Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

NEPOMUK is the social semantic desktop project which is planned to be integrated into KDE 4. The work is being done by Mandriva programmers Sebastian Trüg (of K3b's fame) and Stephane Lauriere. As the move to kdelibs is planned, there will be a couple of presentations in Paris to clarify the aims of the project and its technical aspects.

In the beginning of 2003, the Dutch government started a program called Open Standards and Open Source Software (OSSOS) to stimulate Dutch government agencies to use open standards in their software and to inform them about open source software. Last month, 10 big Dutch cities signed a Manifesto of the Open Cities, signaling that the OSOSS program is working.

Charles Wuischpard, an IBM veteran, has 'aggressive revenue goals' for the Linux computer maker.

Spanish software house Fluendo is selling codecs for Windows Media Player, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to Linux and Solaris users. Although there are open source media players that can work with Windows Media Player, the software can either fail to run or work only in a limited fashion, particularly on websites hosting video.

Kaffe using GNU Classpath (without AWT) is now working fine on SkyOS, just like Wine. Although there is no Wine graphics driver yet, you can already start Windows console applications directly from within SkyOS (once a Wine/SkyGI backend is available Wine should run on SkyOS as good as it does on Linux, and will be available via Software Store). On the driver side there is now an ACPI driver including support for ACPI power/sleep buttons (a SkyOS service, the PowerMonitor, will react on power events with configurable actions like shutdown, reboot, etc.). And finally, the SkyOS LiveCD is shaping together and should soon be available.

SYDNEY -- It took more than 17 hours in planes and a trip through customs, but I've made the trek from Denver, Colorado, to Sydney, Australia, for Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2007. Already it looks like the trip was worthwhile.

Matt Asay has some good advice for folks asking him for career advice: "Work for an open source company." I'd wholeheartedly agree. I'd like to add "or within the open source group of a traditional software company".

Symbian Ltd will today announce the availability of libraries to support the Posix APIs, with a view to attracting developers of open source apps to port to its smart phone OS.

There is a growing recognition of Linux in the retail sector, as retailers are starting to see the advantages and cost savings of a Linux system, Columbitech said. "We are continuously expanding our product portfolio to stay ahead of market demands and meet customer requirements," said Asa Holmstrom, the company's president.

The Forum for Open Source Initiatives in India (FOSII) has been formed by a group of individuals from the Linux/Open Source to accelerate the adoption of Open Source by fostering innovation and development within the country. The FOSII is comprised of senior industry professionals, technology journalists, enthusiasts, mediapersons and others from the Open Source community. Sandeep Menon, convener of FOSII and director of Linux business for Novell West Asia, said, "FOSII members belong to various facets of the Linux/OSS (Open Source Software) ecosystem, which includes the industry, academia, government and the community.

Server maker Unisys wants a bigger piece of the action in the open source software game and also wants to tap into the move by some companies away from mainframe and Unix servers and toward Linux platforms. Which is why the company will today expand its Open and Secure Integrated Solutions, or Oasis, product line.

Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME make it possible for you to assign keyboard shortcuts to a number of global operations, but don't make it easy to create shortcuts to run any program you'd like. To set up shortcuts for programs, XBindKeys is the way to go.

Digital rights management and the General Public License cause a lot of 'hot air' to be exchanged but they are not a 'big deal', according to the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds. DRM is a technology used to control the copying and distribution of content such as music and films while GPLv3 is a software licence drafted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and intended to be used to govern how free and open source software can be copied and changed.

A decade ago, The Department of Justice filed its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft. Four years later, a unanimous US Court of Appeals ruled that the company had used its power illegally to protect its monopoly Windows operating system. That behavior, the government had charged, chilled competitive innovation. A reluctant DOJ concluded that the only solution was a lawsuit. How else, Microsoft's competitors asked, could the software giant be restrained? If not by the US government, then by whom?

Today the mini-conf menu consisted of Debian, GNOME, Education, Gaming, Kernel, PostgreSQL, OpenOffice.org and Linuxchix. The conference that kept outgrowing itself was the Gaming mini-conf. Beginning in a room that seated about 40 people, it soon became clear by the time that the FOSS Licensing panel started that a new room was needed.

In response to the growing demand for proprietary multimedia codecs on the open-source Linux platform, multimedia software development company Fluendo has released GStreamer codec plugins that provide native support for a variety of proprietary media formats. Available from Fluendo's web shop, several of the plugins facilitate encoding as well as playback. In order to provide these codecs without risking legal conflict, Fluendo has properly licensed the relevant patents on the various formats from their respective holders.

Welcome to Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletter—bringing you news from the free software world. Happy reading!

Although Microsoft had one of the largest spaces at BETT, the leading educational technology show in the U.K., there was a strong case made for open source software. Becta, an advice organisation supported by government, published a report that advised against any sudden move to upgrade Windows pending more evaluation promised for next year. Discussion on "personalized learning" followed another report that recognized some limitations in a tightly controlled system of tests.

One of the great things about the WordPress community is the amazing number of people who develop plugins for the blog platform and make them freely available to anyone.

Just because KDE has been designed to be portable across Linux, FreeBSD and other UNIX/X11 environments for an age now, doesn't mean we aren't up for the occasional challenge. With version 4, Trolltech released Qt for the Mac, Windows and now even embedded environments under the GPL. Since Qt is the base upon which KDE is developed, KDE is now free to offer native support for these platforms. Today I am focusing on the KDE/Mac developments for KDE 4.