Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

It's called "The Ultimate Weblog System," and if you can shear off some of the hyperbole in that you'll find that the quick-to-install Geeklog does provide what it claims: a Web portal with all the trimmings, and all of it working right "out of the box."

Despite Medsphere'slitigation issues andnot keeping its promises to open source its products, the company appears to be generatingnew business and is alsohiring.

The OSDL's Desktop Linux Working Group has published a detailed, lengthy "state of the desktop" report that chronicles a truly surprising number of significant developments during 2006. The scholarly work was based in part on 2,600 responses to the OSDL's 2006 Linux Client Survey.

Legal concerns over open source intellectual property might have waned in recent years, but compliance software vendor Palamida Inc insists it is looking at a bright future given the growing use of open source software.

When PHP developer Zend Technologies Ltd announced the appointment of Harold Goldberg as its new CEO, it was arguably a case of a tech startup getting its first adult sales and marketing person at the helm. But one week into the job, Goldberg admits he is still in learning mode.

Six of the world's largest telecommunications companies have officially launched a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a common mobile Linux software platform. Founded by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone, the LiMo Foundation is inviting membership and participation from application and middleware developers.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is going to review the patent held by e-learning software maker Blackboard Inc., in the wake of a challenge by a group advocating open source software. The USPTO responded Thursday to a November 2005 request from the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) for the review on behalf of three open source educational software projects. In granting the review, the Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC's request raises "a substantial new question of patentability" regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent.

[I used blackboard at ASU and its EULA was several pages long then, but patenting Teacher-to Students communication? That's over the top. - Scott]

While the eyes of the IT world have spent years squinting to see Microsoft's slowly unfolding vistas, the companies and individuals that drive open source have been steadily building a case for broader adoption of Linux-based operating systems.

Call it Red Hat's forward spin velocity regarding Linux management tools. With competition such as Oracle offering full Red Hat support on their own products, Red Hat is now expanding and improving its Linux management footprint. The leading Linux distributor told internetnews.com that it is rolling out online monitoring tool this year Red Hat customers.

Mustang Linux, a fork of Buffalo Linux and a newcomer to the "mini" Linux distribution field, achieved a v2.3.1 release earlier this month. The lightweight distro, which can run entirely from RAM, is based on a 2.6.16 kernel and offers a choice of desktops, the project team said.

The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.6, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Significant features include additional support for Compiz as a window manager with Kicker, session management for browser tabs in Akregator, templating for KMail messages, faster frame rates with video chat in Kopete and new summary menus for Kontact making it easier to work with your appointments and to-dos.

At the 2006 China Linux User Convention, held in Beijing on December 21, Chinese Linux users, producers, press, and analysts discussed recent developments in China's Linux and open source industry.

The K12 Linux Terminal Server Project (K12LTSP) is a thin client distribution designed for use in schools. Recently, I was invited by Robert Arkiletian, a K12LTSP contributor, to see the software in action in his computer lab at Eric Hamber Secondary School in Vancouver, Canada. We talked about the system requirements for a K12LTSP installation, investigated the available software, and discussed the success of Arkiletian's own lab, which has saved his school thousands of dollars in hardware costs.

In this multi-part series, DesktopLinux.com columnist and operating system curmudgeon Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols pits Microsoft's latest wares -- Vista -- against Linux's fair haired boy -- Ubuntu -- to see how the pinnacle of commercial desktop operating systems stacks up against the free, community developed-Linux upstart.

When Microsoft and Novell announced that they would work together, Linux enthusiasts were shocked. How has the agreement affected the open-source community, and can it recover?

Apart from a KDE desktop and applications, the developers of the Pardus 2007 Linux distribution have built an entire distribution from scratch. Pardus, released last month, has its own multilingual installer, custom dependency-resolving package manager, and an INIT system that slashes boot times by several seconds. The distribution has come a long way since its first release in 2005, when it was based on Gentoo and lacked a package manager. Thanks to its custom tools, it's one of the easiest Linux distribution to run and manage.

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium, has unveiled the openLiberty Project, a global initiative formed to provide resources and support to open source developers building identity-based applications, the company said. With today's news, Liberty Alliance has launched a portal where developers can collaborate in the openLiberty Project and access tools and information for 'jump starting' the development of secure and privacy-respecting applications based on the widely deployed Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services standards, the company is quoted to have said.

Alan Dechert, one of the pioneers in the open source software movement, will deliver the keynote speech at the Red Hat Summit. The third of the annual events put on by the Raleigh-based Linux software developer and services provider is set for May 9-11 in San Diego.

To support their goal of creating the world's first globally competitive, Linux-based software platform for mobile devices, Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone announced today the official launch of the LiMo Foundation.

When working with XML-based applications, developers often find themselves facing the requirement to generate XML-encoded data structures on the fly. Examples of this include an XML order template based on user input in a Web form, or an XML representation of a server request or client response based on run-time parameters.