Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

The Meraka Institute and Linux Holdings will be co-hosting Linix Professional Institute exams on August 11. The exam will take place at the Linux Holdings premises in Pretoria. Linux Holdings recently launched South Africa's first full-time Linux academy. Candidates from all levels are welcome to attend.

A couple of weeks ago, the O'Reilly editors asked Is Microsoft Relevant in a Post-Rails World? Contrary to some reports, there are still desktop applications in the world besides a web browser--and there are plenty of desktop applications under serious development. Many of them are F/OSS. Of those, plenty have ties to existing projects to produce fully-free desktop software. They run on top of free Unixes, take advantage of free APIs and libraries, and interoperate well with other free software.

NoMachine recently released version 3.0 of its remote desktop product line. NX 3.0 has some interesting advantages over similar products -- but also some pitfalls for inexperienced users. As a whole, I found NX 3.0 to be very capable software, and faster than VNC, which for a free solution is reason enough to earn a place on my network.

Dell plans on expanding the reach of its factory-installed Linux PCs to include small and midsize businesses and Europe, Michael Dell, the company's founder and CEO, said at a July 10 event in New York. This will include a focus on SMBs as well as the European market. Dell, however, did not offer a specific time frame.

Today OpenLogic announced the general availability of OpenLogic Discovery, a free software tool that helps enterprises inventory the open source software installed on their computer systems. They are also announcing a free Open Source Inventory Analysis for up to 500 machines.

Linspire, Inc. today announced the immediate availability of the Open XML Translator within their latest released Freespire and Linspire products. Adding another interoperability tool to their core operating systems, the Open XML Translator enables bi-directional compatibility so that files saved in Open XML can be opened by OpenOffice users, and files created by OpenOffice to be save in Open XML format.

Together, Isaac Garcia and Arnulf Hsu have launched several successful businesses, including two that were eventually purchased by CNET. Garcia and Hsu were firmly in the Microsoft development camp, but recently they noticed what they call the increasing maturity of open source software. They decided to launch their latest endeavor, CentralDesktop.com (CD), using an open source platform.

Microsoft has promised "big dog" products and R&D spend next year, to defend its partner turf and go head-to-head against competitors new and old. Woof! Opening the company's annual Worldwide Partner Conference chief operating officer Kevin Turner adopted a combative tone during a morning session that acknowledged Microsoft partners are being bombarded by new alternatives in technology and platform choice, with on demand software and open source making Microsoft look dated.

Thanks to Colin and Evan’s efforts we now have daily images of a freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu, "Gobuntu". This is a call for developers who are interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom - including firmware, content, and authoring infrastructure, to join the team and help identify places where we must separate out pieces that don’t belong in Gobuntu from the standard Ubuntu builds.

Microsoft Corp. is enlisting Linux distributor TurboLinux Inc. to help tailor work being done to translate documents between Open XML and ODF file formats for Japanese and Chinese users. TurboLinux has joined the Microsoft-funded but community-led Open XML-ODF (Open Document Format) translator project and will help ensure that documents based on Open XML can communicate smoothly with ODF-based documents in Office suites that use Japanese and Chinese characters.

[A Groklaw poster insightfully notices that Microsoft has now enlisted all the original United Linux members, except for Mandriva. Coincidence? -- Sander]

What is the future of Linux and open source? What is the contribution of Indian community to the development of Linux kernel? There could be millions of such questions wandering in your mind. So, if you have questions for Linus Torvalds, feel free to ask. Just send in your question at efynm1@efyindia.com. The deadline to submit questions is 13 July 2007.

The CentOS Development team is pleased to announce the availability of the CentOS 5 i386 Live CD. This CD is based on our CentOS-5.0 i386 distribution. This CD has a non writable /usr directory, which means it is not able to have software installed on it after boot up. That means that the purposes of this CD are to see if CentOS will boot/work on your hardware, to test some of the features of CentOS as a workstation, and to use as a Rescue CD.

Fortune magazine has an interesting article stressing the Chinese market's importance to Microsoft's long term strategy, and touching on Linux's involvement in the Chinese market. So has Microsoft truly conquered China? I don't believe so.

I run a master and slave Kerberos servers, which requires setting up kprop to run regularly on the master server in order to transfer any changes to the slave server. I didn't like the standard script, because I only want to know about it in the event of failure. So I wrote this slightly improved script, which does just that.

A request for opinion/experience today: does anyone have experience of running (local) Jabber servers under Linux? (Debian, ideally). I've been experimenting with setting up a Jabber server to run within our LAN. I would also very much like for it to hook into our LDAP/Kerberos setup.

Open source technology will be used in the IT systems for the Beijing Olympics, but the dominant software platform will be Windows, says Atos Origin. The computer systems for the Games will also utilize other platforms such as "Sun Solaris and some open source components". However, the usage of open source "is relatively small compared to other platforms which we are using", he added.

MEPIS has announced the "Spartacus" release of antiX, a lightweight derivative of MEPIS. AntiX is built and maintained by MEPIS community member anticapitalista, as a free version of MEPIS for very old 32 bit PC hardware. AntiX is designed to work on computers with as little as 64MB RAM and Pentium II or equivalent AMD processors. The new ISO images are available in the 'released/antix' subdirectory at the MEPIS Subscriber's Site and at the MEPIS public mirrors.

Free Software Foundation (FSF) leader Richard Stallman said at the launch of version 3 of the General Public License (GPLv3) late last month that businesses are “foolish” not to adopt non-proprietary technologies. Surrounded by supporters from the software programming and academic fields on the June 29 launch at the foundation’s Boston headquarters, Stallman detailed his opinions on why businesses should use open source software.

Slackware Linux is the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and still one of the most popular. Last week's release of version 12.0 is a milestone for the Slackware team, as it marks Slackware's first use of a default 2.6.x kernel. Other new components include KDE 3.5.7, Xfce 4.4.1, Xorg 7.2.0, and GCC 4.1.2. Slackware is now nearing the bleeding edge without sacrificing stability, making this truly an exciting release.

Mobile-gadget makers are starting to take advantage of software-defined radio, a new technology allowing a single device to receive signals from multiple sources, including television stations and cell phone networks. But a new federal rule set to take effect Friday could mean that radios built on "open-source elements" may encounter a more sluggish path to market--or, in the worst case scenario, be shut out altogether.