Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

According to a Reuters report the acquisition of Novell is being delayed over difficulties in selling the non-Linux portions of the business. Citing anonymous sources, the report says that Novell is attempting to sell the company as a single entity, rather than parting with the SUSE Linux division, which would leave the company with what was described as "a shell of legacy assets". The report says Novell has many rivals prepared to pay for the SUSE Linux division alone. According to a report last week Novell was to be split and sold as two parts with a "strategic buyer" lined up for the SUSE Linux business.

Red Hat is still a strong presence in the Linux distribution market as its latest financial results prove, declares a senior company executive who noted that the company's success comes despite targeted maneuvers by its competitors, specifically, Oracle. Alex Pinchev, executive vice president and president of global sales, services and field marketing for Red Hat, told ZDNet Asia in an interview Thursday that the software company has increased its share of the Linux distribution market from 80 percent four years ago to 87 percent today. This growth comes despite of competition from companies such as Oracle and Novell, he said.

Bids are due to SCO by October 5th at 5 PM and I suspect there will also be a few hedge/investment type groups that may express a lowball offer interest as well. Then again, the SCO Unix business could have such little value that no one in their right mind will offer anything for it and it will finally die the death it should have had years ago and simply fade away.

A few months back Glyn Moody, noted open-source journalist, asked the question, "Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?" Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO answered, "Red Hat could get to $5 billion in due course, but that this entailed 'replacing $50 billion of revenue' currently enjoyed by other computer companies. Guess what? Red Hat is on its way.

Timesys announced the availability of the LinuxLink Free Edition, a "cloud" version of its Linux development platform that provides kernels, toolchains, debuggers, the TimeStorm Eclipse IDE, and the Web Factory build system. The company also announced a LinuxLink subscription for running MeeGo on the new Intel Atom E6xx processor.

2.6.36 offers VFS optimisations, has returned to integrating Ext3 file systems with "data=ordered" by default and can store data from shared Windows or Samba disks in local cache to improve performance. Numerous new and improved drivers enhance the kernel's storage and network hardware support.

Oracle is throwing hardware-accelerated graphics and web integration into mobile Java to catch and contain Google's rogue Android The database giant has laid out plans for Java ME - Oracle's preferred flavor of Java on mobile - that will let the stack render HTML, CSS, and Javascript by default.

Mozilla has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) as a licensee. The unsurprising move reflects Mozilla's long-standing commitment to open source software and support for the Linux platform. It's also yet another high-profile endorsement of the OIN's approach to open intellectual property licensing.

For most of us, using our preferred desktop Linux distributions has become second nature. Yet remembering back to when I first made the switch, it seems that specific Linux apps made the OS change much easier. In this article, I want to share some of the applications I use on a daily basis. Some of the applications are GNOME desktop specific, so whenever possible I have included their KDE counterparts to help even things out.

For those disappointed by Oracle's decision to discontinue supporting a free version of its Solaris Unix-like operating system, a new alternative emerged to take its place. OpenIndiana is part of the Illumos Foundation. OpenIndiana will be built on the last available version of OpenSolaris and will contain bits of Solaris 11. OpenIndiana is the new OpenSolaris.

I still use mutt for my mail but recently rediscovered that on one remote host when connecting via PuTTY, my default settings left the line-drawn threading characters unreadable, which in turn affected scrolling. The first solution I found was in this forum post. It suggested changing the terminal settings, instead of anything in mutt itself.

Oracle has spun a new version of RHEL called Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, claimed to be more than 75 percent faster at OLTP tasks. The Oracle-optimized Linux kernel was announced at Oracle World, which also debuted Oracle Fusion Applications, MySQL 5.5, new Java enhancements, and a Linux-ready Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle continues to resell Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the form of its own RHEL-based Oracle Linux, which has been previously called Unbreakable Linux. Oracle Linux will still be supported, but the similarly RHEL-based Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is now "the only Linux kernel Oracle recommends for use with Oracle software," says the software giant.

In a reaction to the founding of the Mageia project and to a question posed on the Cooker mailing list, the French Linux distributor Mandriva has commented on its current situation and future plans. The company says the Mandriva distribution is far from dead and will continue to be consistently maintained. The next release of the Mandriva Community Edition is reportedly planned for the beginning of 2011.

While it is easy to focus on many other strong points of KDE software, one aspect that deserves a closer look is the ability for it to support science. Back in July, you may have caught the Dot story on "KDE-Science" discussing the background and initial call for engaging the scientific community. Today we would like to highlight some of the advances that have occurred since then and present a real world example of how KDE software is already helping to support research.

Many mobile software conferences take place within an earthquake’s rumble from northern California. If you reside in that neck of the woods or prefer to rack up your frequent flier miles, then that poses little challenge or obstacle to participating in these events. I’ve often wished I could drop in on a presentation or two without making a long and expensive investment in getting out to the conference or have to miss too much family (or work) time along the way.

A press release dated September 11 came to the community's attention Monday, September 13 of the renaming or, as some reported, a fork of sidux to aptosid. Due to conflicts with the commercial backer of the Debian-based distribution, sidux developers have separated themselves from the Sidux e.V. association to continue developing aptosid on their own.

Mozilla has released a JavaScript engine strictly for testing purposes to allow web developers to gain deeper access to – and better understanding of – the code underpinning its browser. The Narcissus engine and Zaphod script look-up tool have been added to Mozilla Labs to help the open source outfit develop new ideas for the JavaScript language.

GNU founder and free software mouthpiece Richard Stallman reportedly gatecrashed a European Patent Office meeting in Brisbane, Australia today. Stallman, who is in Oz to talk at the World Computer Congress, turned up with a placard that read: "Don't get caught in software patent thickets," reported iTnews. European patent officer Ralf Abbing, who during his presentation spoke about computer tech and how it relates to Intellectual Property issues, was briefly interrupted by Stallman.

Last week in Toulouse I learned just how much interest Intel has in Wayland and the active role they are playing in its development. Wayland and related work to bring it up is not limited to just Kristian Høgsberg, who switched from being a Red Hat employee to Intel during Wayland's development, but Jesse Barnes and other Intel OSTC X developers are also contributing to different areas. Jesse Barnes has been working on the Qt support within Wayland and that's hit a new milestone.

HP announced a multifunction inkjet printer that incorporates a seven-inch, detachable Android-based tablet. Based on the HP All-in-One printer, the HP Photosmart eStation All-in-One adds web browsing, Barnes & Noble eBookstore integration, and access to HP print apps and widgets via the integrated, removable Android touchscreen, all for only $399, says the company.