a Curriculum Search tool that focuses on Web-based materials from computer science departments worldwide.

In his LinuxWorld keynote speech August 7th, Dell CTO Kevin Kettler announced that Dell would be offering Novell's SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) in China as a pre-load on Dell systems. Kettler during his speech, which focused on virtualization and the desktop, made a point of using Xen on top of both SLED and Ubuntu on Dell laptops to demonstrate what a powerful combination virtualization and the Linux desktop makes. For example, on both systems, Kettler showed Microsoft Vista running as a client on Ubuntu and SLED using Xen.

The community-drive Edubuntu project aims to create a version of Ubuntu specially tailored for use in primary and secondary education. Perhaps the most useful feature present in the Edubuntu OS is the Linux Terminal Server Project environment, whose applications are not limited just to eduction. The LTSP model centers around one powerful machine that acts as a server and several often much lower-powered machines that act as clients and boot from an installation of Ubuntu on the server. Though you will not be installing anything on them, there are still some maintenance tasks specifically directed at clients.