Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Portable Document Format (PDF) is set to displace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, though Linux will maintain PostScript support for a long time to ensure backward compatibility.

Even if you use Thunderbird on a daily basis, you probably don't know it inside out. There are still quite a few 'hidden' features not covered in the online help that can significantly improve your emailing habits. And since Thunderbird's functionality can be expanded via extensions, you can add some clever features to it too.

Foreword: In this guest editorial, FSMLabs CEO Victor Yodaiken relates his company's experiences in the real-time Linux market to market conditions shaping Wind River's effort to redefine embedded software development as "device software optimization," or DSO.

I love this quote fromDouglas Crockford:What a Flash intro says to me is"I hate my job. What I really want to do is make films. But they won't let me do that because I don't have talent. So watch this Flash intro." Soon as I read it, I immediately thought of Dack Ragus, whose Web Economy Bullshit Generator made me wish I'd supported verbs in BuzzPhraser. Even Way Back When, Dack was a devout disparager of Flash.

Sirius Corporation is one of Europe's leading Open Source consultancies with development staff who have contributed to the success of many Open Source software projects including Samba and OpenLDAP. The company is the founding member of the Open Source Consortium, formed with the assistance of the Society of Information Technology Management - SOCITM , and the Open Standards Alliance to represent the Open Source business community in Europe. Recently, Sirius Corporation successfully implemented an Open Source network infrastructure for a 120 person engineering and risk consultancy business with a number of regional offices in the UK and the Middle East.

Linus Torvalds uploaded the 2.6.17-rc2 kernel, explaining that he usually releases -rc kernels weekly but due to travel and general quiet he waited longer, "I expect to be back to the weekly schedule now, even if it is quiet (which I hope it will be)." Read on for the shortlog which includes a list of all changes in the -rc2 patch. Linus also offered a quick summary of the changes:

"Not a lot of hugely interesting stuff, with a large portion of the diff being a late MIPS update (tssk tssk), and the huge diff from the long over-due removal of the Sangoma wan drivers that have been marked BROKEN for a long time. Same goes for the qlogicfc driver (which has been supplanted by the qla2xxx driver).

"As a result, the diff has just tons of deletions, even if most of the rest of the changes aren't all that big. But there are netfilter fixes, some more splice work, and just tons of random stuff: usb, scsi, knfsd, fuse, infiniband.."

The head of SAP's product and technology group has drawn a sharp contrast between his employer's approach to corporate acquisitions and that of rival Oracle. In doing so, Shai Agassi pretty much dashed the hopes of start-ups hoping to exploit the growing trend towards acquisition by an enterprise IT provider as an exit strategy.

Novell beefs up its security position through purchase of real-time monitoring tool.

At the Brainshare Novell user conference in Salt Lake City last month the company flagged the summer launch of version 10 of its SuSE Linux Enterprise operating system for servers and desktops. The company is positioning its Linux offering as a less complex alternative to the Vista release of Windows.

"..The Open Source movement is not only moving quickly but actually gaining momentum. The only constant is not simply change, but an increasing rate of change. This is in contrast to Debian, in which the last release took 3 years and the one before that took 2 years. I believe there is no technical reason why you cannot ship whenever you’d like. The Linux kernel merges in changes whenever they are ready without anything holding up the train. Your codebase is much bigger and your changes are more frequently more intrusive, but I believe there has to be a way to work things out even if it simply requires more resources."

For long-time watchers of Larry Ellison, the revelation that Oracle is looking at launching its own version of the Linux open source operating system has aroused a suspicion: is the software industry’s most acquisitive CEO stalking his next target? Mr Ellison made the comments in an interview with the Financial Times this week, laying out strong reasons why the database software company should embed a version of Linux into its existing software.

If you think setting up and using a printer in Linux is too much trouble, take heart -- you're not alone. To come to grips with a wide range of Linux printing-related issues, the OSDL-sponsored Portland Project has just held the first Desktop Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta.

Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.

Membership in the OpenDocument Format Alliance has almost quadrupled over the past month. The Alliance, a coalition of international organizations whose goal is to enable governments to have direct management and greater control over their documents, was launched March 3 with 36 initial members, but that has grown to 138.

Chinese domestic software company Redflag Linux has set up a joint venture company with Japan's Miracle Linux and South Korea's Haansoft to jointly promote the Linux operating system.

Open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond is reporting that his name and copyright information for a bit of MIT-licensed code called the GIFLIB library are included in the end user license agreement of a Microsoft application called Expression 3.3.

Linus Torvalds has had an opportunity to examine the testing and analysis by Hans-Werner Hilse which we reported on yesterday, and has blessed it as being correct. The reason that the virus is not propagating itself in the latest kernel versions is due to a bug in how GCC handles specific registers in a particular system call. He has coded a patch for the kernel to allow the virus to work on even the latest Linux kernel.

A week before the spring LinuxWorld tradeshow got underway in Boston in March, Novell's chairman and CEO, Jack Messman, was quoted in the trade press as saying that eventually, when all the dust clears, there would only be two commercial suppliers of the Linux operating system: Red Hat and Novell.