Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Oracle is sifting through millions of lines of code in BEA Systems WebLogic and AquaLogic, to check that products are, as claimed free of unwanted open source licenses. The database giant is making sure here's no code licensed under GPL and LGPL that can be downloaded with BEA's middleware. GPL and LGPL are viewed by the companies as “viral” - a contentious term that critics say is a misunderstanding of the licenses - and therefore potentially damaging to BEA's licensing-based revenue.

If you haven’t yet started using Firefox 3 beta 5, the last of the betas before final release, then you’re missing out. Firefox3b5 is quick, very quick, lean and much better to use than Firefox 2. Firefox 3 is also neatly integrated into Mac, Windows and Linux desktops and uses native icons and themes. Javascript has also been siginficantly improved in Firefox3b5 making it noticeably quicker using online apps such as Google Mail and others. If you are already using a Firefox 3 beta then the one thing that is a frustration is that most of your popular extensions will claim to not be compatible with the latest release. In most cases it is simply that developers haven’t yet made their extensions compatible with Firefox3b5. But this doesn’t mean that most of them wont work.

Under its Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative--what Red Hat refers to as an effort to encourage open source software deployment--the open source vendor launched four programs in Singapore, with three of those focused on institutes of higher learning here. Expanding the Red Hat Academy, Red Hat recruited three new partners: the Asia Pacific College of the Philippines, Singapore Polytechnic and the Institute of Technical Education (ITE). Under OSCI, Red Hat also set up a training center at Singapore Polytechnic. The third program is about setting up a facility at ITE College's East campusand the fourth program involves Red Hat working with six local software vendors to integrate their applications with Red Hat's OS.

While KDE users get to boss KIO slaves for easier access to system and network resources, humble GNOME users can perform similar feats with its virtual file system, called GnomeVFS, which is an extension of the physical filesystem on a disk. Using GnomeVFS, users can work with non-local data that can come from unusual places, such as within compressed gzip archives.

Jörn Engel posted the sixth version of patches introducing his new LogFS filesystem for flash devices to the Linux kernel. He noted that one of its big advantages compared to other solutions was improved mount time and reduced memory consumption compared to other solutions, "LogFS has an on-medium tree, fairly similar to Ext2 in structure, so mount times are O(1)." He went on to add that flash is becoming more and more common in standard PC hardware.

The ultraportable Asus Eee laptop has been getting a lot of good press recently. Now the company is capitalising on its popularity among Linux users by releasing a software developer kit for the platform. And the good news is that you don’t need even need an Eee to play around with the SDK.

These days, you can grab RSS feeds off just about any site and aggregate them into reading lists, pop them into a widget, or post them on your blog. Here's a look at three very different feed-related plugins for your WordPress blog: FeedSnap, RSS Stream, and FeedEntryHeader.

Want to be an Asterisk guru? Then sign up for the first bootcamp to be run by Asterisk gurus Connection Telecom. The five-day course costs a whopping R23 400 but if you can get your company to cover the fees the course will be well worth attending. Connection Telecom has been involved with Asterisk since it first broke onto the IT scene. Rob Lith, director of Connection Telecom, says this training course will assist participants with gaining a high-level knowledge of Asterisk and its potential, with particular focus on the SIP network.

Want Rails to interact with YUI, Yahoo’s web user interface? Then make sure you’re at the Bandwidth Barn in Cape Town on Wednesday 9 April. The Cape Town Ruby Brigade will be hosting a talk by Peter Retief on the YUI API and how it can be coupled with Rails.

Joel Spolsky recently published a very insightful piece called "Martian Headsets". The core of his article is about the standards compliance of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. IE8 presents a problem because, although it is pretty standards compliant, it renders a lot of websites quite badly. The IE8 team presented a controversial solution that would have IE8 render all pages as if it were IE7 unless the developer specifically told IE that it would render well under IE8. Web developers rejected this solution and the IE team reverted their decision. Joel argues that whatever Microsoft ends up choosing on this issue, it will be a bad choice because there is no right choice. I think that there is a third option. In this article I will present three changes that Microsoft could implement that will allow Internet Explorer 8 to be fully standards compliant and ensures that the vast majority of websites will work just fine.

