Showing headlines posted by dave

Firefox 1.5 is finally out the door, and Thunderbird 1.5 won't be far behind. The new releases sport some interesting new features, including faster page navigation, redesigned preferences dialogs, a new update system, and much more. Let's take a look at what the Mozilla Foundation has been up in the year since the first major release of Firefox.

Debian's standard text-based installer has been vilified in the past, so I was excited to see an announcement about a graphical installer under development for Debian. A good GUI installer could bring Debian to a lot of users who don't feel comfortable taking the plunge with a text installer. It's pretty early in the testing cycle for Debian's next version, dubbed Etch, so it's likely that there will be a number of changes before the new installer is finalized, but I took the current version for a test run and found that it's already fairly usable.

"Basically the operation is shutting down." With these words, Tal Danzig, the owner and technical lead for the Libranet distribution, quietly announced in his blog on November 25 the news that users had been dreading ever since his announcement two months ago that the distribution was "restructuring."

A mail server is an essential part of any organization's IT infrastructure, but installing and maintaining a mail server is not always easy, and it's often difficult for small organizations to pay an expert to set up a mail server. Fortunately, Qmail Toaster can simplify the task enormously.

A recent Slashdot offering entitled A Look At Windows Server Outselling Linux pointed to a story on CoolTechZone with the absurd title of "Linux is Doomed, Thanks to Microsoft." The story, title and all, is one of the most egregiously wrong reports of the century. Here's why.

Many players of Electronic Arts' multiplayer online game Battlefield 2 run Battlefield 2 game servers, either at home or as a hosted solution. Most use Windows or Linux as their server operating system. Few people know that you can use FreeBSD as well. Here's how you can set up a Battlefield 2 server on FreeBSD 6.0 RC-1.

BANGALORE: Computers built from scratch are part of technology folklore. Now it is the turn of the mobile phone. Two Indians, Surj Patel and Deva Seetharam are working on a homebrewed cell phone, which will challenge the quality and capabilities of traditional models available in the market today.

Working on the project for two weeks, the two are confirming American writer Thomas Friedman's belief that innovation is no longer confined to the realm of big companies.

Deva explains, "We are building an open source hardware/software Linux-based cell phone." Open source refers to a programme for which the source code (written by a programmer and converted into machine language) is available to the public to use or modify free of cost. The prototype they are working on will be open source and will help developers build powerful applications as they like.

Welcome to this year's 48th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The first test release of Fedora Core 5 and a final release of PCLinuxOS 0.92 were responsible for much excitement during the past week; we'll take a brief look at both these new products. Is Libranet GNU/Linux history? It would appear so, based on an informal announcement by Libranet's Tal Danzig. Also in this issue: a new "ideologically-pure" Ubuntu derivative, KNOPPIX seeks graphics artists, and a quick look at the new KDE 3.5 expected later this week. Our featured distribution of the week is DesktopBSD, a surprisingly intuitive and user-friendly FreeBSD derivative. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

Linux and the Free Software movement are slowly but constantly getting closer to the general public in Italy. More confirmation came last Thursday, when the home page of La Repubblica, one of the biggest national newspapers, displayed a smiling penguin linking to a full-blown article presenting the "Fifth Edition of the National Day of Linux and Free Software, celebrated with 97 events in 94 cities from Agrigento (Southern Sicily) to Aosta (in the Alps)."

Don't you hate it when the word completion feature wants to finish your words for you? Or do you love it? Learn how to customize (or kill) Autocorrect in OOo and live in word-processing peace.

A three-node cluster using Oracle Real Application Clusters on two-way HP ProLiant DL 380 servers with Intel Xeon processors running Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 3 powers Ohio Savings Bank's mortgage system. This clustered Oracle Database is fully integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications running on Windows.

Ubuntu is listed as the number one distribution at Distrowatch.com . Ever wondered why Ubuntu is so popular ? Here are 10 reasons why .

Is your business ready to take the open source plunge? We test five leading desktop Linux distributions and come up with one winner.

RubyForge, the hosting repository for open source applications written using the object-oriented programming language Ruby, added its thousandth project last week. The language has exploded in popularity in the year since the release of the Ruby on Rails (RoR) framework.

Red Hat's plans for the next two years call for the company to fund and develop several projects of interest to the Linux community. They company set out its top priorities for 2006 and 2007 in a press release detailing its plans to further fund and support free software projects, including SystemTap and OProfile, as well as develop virtualization and stateless Linux technologies for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

If you're bored with blogging and ready for new worlds to conquer, podcasting might be just the impetus you need to refuel your interest in Internet publishing. The term is something of a misnomer. You don't need an iPod to create or receive a podcast, and it's not really a broadcast. What it is is hot, and with open source tools for both podcast creation and reception, it's a game that Linux users can play.

This week, advisories were released for phpgroupware, egroupware, fetchmail, gnump3d, common-lisp-controller, xmail, unzip, netpbm, mantis, fetchmail-ssl, sylpheed, ipmenu, horde3, zope, Smb4k, mtab, phpSysInfo, eix, php, drakxtools, binutils, and fuse. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, Mandriva.

Commentary -- According to urban legend, a famous scientist was confronted by a woman who insisted that the world is flat and rests on the back of a giant turtle. "But what does the turtle rest on?" he asked, hoping to disprove her belief by logic. "You're a clever man," she replied, "But it's turtles all the way down!" Recently, I realized that GNU/Linux is like that: From the desktop to the kernel, it's modules all the way down.

Sun Microsystems announced on earlier this month that it would begin including the PostgreSQL database with Solaris 10 sometime in the 30 days, and will immediately offer full support for it, as well as fully integrate the software into the operating system over the next several months.

Estonia's latest local elections, held online nationwide, included the use of open source software in electronic voting. However, experts caution that the use of Linux on Web servers does not equate to publicly viewable voting code, and the system's reliance on the Internet raises red flags.