Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.

I have some important news for you. It's about those 882 Novell patents that are being sold to a Microsoft-organized consortium in connection with the sale of Novell to Attachmate. I've been worrying about those patents, and I was wondering what happens to Novell's license to the Open Invention Network after the sale. So I took the time to find out. And it's very good news. Here's how it works. The patents of OIN members are licensed to each other royalty-free in perpetuity. Even on a sale, the license remains in force for all pre-existing members. If you are a member of OIN prior to the closing on the Novell deal, then, you are covered. The proposed closing date is January 23rd, so you still have time to join OIN and get the benefit of the license to those patents.

Oracle will port its Enterprise Linux distribution to Sun's Sparc processor, a move that could help it compete better against IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the high-end server business. CEO Larry Ellison made the disclosure in response to a question about Oracle's Linux strategy at the company's Sparc systems launch last Thursday. "We think Sparc will become clearly the best chip for running Oracle software. At that point we'd be nuts not to move Oracle Enterprise Linux there. We're a ways away, but I think that's definitely going to happen," Ellison said.

SME is not a three-letter acronym (TLA) for Simple Mature Enterprise but it could be. SME actually is a TLA for Small and Medium Enterprises. SME Server is a pre-configured, CentOS-based and free (GPLv2) enterprise-ready server. The web interface is complete and intuitive. The SME Server project offers a free alternative to expensive proprietary software. Is there a downside to SME Server? Yes, there is. You don’t have it yet.

Our final pattern in this series continues the theme of different ways to go wrong, and turns out to have a lot in common with the previous pattern of trying to "fix the unfixable". However it has a crucial difference which very much changes the way the pattern might be recognized and, so, the ways we must be on the look-out for it. This pattern we will refer to as a "high maintenance" design. Alternatively: "It seemed like a good idea at the time, but was it worth the cost?".

The Apache Software Foundation – one of tech's most influential open-source groups – is closer to quitting Java's governing body after losing a stand-off vote against Oracle on Java. The Reg has learned that with 75 per cent of qualifying Java Community Process (JCP) members having voted on whether to ratify Oracle's proposed roadmap for Java 7 and 8, Oracle's plan has been accepted.

Initially released in 1995, this is the most popular web server across the entire World Wide Web, currently used by around 60% of web domains. Its released under an Apache License, which requires preservation of the copyright notices and disclaimers, but doesn't require modified versions to be distributed using the same license. Though most prevalent on Unix-like operating system, it also runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and others.

The OASIS ODF Technical Committee voted a couple of weeks ago to create a new subcommittee, on “Advanced Document Collaboration”. Robin LaFontaine, from DeltaXML will chair the subcommittee. Since the entire ODF TC is quite large now (almost 20 active members attend each meeting) it is impossible to do a technical “deep dive” on every topic in our meetings. So when a particular specification domain requires sustained attention for a period of time, we can create a subcommittee, to allow interested TC members to study and draft specification enhancements. We’ve done this several times before. For example, the Accessibility SC developed the accessibility enhancements for ODF 1.1. And the Formula and Metadata subcommittees drafted those key parts of ODF 1.2. I hope that this new SC will be equally successful in their work.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced plans to provide minor patches and bug fixes only for the current Stable Series of the Linux kernel. Selected older kernel versions will, in future, be maintained as "Long-term" releases. The kernel developer said he hopes that this approach will help the community and developers focus on the current versions rather than waste their time with old kernel versions. The Long-term kernels are to follow the same rules as the Stable Series kernels.

The headline pretty much reveals the brunt of it, but indeed, it looks like next week Google is going to start talking about how its Chrome operating system is coming along. Multiple sources have told us that Google will be holding some sort of event on Tuesday, December 7th -- we're not sure if it'll be a live event, a webcast, or something else entirely -- and that the shindig will see the launch of that Google-branded Chrome OS netbook we've been hearing about.

The Document Foundation has announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 3.3 of LibreOffice, the free open source office suite. LibreOffice forked from the OpenOffice.org office suite following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems the original copyright holders of the name and main sponsors of the project.

LXer Feature: 06-Dec-2010

Recently SkySQL announced itself to the world with its focus being on former Sun MySQL customers. This comes in the aftermath of Sun being bought by Oracle and the subsequent departures of former Sun executives and engineers before and after the purchase. I recently had a chance to talk with Ulf Sandberg the new CEO of SkySQL for a few minutes.

A new edition of a study by the Linux Foundation explains the Linux kernel development process and includes various statistics that demonstrate the kernel's growth rate. It also analyses how much is contributed to the kernel's development by which developers and companies.

LXer Feature: 05-Dec-2010

In the LXWR this week we have part 1 and 2 of Steven Rosenberg's farewell to Fedora. why Glyn Moody is rooting for Microsoft, a long overdue look at XFCE, Dr. Tony Young's final (or is it?) installment in his switching to KDE 4.4 adventures and the Linux foundation releases their annual list of who writes Linux. Enjoy!

If that someone special in your life has storage on their mind come the holidays, we may be able to help with gift ideas. With ideas ranging from the very affordable (free) to very expensive (skipping a few mortgage payments), we’ve combed the world of storage procurement so you don’t have to.

Summary: Oracle's MySQL is in pretty good shape, considering the circumstances. Chances are the community will be happier with the 5.5 release than anything we've seen for a very long time - focus is on scalability, finally! The community has been able to patch over the problems that are due to Oracle: keeping the MySQL conference alive, retaining the talent within the ecosystem and addressing enterprise customers with new 3rd party support providers, not the least of which is SkySQL..

[Funny he should say that.. - Scott]

As we shared last week, Unigine Corp launched a Linux game development competition where any independent game teams/studios could submit a written proposal to them for a new Linux game and then later this month they will pick one submission and grant them a free license of their expensive, very advanced, multi-platform engine. There's still another week left to this competition, but we have learned some details from Unigine Corp about the submissions thus far.

There are hundreds of compelling reasons why Linux is better than all the rival operating systems. Here are just 20.

Front-line measures like firewalling, strong authentication, and staying on top of security updates are mandatory steps to keeping your system secure. But you also need to check your system's health frequently and make sure a compromise didn't slip past you unnoticed. A good place to start is with an intrusion detection system (IDS) that monitors your machine's resources and flags any changes that might indicate an intruder or a rootkit. The Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment (AIDE) is an open source IDS that you can set up in a weekend.

Less than two weeks left for SCALE Call for Papers; Sponsors start lining up for event. As everyone's sights are set on the December holidays, the Southern California Linux Expo reminds those who plan to submit papers for SCALE 9X to get them in before the deadline, which is a little over a week away. The deadline for the SCALE 9x Call for Papers is Dec. 13, with notification of acceptance being sent to speakers by Dec. 27.