Showing headlines posted by dcparris

Yesterday, Jon 'maddog' Hall contacted LXer to announce the auction of a copy of John Lions' book, Lions' Commentary on UNIX, autographed by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Peter Salus, and Linus Torvalds. This is part of a drive to establish the John Lions Chair in Operating Systems at the University of New South Wales, but for the lucky bid-winner, it's a chance to own a bit of computing history.

The mouse, despite all of its admirable qualities, was created by a left-brained thinker and built for left-brained work. Mostly that's fine, but when it comes time to draw an icon or retouch a photograph, you'll be cursing your mouse as the worst input device imaginable -- awkward to hold, awkward to move with, and awkward to click. To get the right side of your brain happy, you need a pressure-sensitive tablet. Here is how to get started in Linux.

If you haven't been paying attention to GNU grep recently, you should be happily surprised by some of the new features and options that have come about with the 2.5 series. They bring it functionality you can't get anywhere else -- including the ability to output only matched patterns (not lines), color output, and new file and directory options.

A portable, small-footprint database targeting embedded and mobile applications has achieved its first stable release. ITTIA's Fuel DB offers full transactional support, along with multi-threaded shared access, and implements a fast, efficient database that can be embedded within applications, the company says.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is hosting its Red Hat Summit for customers and partners in Nashville, Tennessee, this week, and Matthew Szulik, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, used his keynote address to talk a little bit about the way that the open source community is fostering the ideals of democracy and transparency and to announce some new open source projects aimed at both commercial enterprises and individual consumers.

Eyeing systems management as the next big market to "go open source," Zenoss, Inc. is now trying to give mid-sized customers another alternative beyond the two main choices available so far: massive suites from the "Big Four" giants or a mishmash of specialized point solutions. Jacqueline Emigh reports.

Microsoft is taking a page out of the open-source community's book where it comes to security. In Windows Vista Beta 2, released last week, the company included a feature called address space layout randomisation (ASLR), a method of foiling some classes of attack that has usually been associated with open-source projects.

[Hmmm... Does Bill know about this? - dcparris]

NASHVILLE, TN -- The second annual Red Hat Summit got underway today at the Opryland Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's CEO, formally opened the event with his keynote address being the first of three days worth of keynotes, parties, and presentations.

I manage about 200 computers running various flavors of Linux and Microsoft Windows in my company. We built a home-grown PHP-based inventory application to store our hardware and software inventory information. The software relied on our updating information manually, whenever there was any change, so as you might expect, the data was always outdated. We replaced our old system with Open Computer and Software Inventory Next Generation, released under the GNU GPL. OCSNG suited our needs immensely. We could see the benefits almost immediately, as it automated the collection and updating of the data, which is the most crucial part of inventory management.

Year-Over-Year Results Show Continued Growth in Linux and Identity Revenues and Improvement in Overall Profitability

Foreword -- The embedded market is a service industry, because off-the-shelf products are fundamentally ill-suited to the unique requirements of specialized embedded devices, argues Curt Schacker in this brief guest column. Schacker is CEO of embedded services company Embedded Solution Partners, and a veteran of Wind River and Ready Systems.

BEDFORD, Mass., May 31, 2006 (PRIMEZONE) -- Collax, Inc., a leading European vendor of affordable, turn-key, Linux-based server solutions for small and medium businesses, today announced that Paula Hunter, formerly of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), has joined the management team as vice president of U.S. marketing.

Begun at the start of this year, the OASIS ODF Accessibility Subcommittee has just completed its first assigned task: an accessibility evaluation of the ~700 page ODF 1.0 specification. Producing this evaluation was the formal statement of purpose of this subcommittee...

BRANCHBURG, N.J., May 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Congoo(TM), the Web's first free premium information network, today announced that its NetPass downloadable toolbar is now available in beta version for users of the Mozilla Firefox® web browser. The development enables millions of Firefox users to locate huge amounts of otherwise unavailable, subscription-only Web content -- and to access that content free of charge.

The name of the conference says it all: JavaOne. For developers, the idea that there is one Java is a guarantee of consistency. But when Sun announced that it would open-source Java, developers offered a range of reactions, from applause at the initial announcement to later concerns over whether Sun can keep Java from taking different paths.

Ubuntu Project Founder's Comments, Analysis and Insight From 451 Analysts, Available Online

Canonical to support Sun's T1000 and T2000 servers on upcoming release of Ubuntu, as Sun's embrace of Linux gains a key supporter.

I still see people arguing about whether GNU/Linux is “ready for the desktop”. The truth is, it really depends... For me, I switched almost “cold turkey” from Windows 3.1 to Debian “Slink” in about 1999 or 2000 (at the time, I liked to say I “upgraded from Win 3.1 to GNU/Linux”).

The opening of Beta 2 testing at WinHEC for Windows Vista has once again raised serious questions about Microsoft's ability to keep its promises. We have witnessed up until now the inexhaustible reservoir of excuses coming from MS's officials, who have continuously fed us with plenty of reasons for Vista's delay: they're working on security, they're trying to make it more reliable for business, etc. Although it was initially destined to make its public debut way back in 2002, following years haven't shown us more than small bits of what was to become Microsoft's best product in more than 10 years.

Ask anyone what they use their computer for, and "listening to music" will no doubt be high on the list. Regrettably, there aren't any Linux applications designed let us do that. Sure, there are applications designed to accomplish data-centric tasks like "play and manage digital audio files" and "control an FM radio tuner card." These are two very different tasks from a programming standpoint, but interchangeable from the point of view of a user who just wants to listen to music.