Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Ubuntu technical team yesterday announced that it would maintain the status quo and not activate proprietary video drivers in the forthcoming Feisty release. The team also reclassified PowerPC as unofficial.

ACCESS is showcasing a number of products and technologies incluidng the ACCESS Linux Platform, NetFront Browser, and NetFront Mobile Client Suite.

Focusing again on applications this week, specifically I'll look at two of the promising document viewers for KDE 4, Okular and Ligature. They are two of the rising stars of KDE 4, but they both have their roots as KDE 3 applications that have grown up. Read on for more...

Artists and Developers ally to boost Open Source Graphics Software: Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 Montréal announced. Building on the overwhelming success of last year's Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon, France, key Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) graphics projects are pleased to announce the second Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), to be held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada, May 6, 2007 at École Polytechnique de Montréal.

Three post graduate students from Wits University won silver in the SIMagine 2007 awards for developing Mobiraba. A Java based version of the popular Morabaraba board game, it can be played on cellphones with GPRS.

Like many companies, Light Crafts releases its flagship application -- the RAW photo converter LightZone -- for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. But although the Windows and OS X versions of LightZone cost hundreds of dollars, the Linux version is absolutely free. It is a lucky break, too, because LightZone is a powerful tool that bests many of its expensive competitors on both quality and ease of use.

Tired of bloated operating systems but still need a good looking desktop? Ubuntu derivative Xubuntu offers the best of the modern desktop with very little of the desktop-slowing excess.

Ubuntu has an interesting project called Upstart, which is a replacement for the traditional Unix init system. The goals of Upstart are ambitious: to modernize and streamline the boot process, control user tasks, and manage services. Currently these things are managed with a multitude of different utilities: cron, atd, anacron, init, telinit, udev, acpid, apmd, ifupdown, module-init-tools, inetd, xinetd, update-rc.d, etc.init.d, /etc/rc*d, and gosh knows what-all. So Upstart intends to replace sysvinit and initscripts, and to replace all the service and task managers- cron, atd, inetd, and so forth- with a single daemon. To make it even more fun, they are preserving backwards-compatibility for a period of time to make the transition easier for users. If you're running *buntu Edgy, you're already seeing Upstart in action.

A group of open-source software companies has banded together to try to ensure their products work well with one another, an effort aimed at matching the tight integration of competing products from proprietary software companies such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Kolkata: Jadavpur University’s department of Computer Science & Engineering under ‘Computer Literacy’ activity programme organised a ‘Convention on Free Software – Concepts & Applications’ on 10 February. Bengal IT minister Prof Debesh Das inaugurated the programme in the presence of representatives from the industry, educationists and students across the state.

MEPIS founder and chief maintainer Warren Woodford announced today that Beta 5 of SimplyMEPIS 6.5, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, default KDE 3.5.3 desktop, and 3D support, is ready for download. Additionally, "Xorg 7.1 and lots of new drivers make this release Beryl-ready," according to Woodford.

You've heard of LAMP, the popular open-source infrastructure stack featuring the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, MySQL's database, and the Perl, Python or PHP scripting languages. Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to spotlight a variation on that mixture, replacing Linux with its own Solaris Unix operating system as part of its Solaris + AMP, or SAMP, stack for building Web applications. Featured in Sun's rollout today are versions of the open-source AMP components optimized for Solaris 10 plus Sun developer tools.

Elliote Rusty Harold, acclaimed Java and XML author, recently described Java as the lingua franca of the programming world. According to Harold he can write basic Java and have it understood by non-Java programmers more often than not.

IBM's appetite for acquiring software companies shows no signs of diminishing. Last year, the company conservatively spent $3.6bn, adding 12 companies or just their assets to its $18bn middleware business during 2006.

LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit takes place this week, Feb. 14-15, in New York City at the New York Marriott Marquis on Time Square. This is a regional and vertically focused business conference that addresses the needs and interests of IT professionals involved in the deployment of Linux and open source solutions.

Welcome to this year's 3rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. In light of recent attacks on SHA-1, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is preparing for a competition to augment and revise the current Secure Hash Standard. Rick Lehrbaum reported that the installation of Debian etch on an old ThinkPad notebook went pretty well and added a number of screenshots.

About a week ago id Software released updates to their latest games Doom 3 and Quake 4. Here are the details for all you gamers out there.

The organisers of Akademy 2007 have put out a Call for Sponsorship. Akademy is the KDE World Summit, this year taking place in Glasgow at the end of June. Sponsorship is an opportunity to promote your company or product to the developers, users, deployers and consultants who will attend the conference. It will also provide a marketing avenue for your company to the thousands who read our website and publications. Most importantly, it gives vital support which ensures that hundreds of KDE contributors can meet together to plan the future of the free desktop. If your company would like to sponsor Akademy contact us at akademy-sponsoring@kde.org. If you know any companies in your local area who could also be potential Akademy sponsors please let us know too.

Identity management is the bane of IT administrators' existence if they're presiding over heterogeneous Windows and Linux environments. The hang up arrives when they attempt to synch Linux boxes with Active Directory, or try to manage those servers from a central point.

The One Laptop Per Child project will ship nearly 2,500 of its $150 laptops to eight nations this month, Reuters reported today. The experiment is a prelude to mass production of the kid-friendly, lime-green-and-white laptops scheduled to begin in July, when 5 million will be built.