Showing headlines posted by tadelste

The KDE Marketing Working Group has formed, after being proposed by the KDE community at aKademy 2005, with the aim of improving KDE's marketing and promotion efforts. Martijn Klingens, Sebastian Kügler and Wade Olson will be taking the lead in coordinating and implementing new practices, such as promoting releases more widely and running more exciting events booths. An initial charter has been created and approved by KDE e.V with the long-term goal of "coherent and strategic messaging around KDE". The group is currently focused on establishing infrastructure and prioritizing tasks.

Ubuntu a popular distribution of the Linux operating system, has acquired a wildly growing user base and today I have joined them. Described as being Linux for Human Beings, Ubuntu is somewhere in between Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) and Fedora Core in terms of ease of use. It is far from Gentoo (my personal favorite because of the emerge package manager), which should be pleasing to novice users that want a more versatile Linux installation. Ubuntu has recently been awarded Best Distribution.

An opinion article submitted to Linux Today earlier today accused Novell with implementing cuts in its SUSE Linux division, an accusation that has raised concern amongst community members and Novell itself.

Novell, the article stated, is laying off at least one KDE core developer employed by SUSE. The entire Evolution development team, currently based in India, is also slated to be dissolved, with only one maintainer left in place for product maintenance. Hula development is said to be cut completely; Mono development is also affected; what the future holds for the Novell Linux Desktop product is still unknown, according to Kurt Pfeifle, the author of the submitted article.

With security concerns about compromised accounts, phishing and fraud increasing rapidly, more enterprise organizations recognize the risks and are working to improve security controls.

A new, collaborative web page aims to introduce Windows users to high quality, free, open source applications that run on Windows. Called "LOOP" (List of Open Source Programs), the wiki-based list is intended to demonstrate the value of open source Windows apps to newcomers as a migration path toward Linux.

"Tell all your non-Linux friends and family about the LOOP list," Tristan Rhodes, who created LOOP, writes. "On this list they will find high-quality replacements for the software that they have purchased/pirated. Once they become familiar with these new applications, introduce them to your favorite Linux distribution (mine is Ubuntu)."

PHP supplier Zend Technologies has updated its scripting environment, embracing web services along with support for both enterprise and open source database servers.

HP HAS NOTIFIED its partners and customers of the end of the line for its AlphaServer systems.

According to a document seen by the INQUIRER, the last order date is planned for the 27th of October 2006, with those systems delivered by December next year.

[Ed: Shedding tears an acceptible means of expression, but I doubt many will flow.]

Welcome to this year's 45th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community.

In the first segment of a two-part interview, technology guru Tim O'Reilly outlines his views on open source in an interview with the BBC World Service programme Go Digital.

MANHASSET, N.Y. — Microprocessor supplier AMD Inc. has scored a minor victory in its long uphill fight to wrestle the processor market from Intel Corp., as the company overtook its archrival in the U.S. retail PC sector, according to market reseach firm Current Analysis.

The firm noted that in October, processors from AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.) were in 49.8 percent of desktop and notebook PCs sold, compared to 48.5 percent from Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.).

Any doubt that Linux and open-source software are powering mission-critical systems in some of the largest enterprises was laid to rest at the Open Source Business Conference.

On page 5 of this weeks CRN print Magazine, you will find a picture of Michael Dell gracing the cover. In large print, the cover reads DELL HITS THE WALL. Below, it asks: "Does Dell's warning to Wall Street last week expose chinks in the armor of the direct giant's business model?"

Then the article reads: "That’s what solution providers gleaned from Dell’s unexpected warning to Wall Street last week. The Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker warned that its upcoming earnings report would show revenue of about $13.9 billion for its fiscal third quarter, down from the range of $14.1 billion to $14.5 billion it had previously forecast."

“Dell’s formula isn’t working any longer,” said Jay Tipton, vice president of Technology Specialists, a Fort Wayne, Ind.-based solution provider. Tipton and other solution providers noted that Dell’s direct-equals-low-price gambit no longer works with customers hungry for solutions and local service.

[Ed; So what do I read out of this? Payback. -tadelste]

As you might have predicted, Red Hat is indeed working to support the open source Xen virtual machine hypervisor in the future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server, which is expected to come to market in late 2006.

Open Source in Government: Some governments have embraced the potential of open source, while others seem culturally opposed to the whole concept. [Ed: Little difference exits. The problem has more to do with politicians than culture.]

Gnusolaris.org reports - Nexenta is a complete GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. It is a result of our inspiration and desire to build a great system based on the best existing software: SunOS kernel and GNU software. We use Debian - one of the best existing software distribution/packaging mechanisms - to glue the numerous pieces together. Nexenta OS Pre-Alpha 1 has been released.

OSDir has some hot screenshots of Nexenta OS.

You might think that the sky is falling the way the media has gone on a feeding frenzy related to a Linux worm. Sorry to disappoint you, but the worm will hardly affect the user base. It's not like the "Code Red" worm which self-replicated malicious code that exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS servers (CA-2001-13). Rumor has it, Wal-Mart didn't cope with it very well.

Stephe writes: The entire case was just wrong. The protesting companies made claims that were simply incorrect. That's why they lost. The reporting was sensational and wrong. That's why I wrote the article for USENIX ;login: once I was out from under the embargo of the appeals time frame. (I was the USENIX representative to the IEEE POSIX working groups, as Shane and Jeff both were before me.

[Ed: Interesting to get a perspective from the author of the article ten years after he testified at the hearing. If you have a difficult time getting to Stephe's article in the archives, need we say more?]

Related to:
Did Bill Gates Invent Linux and Has He Erased the Evidence?

How Microsoft Got its OS Declared an "Open System" and wound up in Government

Veteran Technology Executives Provide Leadership

The second annual Trolltech Developer Days took place last month in San Jose, USA and on last week in Munich, Germany. They featured keynotes and presentations from Eirik Chambe-Eng, Trolltech's co-founder and President; Matthias Ettrich, founder of KDE and Trolltech's Vice President Software Development; Aaron Seigo, KDE Core Contributor and many others. Read on for a summary of some of the keynotes and presentations given in Munich.

Dublin, California – Zendex is now offering a special purpose single board computer aimed specifically at the gaming market. The ZXE-855 is a full-function dedicated gaming platform that can deliver the rich visual gaming experience that people now expect in casinos. At the same time, it allows the system manufacturer to configure the board in order to optimize speed, power consumption or cost.