Showing headlines posted by dave

Want to send your best buddy, boss, or promising client a drink "on you" via your wireless phone? You can, if your friend lives in London. Eagle Eye Solutions, based in the United Kingdom, is launching a new service today called Buymeabeer.com using a Linux-based server platform.

Allowing multiple users to seamlessly access Windows desktop and applications remotely without the performance hit associated with thin clients is being put into production by Sydney-based startup NetLeverage.

Over the last three years MTU Aero Engines has built up two parallel Linux clusters which contain a total of 448 processors. MTU's supercomputer is now ranked at 179 in the Top500 supercomputers.

Programmers on Wednesday released the new version 3.0 of SpamAssassin, open-source software for filtering out unwanted e-mail, but the changes are as much legal as technological.

The process of hunting typically requires a lot of time just waiting for the animal to show up. Using a Linux box, a cheap webcam, and a modem, one can make the job a lot more comfortable and take up a lot less of your time in the field.

PAM is an authentication mechanism that originated on Solaris, but is used on various systems, including Linux. The Linux PAM implementation allows a system administrator to choose how users authenticate to various services. New modules can be added by an administrator at any time, offering overall flexibility in how authentication happens.

A new KDE website has been launched! KDE.org.uk promotes the K Desktop Environment and showcases activities of KDE developers and contributors around the United Kingdom. If you want to help with creating more content on KDE.org.uk or get involved in KDE events in the UK, please contact the KDE.org.uk team.

A company which had tried to trademark the term Linux Australia, prompting the intervention of Linus Torvalds, is now suing its own former executives

If you're one of about 200 million people using older versions of Windows and you want the latest security enhancements to Internet Explorer, get your credit card ready.

There's a community center in my town where you can do things like take classes for a variety of interesting things, play basketball, run on an indoor track, or exercise in the workout facility. Until recently I bought monthly membership passes to use the exercise rooms -- until, that is, someone in management decided to start collecting more information about the members and storing everything on a small, unmonitored, Internet-connected, Windows XP-based network. What were these clowns thinking?

Is this the right book to introduce Microsoft power users to Linux?

Microsoft's offer to "open-source" Office 2003 for European governments, along with Sun's Solaris talk, boil down to pure marketing hype.

The United Nations-funded UNDP-APDIP International Open Source Network (IOSN) has published a free preview of its upcoming LiveCD that will allow computer users to experience the Linux desktop without requiring installation of the open source OS their PCs.

A common problem with word processors today is that they force users to deal with typesetting, a skill that is about as useful to a writer as metalworking is to a mechanic. This focus on typesetting means that writers have to spend too much time dealing with the way their documents look. To make matters worse, many documents are shared in a variety of different formats requiring additional time wasted in export, conversion, and quality control on the finished product. To help get around these obstacles, Linux users can turn to a document processor called LyX. LyX is optimized for writing and takes the chores of typesetting out of the writer's hands and places them in a competent professional: LaTeX.

If you look at the traditional media (cable networks, newspapers, radio) coverage of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and subsequently in Afghanistan and Iraq, you'll notice they are gradually becoming more and more reliant on reporting from people who are not professional journalists. This new breed of citizen journalist, the person who blogs, takes photos on their mobile phone and uploads them to a mobLog (mobile weblog), records video, sends it to a video blog and participates in what is commonly becoming known as the "We Media", relies heavily on Open Source Software, often running on Linux servers.

Linux users have a lot of choices in the Internet browser category these days, including Mozilla, Konqueror, Opera, and Epiphany, among others. Now there is also Mozilla Firefox, a leaner browser than its sibling, Mozilla 1.7. Firefox just had its preview release last week and already has been downloaded more than a million times. I reviewed the new version, and found Firefox's simple interface gets you the information you want without distracting you with options.

Novell South Africa yesterday announced it has appointed ex-Microsoft employee Garry Hodgson as its OEM Business Development manager. Hodgson during his time at Microsoft was a key architect of the company's Windows 95 OEM strategy which established the company as the dominant player in the software market in South Africa. Hodgson was also the driver of Microsoft's programme to offer all schools in South Africa with free software. Hodgson left Microsoft 18 months to establish the Digital Hope Foundation with the idea of providing communities and schools with low-cost access to computing technology.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a global consortium dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, announced a collaboration to accelerate enterprise adoption of the Linux Standard Base (LSB) with new services to support software vendors developing applications for Linux.

Xandros has announced they are bundling Ericom's terminal emulation software in their Linux business desktop to support over 30 types of legacy systems.

IBM is throwing its voice to the open source community, but developers say it is no trick as Big Blue looks to bump up development of speech software and applications with a worthwhile contribution of code.