Showing headlines posted by dcparris

The conventional wisdom is that software development companies have trouble converting to free and open source (FOSS) business models. But someone seems to have forgot to mention that to Charles Moir, the upbeat CEO of Xara.

[The company that seeks to collaborate with its competitor is beginning to grasp the true nature of FOSS. - dcparris]

In "Acquiring data from the physical world," we explored how to take a couple of sensor readings and print them on a Web page, thanks to a Netmedia BX-24 microcontroller and a Linux/Apache server. This time, we'll grab a series of readings and use them to plot a pretty Web chart using PHPlot.

Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu released updates that address security problems for the following packages: zvg, xzvg, Blender, abc2ps. abcmidi-yaps, Firefox, Cyrus SASL2, Dia, fbida, BEAGLE, Ethereal, Crossfire, Module-Init-Tools, GDM, xine-ui, xine-lib, IPsec-tools, PHP, OpenVPN, and Ruby.

The Symbian operating system dominates pricey smartphones, but Linux may find its place in low-end ‘feature’ phones.

NComputing is shipping a multi-user Linux PC expansion kit targeting the global education market. The company's Xtenda X300 expansion kit allows a single Linux PC to support up to six additional users, at a cost of around $83 per added user (plus monitor, keyboard, and mouse).

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Free Standards Group, is on a mission. He wants to prevent Linux from falling prey to the fragmentation fate that befell Unix.

MS v EC Day five: There's a fat lady, and she's warming up...

A couple of PCI cards, the Xtenda kit and some extra peripherals turns your Linux machine into a four-person workstation. SA Linux company Yellow Penguin has partnered with Linspire and NComputing to bring Xtenda to the country.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed software that enables the sharing of high-speed wireless connections without compromising security or privacy. The software can improve Internet connectivity in residential areas at no additional cost.

EU vs MS Comment Plus ca change

One of the few remaining gaps in basic desktop functionality in GNU/Linux is the dynamic loading and unloading of fonts, especially in groups. If you're working in OpenOffice.org (OOo), StarOffice Printer Administrator (spadmin) offers a partial solution to the problem.

According to an IBM press release in February, a prominent group of computer industry vendors and Internet-based businesses are supporting an initiative to make it easier for an open-source community to form and popularize Ajax.

After many months of work on the new Multimedia API for KDE 4 it is time to finally announce Phonon. Phonon will provide a task oriented API for multimedia, making it easy for KDE applications to use media playback and capture functionality (and more) resulting in application developers being free to concentrate on the user interface aspects. The number of possibilities to integrate multimedia into the desktop experience make Phonon especially interesting.

Among early adopters of Linux, Wall Street looms as tall as its skycrapers. But why are some financial services firms starting to take giant steps into Linux, and what stands in the way of even bigger penetration? Jacqueline Emigh files this report from this week's Linux on Wall Street show in New York City.

Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows you to create virtual disk partitions out of one or more hard drives. This makes it easy to manage growth in filesystems. Combined with RAID, it provides a nearly unbeatable way to keep your files safe and available. Bryce Harrington and Kees Cook show how to configure LVM, how to combine it with RAID, and how to use it on desktop machines too.

TORONTO -- The final day of the LinuxWorld Conference& Expo Toronto was a busy one. Novell Canada CTO Ross Chevalier delivered a keynote address on why this year is the year of corporate Linux desktop adoption -- as opposed to all those previous years that were -- the Free Standards Group executive director Jim Zemlin explained the importance of the Linux Standard Base, and developer Ulrich Czekalla gave an excellent presentation on the state of Wine.

Hello, from the Information Builders (IBI) summit in Orlando! Some interesting new ideas here, from people who've been in large-scale BI for some 30 years - how about BI embedded in workflow applications written in BPEL (when you receive an order, you can fire off a BI report on stock levels/locations, and fire up a request to the stock controller for action, with the BI report appended)?

Last issue's look at migrating from Windows to Linux desktops overlooked one very useful possibility. That is to say, I overlooked it but a number of readers hadn't - and were quick to tell me about it: Citrix.

TORONTO – The Bank of Canada is slowly moving off of Unix into an environment that will see its economic analysts using Windows PCs to create models running on a Linux-based cluster.

MS v EC Day four: Tough questions or tough love?