Showing headlines posted by tadelste

Linux users who live in Toronto now have a special place to gather, get online, and sip fancy coffee drinks. It's not Starbucks, it's the linuxcaffe.

AOL is opening up its code base, enabling developers to expand its online service, but is holding back on allowing for any convergence between AIM and rival messaging clients and services.

The internet service provider has launched the Open AIM initiative that provides access to AOL's proprietary protocols through a Software Development Kit (SDK). This allows developers to build plug-ins and customised communication clients running on the AOL network.

Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, is at it again. Bricklin is working on wikiCalc, a Web-based spreadsheet application. It's not quite ready for prime time yet, but it does show promise.

In what is believed to be the first open source government contract in Australia of its kind, Novell has signed a deal with the NSW Department of Commerce to become an approved supplier of Open Source software and solutions under the Open Source (Linux) Enterprise Software and Services agreement 2316.

Not everyone learns or uses awk these days, so here's a quick review of what the language can do and some of its features.

Open source software capability key to 'technological self-determination'

Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of Update 3 for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 family of products.

The update includes the following:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4 for x86, AMD64/EM64T, Itanium, POWER, S/390 and zSeries
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4 for x86, AMD64/EM64T, Itanium
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 4 for x86, AMD64/EM64T, Itanium
• Red Hat Desktop 4 for x86 and AMD64/EM64T

SGI has received SAP certification for its Linux servers of the Altix Series. Thus the first step of the company's new strategy, which its new CEO Dennis McKenna had announced recently, is beginning to emerge: SGI will aim to reach out to new markets from out of its traditional domain of high performance computing.

Benefits: A significant increase in computing power, with large workloads running at 80 to 90 percent capacity with virtually no downtime. The capacity to support new clients and participate in building a national computing grid. Lower power costs, contributing to return on investment within four years.

LinuxQuestions.org reported on Monday that of the 2500 users that voted in a site poll, 19.5 percent voted for Ubuntu as the Linux distribution of the year, narrowly beating Slackware, which received 19 percent of the votes.

This is the latest in a long line of awards that Ubuntu has racked up over the last six months, an impressive achievement considering that the distribution is less than two years old.

KOffice often gets overlooked in favor of rival office suite OpenOffice.org (OOo), which has a wider set of features, corporate backing, and cross-platform compatibility. However, the recent release of the KOffice 1.5 beta makes this a good time to take a closer look at the KDE suite's applications, features, and performance.

Some time ago I read an article about versioning your /home files with Concurrent Versions System (CVS). The article appealed to me because I like the idea of always being able to undo a mistake, compare my current work with a previous version, and keep a backup of my important files. But the thought that I would litter my home directory with a lot of CVS directories was enough to keep me from implementing it. Recently, however, I've thought about applying versioning to administration files.

The Linux kernel accepts boot time parameters as it starts to boot system. This is used to inform kernel about various hardware parameter.

  
If this threat is not dealt with swiftly and effectively, the main use of the word “open” in computing one day might be by anthropologists and historians as a quaint label for a sub-grouping in the increasingly marginalized hacker culture.

Microsoft petitioned several U.S. courts last week to force its competitors to turn over communications they've had with the European Commission regarding its antitrust battle against Microsoft. The Commission had previously declined the software giant's request for the documents, which Microsoft says shows it's "colluding" with its competitors and failing to meet its own transparency standards. Meanwhile, a Microsoft competitor derided the software giant's offer of Windows source code as a "poisoned honeypot."

When people asked Captain Kirk of Star Trek how much he got paid for his job, he answered that in the future, we don't use money any more _ people just work for the betterment of mankind. The concept puzzled me from an economics perspective. But having observed the open-source movement in the IT realm, I am starting to comprehend one direction that the economy of the future might take.

The best discoveries emerge from obscurity. My favorite discovery of last year was GRML Linux. You won't find this gem in the top 100 at Distrowatch, but if you ask me, it works better than all the usual names.

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Debian Weekly News
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/10/
Debian Weekly News - March 7th, 2006
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If there is one technology that took hold in the enterprise in 2005, it's virtualization. The software moved from test and development and into the data center faster than anyone imagined, including the experts. And while there are sure to be some bumps in the road in 2006 as the technology moves from awareness to adoption, you can bet most IT pros will be running virtualization in the data center before the end of next year.

Stob Farewell my lovely