Sun Microsystems is extending the working life of Java Standard Edition 1.4, through a support program to carry the software beyond this summer's official retirement and onto 2017. This is for paying customers only. Others must upgrade to the latest edition of Java SE, with free support slashed from six to three years - or fend for themselves using Sun's OpenJDK.

European public administrations that want to use software that is offered for free, such as Open Source software, do not need to organise a call for tender. This is the conclusion of the Dutch government project NOIV, after studying European rules on tenders. The NOIV published an English translation of its guide for ICT buyers in the public and semi-public sectors, 'The acquisition of (open-source) software', on its website this week.

The 451 Group is out with a new report on venture capital funding for open source, and the news is rosy. The first quarter of this year brought more venture capital funding for open source than ever before, totaling $203.75 million, up from $100.4 million in the same quarter for 2007. That's more than a double, for year-over-year growth, although the news immediately follows a plunge in VC funding for open source that arrived in the fourth quarter of last year. The report also includes some good analysis of how VC funds are flowing to the open source community.

ClearHealth is happy to announce the release of ClearHealth 2.2-PR1 which is the first preview of the final 2.2 release. The real highlight of this release is support for PDF templates. Easily create fully custom forms and reports in Office or even on paper and load them into Adobe LiveCycle Designer, upload to ClearHealth and you're done (ClearHealth automatically creates the DB for forms with no programming necessary). There are several other new features and fixes in this release as well with the full release notes.

Extensions have long been written for OpenOffice.org Writer. However, the fact that attention is finally being paid to other applications seems a sign that OpenOffice.org is finally starting to develop an active extension-writing community. A case in point is the recent availability of extensions for Impress, OpenOffice.org's slide show program. Extensions for Impress are still outnumbered four or five to one by those for Writer, but at least they are now being written. Just as importantly, they are filling important gaps in functionality, and encouraging uses for slide shows other than the standard presentation in work or education.

Some people who are new to Linux want to install the operating system on an older, second computer, to try it out and see how they get on. Others have older computers with obsolete operating systems (such as Windows 98 or Me), and don’t want to pay for a newer version of Windows, but would still like to make a use of the machine. Some may simply want a separate backup machine, one for a member of their family, or maybe just a file server. Consequently, the question of the minimum specifications to run Linux frequently comes up. So what type of hardware do you need? The answer depends on what you want to use the computer for, and which applications you intend to run. That being said, there are a few general guidelines for the most common cases.

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has always been one of those iconic central points of reference in British life – a kind of Big Ben for standards. But it's a little hard to square that image – perhaps hopelessly outdated – with the BSI's recent decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's OOXML document standard.

"No cute April 1st shenanigans, just a regular -rc release that happened to come up today because I was waiting for the input layer oops-fixes to be ready and tested," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel on April 1st. "The big thing that is actually *noticeable* to most people is that this should fix the two top regressions. The other thing that bit a number of people and is now fixed (and that also probably often showed up as a suspend/resume regression) was some 'struct device' lifetime changes that broke the input layer. Thanks to people who debugged that one."

Just because OpenOffice.org Basic is designed to automate mundane tasks doesn't mean that you must use it only for serious work. It's a programming language after all, and nothing stops you from using it to write something fun. Today we'll use it write a simple game where you have to guess a word, a letter at a time, from among words you've stored in a Base database. Although this is not a particularly sophisticated game, it contains a couple of string manipulation techniques and a clever trick for picking a random record from a database, which you might find useful when writing your own macros.

A deal struck by government CIO John Suffolk and the Cabinet Office could save the public sector billions of pounds by supplying networked, supported PCs for around half the typical price. Suffolk said the Cabinet Office had cut the total cost of ownership for PCs by half, compared with the Gartner benchmark price of £2,000 per PC. The Gartner benchmark is widely used in the public and private sectors for pricing PCs. If just £100 a year were saved on every PC used by the UK's three to four million public servants, the annual savings would be at least £3bn over 10 years.

[Note that these PC's come with OpenOffice.org and not MS-Office. - Sander]