Showing headlines posted by bstadil

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft’s decision to make the enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance programme. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft’s licensing regime.

The KOffice team today announced the second maintenance release of the 1.4 series. Among various bugfixes and translation improvements, the KOffice 1.4.2 release further improves support for the OASIS OpenDocument file format and interoperability with OpenOffice.org.

A new initiative from Novell seeks to unlock a better Linux desktop experience by helping developers better understand how the desktop is used.

Linus Torvalds announced 2.6.14-rc4, "the final -rc before a 2.6.14 release." The 2.6.14 merge cycle began with the release of the 2.6.13 kernel on August 28'th [story], allowing for two weeks of time during which large changes were allowed into the mainline kernel [story]. For the past month, primarily only bug fixes have been accepted as the kernel developers have worked toward a stable release. In his email, Linus summarized the changes in the latest release candidate:

"In the diffstat, most of the changes are one-liners, with the main exceptions being some sparc64 work (fix user-space corruption due to FP save/restore) and the new Megaraid SAS driver. There's some networking fixes, and a couple of driver updates (scsi: aacraid, net: cassini, and watchdog: pcwd_pci). Along with a x86-64 suspend/resume page table corruption and some new defconfig files for ARM, that rounds out the bigger chunks."

Adoption of Zend Core for Oracle Accelerates Enterprise Web Application Development and Deployment

A Stanford-designed robotic car has driven away with the $2M prize in the second DARPA Challenge, a 175-mile race for autonomous vehicles held this weekend in the Mojava desert south of Las Vegas. Four of 23 vehicles completed the course, including several that used Linux.

With all the buying that Oracle's been doing lately, it would have been fairly easy to overlook the supposedly small acquisition the company made on Friday. In fact, it didn't seem worth posting about. However, as the discussions about the acquisition are spreading, this small deal could actually be a very big deal.

Oracles OpenSource Evangelist Omar Tazi has this to say

A protracted NSW government project to give its agencies cheaper and quicker access to Linux and open source software is reaching fruition with several vendors preparing to sign contracts as pre-approved suppliers.

Oracle acquired Innobase, a company that develops open-source database technology, for an undisclosed sum, marking the software company’s 11th acquisition in less than a year. Innobase is most known for InnoDB, which is a transactional database technology that is distributed as part of the MySQL database, an open-source data management system.

The bundle is currently only available in Singapore. Other Chinese companies, though, are being more aggressive about supporting open source.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 is now available for download. Also known as the 1.8 Beta 5 milestone, this is the last beta release of the next major Firefox update and is aimed at testers, extension/theme authors and Web developers.

Speaking at a private dinner with select captains of German industry on Wednesday, Steven Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, may have felt a small sense of triumph in his company's battle against open source software.

Messaging and collaboration vendor Zimbra Inc. has released a beta version of its new open-source Zimbra Collaboration Suite, which integrates other applications such as antivirus, antispam and search software..

O'Reilly has covered this as well. Here

For a long time, Linux was seen as a geek's system--too complicated for ordinary folks. But Linux has matured, and with today's desktop environments and new user-friendly installations, Linux is finally coming into its own as a desktop system. Ellen Siever takes a fresh look at what Linux is (and is not), its features, distributions, and much more. Ellen is a coauthor of Linux in a Nutshell, 5th Edition.

As the LXer community have known for almost a day the first community-build version of SuSE has been quietly released and is now available. Here is a bit more coverage

Looks like Suse 10.0 has been release. It is available on http://ftp.suse.com but has not reached the mirrors yet. ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/10.0/iso/

Opera's browser seems to be music to the ears of Internet surfers. After the Oslo-based company served up about 1 million browser downloads in the first two days following its launch of the ad- and license-free Opera v8.5, some 3 million additional copies were downloaded in next two weeks.

The High Court of Australia has considered the case and has unanimously concluded that the chips are not technological protection measures - reversing the decision of the Full Court affirming the decision of the court at first instance The case relates to Mr. Steven's sale of "mod chips" for the Sony Playstation a couple of years ago. The case is relevant for its interpretation of the term "technological protection measure". I also believe that this is the first time DMCA provisions have been considered by a court of final appeal anywhere in the world.

The Mozilla Quality weblog has announced the availability of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2 release candidates. Testers are asked to check that they can successfully log in to webmail accounts and finance/banking sites, ensure that extensions and themes can be installed correctly and verify that the software update feature works.

Linspire, Inc., developer of the Linspire desktop Linux operating system, today announced that the world's largest technology distributor, Ingram Micro, Inc. has begun selling the full range of Linspire products to its network of U.S. resellers and retailers. Leveraging Ingram Micro's broad catalog and North American distribution center network, thousands of new customers and markets will now for the first time have unfettered access to desktop Linux products and services offered by Linspire.