Showing headlines posted by tadelste

I'm a big fan of two things that I get in X-Windows (on UNIX systems) which I don't usually get in Microsoft Windows: 1. Middle-click pasting 2. Whatever I'm selecting automatically going to the clipboard. 3. Focus following mouse, allowing me to keep one application in the foreground while actually typing on the application in the background. Usually wherever I'm contracting (at the moment, a software security company in Utah), I'm stuck using Windows despite how productive I am in Linux. Occupational hazard, I suppose. There are a few utilities I use to make my life easier when stuck using a legacy operating system such as Microsoft's Windows:

No Linux, please. We're Aussies. Intellectual Property Australia has rejected the attempt by Linus Torvalds and his Linux Mark Institute to control the Linux trademark, ruling the word wasn't distinctive enough.

In a deal similar to one it already has with Novell, IBM is now joining hands with market leader Red Hat to push Linux into emerging markets such as China, India, Russia and Korea without overlooking the established markets. The alliance, which started with a pilot in Europe earlier this year, is cast as an anti-Microsoft software- capturing migration play.

You're ready to be a card-carrying Linux geek, but with several different Linux distributions available, you don't know where to start. Which one offers the best balance of tools, performance, and price? takes you through the most popular Linux distros and introduces you to a brave new world without Windows.

"Having full control over the source codes in which we have built our prepaid billing system based on Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server gives us the ability to anticipate trends and rapidly roll out innovative offerings that capture the explosively growing prepaid communications marketplace." -- Wilma D. Cruz, Chief Information Officer, SMART Communications Inc.

There are lots of applications built on an open source platform, such as the operating system from Linux and the Internet browsers from Firefox and Mozilla. Typically, open source software starts with a small company developing the foundation application code. Other software developing companies, individuals and small groups test and determine the code’s usefulness and whether they have any interest in enhancing the code. This public participation creates the opportunity for a major collaboration among the original developers and a wide range of other developers. Some believe that open source is the domain of the geek who does nothing but play with code. With easy access to an open source application, the techie can wreak havoc and make error-filled changes. However, this does not happen.

Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have a lot to prove. The two struggling IT vendors this week will unveil a wave of products designed to patch weak spots in their product lineups and re-establish their former positions of strength. They're innovative additions, but the companies will have to do even more to keep up with Dell, which drives the market for high-volume, low-cost PCs and servers, and IBM, which dominates the high end with its mainframes, systems integration and outsourcing services, and army of consultants.

Today, the Linux Association of Germany announced that it has received a temporary restraining order from the first-district court of Hamburg against Germany's Channel One, which was displaying the Microsoft logo when it showed the results of polls taken by Infratest dimap. In light of the "urgency" of the situation, the temporary restraining order was issued without a hearing. No one from German public television wished to make a comment.

Live Web search got a lot bigger yesterday, when Google launched its new blogsearch engine. There's no direct link on the Google index page yet. For now, you can find it in the roster of services behind the "more" link. There are 29 of those, and Blog Search is the newest. But the news is still big. It legitimizes the Live Web--and blogging in particular--in a big way. Far as I know, the blog search category was born when David Sifry put a hack he called Technorati on a Penguin Computing Linux box that lived in his basement while he and I were working on "Building With Blogs", a feature for the February 2003 issue of Linux Journal. Dave needed to research blogs, so he created a tool for it. As of today, Technorati's traffic is #751 on Alexa, pushing 80 million page views per day. (Disclosure: I'm on Technorati's Advisory Board.)

How long does it take a .NET developer to write a Linux application? The Race to Linux project aims to find out. Race to Linux was announced Wednesday at the Microsoft (Quote, Chart) Professional Developers Conference. The challenge for developers is to port any existing ASP.NET application to Linux using any cross-platform tool of choice, including Mono, Grasshopper and PHP. The winner of each of three races will win an xBox 360. Chris Maunder, co-founder of The Code Project, a community site for .NET developers and one of the organizers of Race to Linux, said that one in five Code Project community members also works with Linux, while 16 percent use Java.

