Showing headlines posted by dave

Open source is still up to five years away from mainstream use in enterprise IT infrastructures, despite the progress made in the commercialization of the platform, according to analyst Gartner.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds sent a reminder to theLinux Kernel Mailing List that the merge window for 2.6.14 is coming to and end. "As per the new merge policies that were discussed during LKS in Ottawa earlier during the summer," Linus explained, "I'm going to accept new stuff for 2.6.14 only during the first two weeks after 2.6.13 was released." The new development policy was first discussed on the lkml with the release of 2.6.13-rc4, and further elaborated with the release of 2.6.13.

Linux shows maturity on Gartner's famous Hype Cycle, but is still two to five years short of mainstream use.

No one knows for sure who Pamela Jones is: where she's worked, where she lives, what she looks like or why she's so obsessed with a lawsuit by the SCO Group Inc. against IBM Corp. But that doesn't stop lawyers embroiled in the breach of contract and trade secret violations case from being mesmerized by her Web site, http://www.Groklaw.net.

Gartner has published ‘Hype Cycle for Linux 2005’ a report which illustrates how, over the past two years, Linux has matured as an established operating system environment, primarily on one-to four-processors. However, Gartner found that for eight processors and beyond, Linux must demonstrate performance, security and application proof points based on the 2.6 version of the kernel and that the biggest test continues to be whether it can function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications.

Among the confusion new Linux users often face is the variability among archived and compressed formats used by downloaded applications. "Should I use the tar.gz file, the zip file, or the tar.bz2 file?" they may wonder. Here's what you need to know about compression formats in order to easily install any application.

Linux server sales continued strong through the second quarter of 2005, according to a recent market research report.

Linux Today points to an interview with Zack Rusin which was conducted at aKademy 2005. Topics include his employment by Trolltech, his contributions to X.org and upcoming technologies and eye-candy Zack demoed at the conference. A German version of the article was published by Golem.de.

Mozilla releases Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, a preview of the next major release of its popular open-source-based browser.

The Unix vendor posts a $2.4 million third-quarter loss, due in part to hefty legal bills from ongoing litigation.

For people living in the path of potential hurricane fury, the Internet can be an important source for the latest information about storm tracks and projections. FLHurricane.com is one of the most popular tropical weather blogs in existence. It gets millions of hits during hurricane season, serves up gigabytes of image data, and runs on custom software and Linux.

This week, advisories were released for proftpd, sqwebmail, polygen, affix, zsync, phpgroupware, webcalendar, pcre3, ntp, cvs, kdelibs, evince, openmotif, cman, gnbd-kernel, dlm-kernel, lockdev, perl, termcap, ckermit, kdegraphics, squid, pam, setup, tar, openssh, tzdata, httpd, mplayer, and phpldapadmin. The distributors include Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Red Hat.

As expected, there are fewer volunteers to help with computer usage and computer-related issues at the Austin Convention Center during the normal business week than on the weekends. This morning, for example, I couldn't move down the line of public Internet access stations more than a few feet at a time without being asked if I could help someone with something.

In reading through the latest earnings announcement from SCO Group, the burning question is whether the company will be around to collect even if it should win the lawsuits it has pending against IBM, Novell, and AutoZone. The IBM case, which is likely to be the first one up, is not scheduled for trial until February 2007. Meanwhile, the company has less than $13 million of cash on hand, and is spending more than $2 million a month on average -- you do the math.

Robert Dayton owns CheckStatus.net, a network of process servers that deliver subpoenas, summons, and other legal documents for clients. One day in 2000, Dayton shut himself in his office with a stack of books and taught himself to program in Perl and PHP. He didn't come out until he'd written a complete Web application for his court documents processing service.

Intended to highlight the virtues of open-source and free software, the worldwide event is most popular in developing countries.

The latest edition of Linux.Ars has an excellent, Linux-oriented introduction to Firefox extension authoring written by Kris Kowal. It includes complete source code and build scripts for Stantz, a Firefox extension designed to complement the Venkman JavaScript debugger. This article is a good read for Linux users who are interested in learning how to make new Firefox extensions.

Demicron recently released a Linux version of its WireFusion Web3D animation program, aimed at making animations easier for Web designers. With WireFusion you can make 3D objects spin or fly around or zoom in and out. You can design 3D worlds, where customers can move around through virtual show rooms. And you can make simple animations, such as a clock where the hands move and display the correct time. A quick look at Demicron's animation gallery (with a Java-enabled browser) will show you what WireFusion can do.

Laszlo Systems, the creator and sponsor of the OpenLaszlo platform for Web application development, has hired Kent Libbey away from Microsoft to fill the position of chief marketing officer.

Ever since computer programmers began collaborating online to build software applications, the "open source" movement has been developing into a serious rival to the multinational software companies. Since the term was coined in the late 1990s, open source has rapidly matured from an egalitarian approach to software design into a movement whose practices underpin the internet. More recently, it has begun to represent the seed of an ideology, whose approach to openness and sharing is spilling over into the wider world.