Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Ah, survived the holidays! But if your bank balance is anything like mine right now, you’re looking for ways to save money. Here’s one means of economizing -- stop buying computer software. No, I’m not advocating becoming a pirate. Johnny Depp can pull it off, but I wouldn’t recommend it for educators. (Too few of us look that good in mascara.) Instead, take a serious look at some high quality software that is now available -- at no cost.

Featured in the expanded arrangement are specific blueprints that demonstrate how to redeploy applications. For example, the companies have been building a blueprint, or "proof point," on moving from an IBM CICS environment onto Linux running Oracle Fusion Middleware and the Oracle 10g database on Unisys ES7000/one Enterprise Servers.

This is the first in what will hopefully be monthly summaries of news from the Free Software Foundation and GNU project. This summary has been distilled down from press releases, blogs, email lists, and website news pages. The idea is to provide a concise summary of the latest FSF/GNU news for those who don't have the time or interest to find and read all the original news sources within that community.

If proprietary software continues to dominate, within 10 years no one will be able to store any file and even view their own content without first paying a service provider to see it and the PC as we know it will be gone within 30 years. Those were just two of the predictions made by German Linux consultant Klaus Knopper, creator of the Knoppix live CD computer operating system, at the three-day Open Source conference, LinuxAsia 2007, in New Delhi.

The release of the upcoming version of Debian may slip to March, according to one of the two release managers for the Linux distribution.

Book publishers Penguin has launched an interesting new project that will apply the wiki style of collaborative editing and writing to the novel in their experimental project, A Million Penguins.

Got to hand it to the Open Source community. They are kind of spinning their wheels here in North America, but they made some headway in, of all places, France. They are giving 175,000 school kids USB keys loaded with open source software. This will come at a cost of 2.6 million Euros (roughly $3.97 million). So much for it being free. At least to the kids it's free and that is the point.

Last year, I took a trip to Asia. To stay in touch, I carried a GSM world phone, capable of receiving telephone calls in the countries I was visiting. The capability to receive calls with the same mobile phone number I use at home while halfway across the world seemed incredibly cool-at least until the first call came in! Mobile phones hide the location of the phone, which cuts both ways. A colleague had decided to call me in the middle of the day on a Friday, which had awakened me very early on Saturday morning, because the phone "hid"my faraway location from him.

It might seem like Hewlett-Packard can't decide to love or hate rival Sun Microsystems. Today, HP significantly broadened its certification for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system on its ProLiant rack and tower servers and BladeSystem blade servers. But on the other hand, HP has partnered with Transitive to jointly engage with Sun's customers to see how they might deploy that company's emulation technology. What HP loves, you see, is the money that some Sparc shops want to spend as they migrate to X64 iron.

Not so fast, Microsoft, Novell, and Oracle—Red Hat’s upcoming release of its enterprise Linux operating system will keep it on top for business use of Linux, an analyst said on Tuesday. The operating system version, dubbed RHEL5, is slated for March. The system’s advanced features and the company’s market entrenchment will ensure that Red Hat triumphs over its rivals, WR Hambrecht+Co analyst Robert Stimson said in a report. Mr. Stimson also predicted sales growth of 44 percent and earnings increases of 31 percent for the fiscal year ending February 28.

Last week we learned how to use iperf to measure network throughput, jitter, and datagram loss. Today we're going to learn more excellent ways to measure network performance using iperf and ntop, but first I have a couple of corrections to make.

This detailed, hands-on review examines Nokia's Linux-based N800 Internet Tablet first as a consumer electronics device, and then as a platform for open source software development. Reviewer Jerry Epplin infuses the review with crotchety humor and deeply technical insights.

Dave Freese has just released version 1.2 of Fldigi, a popular new program for Linux and FreeBSD which enables amateur radio operators to join their radios and their computers at the hip and create a new kind of ham shack: a digital ham shack. Here's the story behind both the rising popularity of "sound card" digital modes in amateur radio and how Fldigi lets you enjoy enjoy them on Linux.

Some years ago Linux creator Linux Torvalds famously compared changing operating systems to “performing brain surgery on yourself”. I’ve quoted him often because so many people seem to have unrealistic expectations when they pick up a Linux DVD or CD-ROM. I’ve recently received a couple of e-mails in response to my articles here on O’Reillynet that illustrate Linus’ point beautifully and demonstrate part of the problem Linux has faced in gaining greater acceptance on the desktop.

Following my recent article in which I wrote that neither I, nor several financial analysis firms, were aware of any companies that were planning to deploy Oracle's Unbreakable Linux, a handful of companies have told me that they are giving Unbreakable Linux a try. What I think is interesting is why they're giving it a try, and what it tells us about Oracle's intentions towards Red Hat.

There's little doubt that many e-commerce businesses embrace open source applications such as OS Commerce. The problem is that using open source software isn't for the faint of heart as you need a certain level of technical expertise to deploy and manage these applications. While you don't have to pay to use open source applications, providing the integration, implementation and maintenance for the servers hosting the "free" software can be costly and time-consuming.

I know that the original question was "Who are the top 5 OSS thought leaders", and that's been covered by several folks already. I'm going to ask a similar, but different question.

Commercial Linux distributor rPath, which has a variant of Linux and a build system for creating and deploying software appliances based on Linux, last week said that it has closed its second round of venture capital funding.

This article presents a little-known use of XUL (Mozilla's user-interface language) and shows how to take advantage of its superior performance and accessibility over HTML while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. I will illustrate this using a proof-of-concept JavaScript library that can render UI widgets using either XUL or DHTML. If possible, you will want to open this page in Firefox. The side-by-side examples below will not make much sense otherwise.

The Swedish Armed Forces has made the decision to migrate its servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Following the deal, the Swedish Armed Forces will start replacing Windows NT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its core IT infrastructure.