DistroWatch reports - Slackware Linux 10.2 has been released: "Announcing Slackware Linux 10.2! The second Slackware release of 2005, Slackware Linux 10.2 continues the long Slackware tradition of simplicity, stability, and security. Among the many program updates and distribution enhancements, you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: XFce 4.2.2, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 3.4.2, the latest version of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. OSDir has some nice screenshots of Slackware Linux 10.2.

For the first time Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) is No. 1 inworldwide unit shipments of x86-based Linux servers, according to themost recent data compiled by market researcher IDC.(a) Dell also retained its top x86-based Linux server shipmentposition in two of the world's largest regional markets, the U.S., andJapan.(a) "We attribute our continued success in the Linux server market toour focus on addressing customer needs through our scalable enterprisestrategy," said Judy Chavis, Dell's director of business developmentand global alliances. "With a combination of performance, ease ofdeployment and management, our Linux solutions for the scalableenterprise help customers scale information technology as theirbusiness needs require."

Dell is reportedly phasing out servers running Intel’s Itanium processors and switching to Intel’s older Xeon architecture. Dell had earlier been a major backer of Itanium but has decided to focus on chip designs “that have a lot of customer momentum behind them,” said Paul Gottsegen, vice president of worldwide marketing at Dell, according to The Wall Street Journal. Dell’s future servers will rely on the older Xeon architecture, which Intel has been updating to keep up with the 64-bit advances originally touted for the Itanium. But Itanium has not enjoyed the same success in the market as Advanced Micro Devices’ (AMD) 64-bit Opteron hybrid chips, which are able to run both 64-bit software and software designed for the more traditional 32-bit x86-based Intel architecture.

The partner program is offered to hardware vendors, software vendors, services providers and agents outside Japan who want to resell the leading Asia Pacific Linux solutions. Turbolinux offers a number of partner options intended to help customers build a certified and open source Linux solution by empowering a complex network of hundreds of leading ISVs, IHVs and services vendors. Turbolinux offers a full range of products to ensure partners continued success and to increase partnership effectiveness.

Novell's move to pitching open source is a good start for the company, according to Michael Goulde, an analyst at Forrester Research. The decision to focus on a few targeted areas allows the company to take advantage of its traditional strengths.

During the two-day hearing he painted a distinctly unflattering picture of the company's inner workings. Lee, who opened Microsoft's research lab in China in 1998 and moved to headquarters in Redmond, Wash., two years later, fretted over what he saw as repeated missteps. In court he detailed how the more than 20 product-development centers in China tripped over one another, duplicating efforts and even fighting over the same job candidate. Lee called the company "incompetent." After the ruling he praised Google, noting, "the culture is very supportive, collaborative, innovative, and Internet-like -- and that's bottoms-up innovation rather than top-down direction."

O’Reilly is staging a European Open Source Convention from 17-20 October in Amsterdam, citing the success of its North American-centric OSCON as a key factor in the expansion into new territory. EuroOSCON will offer the same wealth of technical detail, breadth of open source languages, and high level of presentations, but with a European focus. The organisers say, “It’s one place where you can get help for your programming problems, see the full range of open source possibilities, and learn what’s on the horizon for OS technologies in Europe and beyond.” The conference will feature technical sessions on Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Subversion, as well as streams focused on Linux, Java, Python, PHP and security and business.

There are two kinds of OSS users: The offensive ones and the defensive ones, writes Jason Norwood-Young.

Michael Kelly reports on handy security uses for four open source tools: WebGoat, Firefox Web Developer, WebScarab, and Ethereal. By combining the tools in easy ways, testers can track down and close the gaping security holes that are often left in applications.

In rich countries, unsolicited e-mail, or spam, is a nuisance, but in poorer countries, it is a threat to development, says Foreign Policy contributor Elisabeth Eaves. According to a report by the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), spam will not stop the development of information technology, but it will severely retard it. In developing nations, bandwidth is expensive and connection speeds are often so slow that spammers can bring a nation's network down -- or reduce it to a snail's pace -- by flooding inboxes. Since local Internet service providers lack the software or a trained staff, they can do little to fix the problem. Moreover, the impact of spam on developing countries is difficult to determine and pin down with a dollar figure, says Eaves.