Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Red Hat Enterprise support contracts need to be more flexible. When I learned that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which is a big release for Red Hat I've been looking forward to for some time, was coming out on March 14, one of the first thoughts that crossed my mind was, "Great—when's CentOS 5 coming out?"

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is changing the final process of writing the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3). Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, says that the reasons for the change are the extensive revisions in the next draft and the need "to get the community back involved in the process" as it reaches a climax. The revisions deal with issues raised by the recent Novell-Microsoft deal, and by the community about language in the license about patents and digital rights management (DRM).

The notion of doneness pervades everything we, as humans, set out to achieve. Want to send a manned rocket to Mars? It’ll be done when it’s done. Composing a new symphony? Can’t wait to hear the finished piece. Want to create a payroll system for an automotive company? Better deliver it on time, otherwise they might grow tired of waiting and pull the plug on the whole project.

Six weeks after it first promised a revamped add-ons site for its Firefox browser, Mozilla Corp. today officially launched a streamlined version that touts a beginner's list of extensions. Mozilla did not, however, cull the more than 2,200 extensions offered by the site to the "couple hundred" as it pledged to do early last month.

On March 27, Oracle and the Open Invention Network (OIN) will announce that Oracle will become an OIN licensee. By doing this, Oracle opens the doors to making some of its patents available royalty-free to any company, institution, or individual that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux.

Former Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr is completing his doctoral thesis at the Centre for Technology Management, University of Cambridge. Entitled "Quality Improvement in Volunteer, Free, and Open Source Project: Exploring the Impact of Release Management," his thesis is based on case studies of major free and open source software (FOSS) project, including Debian, GNOME, the Linux kernel, OpenOffice.org, Plone, and X.org. A supporter of the open access movement, which tries to make academic work as widely available as possible, Michlmayr is blogging and discussing his work as often as possible. He also plans to make the final version of his thesis available on the Internet. As part of his efforts, Michlmayr talked to Linux.com about why he concludes that regularly scheduled releases are desirable in large FOSS projects.

Sun Microsystems on Tuesday introduced a Netra rack server that offers broader operating system support and is powered by AMD Opteron processors. The Netra X4200 M2, the latest in a product line targeted at the telecom industry, runs Linux, Windows, or Solaris. It is also Sun's first Network Equipment Building Standard Level 3 certified rack server powered by Advanced Micro Devices. NEBS is a widely used set of safety, spatial, and environmental design guidelines for U.S. telecommunications equipment.

Recent talk over a possible merging of the teams of compositing window managers Compiz and Beryl seems to be reaching fruition. Although details have yet to be worked out and no deals have been finalised, the project already has the suggested title of Coral

If sci-fi author William Gibson’s claim that "the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet" is correct, then how we will manufacture physical goods tomorrow may be augured by how we make software today. Open-source, object-oriented development, personalization, even hacking, are presaging and inspiring new manufacturing methods that will overhaul today’s plodding techniques born during the Industrial Revolution, according to panelists speaking Monday at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

When it comes to choosing a Linux distribution, people tend to stick with the major players, such as Ubuntu, SUSE, or Fedora. However, every once in a while a distro comes along that offers a look at Linux in a new and fun way. One such distribution is Dreamlinux, a Morphix-based implementation of Linux that can be run from a single CD or installed on a hard drive. Dreamlinux 2.2 aims to offer a full range of desktop applications while providing a wealth of multimedia tools for easy production of professional-grade media.

Oracle has licensed patents of the Open Invention Network, a group seeking to give open source allies some clout in an intellectual property realm that favours the incumbent proprietary software powers.

Last time, I gave a users' perspective overview of the OpenID decentralized single sign-on system, and described how to take the first step: getting your own OpenID identity. Once you are comfortable with OpenID as a login method for the sites that you visit, you can look at implementing it for the sites that you run. Plugins for WordPress make the process easy to understand.

Novell is developing an open source version of Microsoft's InfoCard identity technology that will run on both Linux and Mac.

The OpenOffice.org project team said today that three security vulnerabilities, which had been reported in the last week, have been fully addressed in OpenOffice.org 2.2. The latest release candidate (RC4) of v2.2 -- including all the security fixes -- is now available for download.

The humble personal computer has a well-deserved reputation as a giant-killer. After all, it was the virus-like spread of PCs which spelled the beginning of the end for the mainframe dinosaurs. Because the first low-cost servers emerged from high-end PCs being asked to look after more than one user at once, it took quite a few of the diminutive workhorses to match the capacity of the mini-computers they were slowly but surely replacing.

At the time of writing, half an week into the second week of the vote, we have the the following statistics gathered at the beginning of the week..

OGRE Team, the developers behind the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE), have announced the latest release of OGRE, codenamed 'Eihort,' including improved advanced lighting and shadowing techniques and more. According to the engine's official website, OGRE is “a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.”

Deleting files can take forever. Windows Vista suffers from a bug that causes many machines to stall while deleting, copying and moving files, a flaw that has provoked consternation in online forums.

A new phase of wrangling over the future of the dominant open-source license, the General Public License, is set to begin Wednesday and to end 90 days afterward.

There are four objects that provide information about the environment of the user's system. They belong to the window object: navigator, screen, history and location. These objects are used to obtain information such as screen size and resolution, color depth of the monitor, limited information on the browser history, and the URL. In addition, information such as the user's operating system, including the browser type, version and language can also be obtained. In this installment, we'll look at objects, their related properties and methods. We'll delve deeper into them when we use them later in our study.