Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Following recent reports of a South African bank eyeing out Linux, Novell South Africa today issued a statement in which it said it had reached an agreement with First National Bank of South Africa to standardise the bank's 12 000 desktops in its 680 retail branches on Novell's Linux product.

Now one can avoid the pain of dealing with lawyers for simple legal paperwork thanks to DocumentX, the first website to offer customised legal documents, created and stored online.

If you need to create a presentation every now and then, but you find OpenOffice.org Impress too complicated and bulky, check out KeyJnote, a tool that turns any PDF document or set of graphics files into a professional-quality presentation with impressive transition effects.

Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros announced on Monday a technical and legal collaboration, the latest step in the software giant's ongoing program to partner with open-source companies.

[I wonder what the dollar amount was this time. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems today releases Sun Studio 12, its latest IDE (integrated development environment) for C, C++ and Fortran. It's freely available for Solaris and Linux software platforms and the update will be useful for developers building multi-core and multi-threaded applications, the company says.

Novell isn't the only company that could be hurt by new license terms likely to be implemented by the group that polices open source software. In a regulatory filing, digital video recorder manufacturer TiVo warned that the newly revised General Public License could harm its business.

LXer Feature: 03-Jun-2007

A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source.

This book gets right to work. Don't expect Karlins' streamlined text to hold your hand if you don't know the ins and outs of Dreamweaver yet. It's not that kind of book. Think of this as Adobe's (Peachpit Press, really) version of an O'Reilly "Hacks" book. You've got 100 hot tips on hand to enable you to improve your Dreamweaver web design skill sets. That said, they aren't presented in a random fashion at all.

Professor Eben Moglen is a polished speaker, a true orator. It is a real treat to hear him speak, and if you ever get a chance to do so, I heartily recommend that you do. I learned last week that he communicates just as well in one-on-one sessions.

Liquidat has posted a nice overview of the technology known as NEPOMUK, a part of KDE 4. An excerpt reads: "Nepomuk-KDE is the basis for the semantic technologies we will see in KDE 4. Sebastian Trüg, the main developer behind Nepomuk-KDE, provided me with some up2date information about the current state and future plans".

The Zenwalk project today released Zenwalk Linux 4.6 (code-named Red Pill). The lightweight distribution utilizes a cutting-edge 2.6.21.3 Linux kernel with KVM support, along with the relatively new Xfce 4.4.1 desktop environment.

LearningSoft has used customized Linux-based handheld devices in an "assessment system" aimed at helping classroom school teachers create, administer, and score tests. Aimed primarily at grades three through eight, the "Indigo Learning System" uses Aeronix's $99 Zipit chat device running a custom software stack.

“We feel very strongly about this being an industry effort and being a standard. We want this to be the one way that developers can add offline capabilities to their applications,” says Jeff Huger, Google’s VP of engineering, during the keynote for the company’s global Developer Day.

Another chapter of a new how-to book, Hacking Ubuntu: Serious Hacks, Mods and Customizations, has been published online at ExtremeTech.com. The chapter, entitled "Multitasking in Ubuntu," explains how to switch applications, tweak the workplace switcher, customize applications, use buffers, and track projects.

Ten years ago, IT consultant Sona Mehring had a friend who was going through a difficult pregnancy. Mehring wanted to help in some way, so she created a Web site where her friend could post updates throughout the pregnancy and the subsequent premature birth of her child, and visitors could post messages of encouragement and love. It was an efficient way of communicating because it eliminated the need for multiple phone calls and email messages. The family was so impacted by the online support it had received through Mehring's Web site that it donated money to the hospital to provide an onsite computer and Internet access to other families experiencing life-threatening illness and disease. That inspired Mehring to found CaringBridge, a nonprofit company that provides free customizable Web sites built on open source software.

The Microsoft "boost" seems to be wearing down, but the Linux company has become more efficient.

In this, the fifth and penultimate edition of our weeklong series of video clips taken from our interview with Professor Eben Moglen at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, the good professor explains how he came to meet and do legal work for Richard Stallman.

Building packages is usually hard work, and best left to distro developers who have the time and patience to work the appropriate magic. However, if you're an admin or user with a need to rebuild existing packages, rpmrebuild takes the pain out of creating new RPMs from installed packages.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was once the most widely used protocol for transferring files between computers. However, because FTP sends authentication information and file contents over the wire unencrypted, it's not a secure way to communicate. Secure Copy (SCP) and the more robust SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) address this security concern by providing data transfer over a fully encrypted channel. You can use these alternatives for transferring files securely over the Internet or any other untrusted network.

Obvious quality control and performance distinguish commercial, open source Zenoss from other offerings in the network and service monitoring field.