Showing headlines posted by d0nk3y

An impression that schools and even tertiary institutions are not producing the software developers New Zealand needs has led Wellington open-source specialist Catalyst IT to pilot an “Academy”. This aims to give a limited number of school students a basic grounding in ICT and some experience of real program development.

At my place of work, we use a Java-based trouble-ticketing system from Atlassian called Jira. It is hosted on a LAMP server virtual machine in our production VMware environment. The system has been in daily use (well, week day use) since near the end of 2008 - requiring minimal maintenance in that time (the occasional reboot after security updates have been installed). Up until yesterday, we had been using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server. I decided it was time to move to the latest LTS release - 10.04 - which was released earlier this year and had just received it's first .1 refresh.

Horizons Regional Council "would be remiss not to investigate alternatives" to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.

Interestingly, the latest build of KDE 4 (4.3.90 aka 4.4 RC1) no longer supports the underscore character in host names.

For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption. As the project has run out of money, my involvement is at an end, so it’s a good time to reflect on what the project has achieved so far.

That long wait while Windows cranks up can be avoided, says Rich Jaroslovsky It took about 20 years before television viewers no longer had to wait for their sets to warm up. Yet here we are, 30-plus years into the personal computer era, and the instant-on PC remains elusive. That may be about to change.

Kiwi vendor's asked to log their capability to support free software on the desktop

Once upon a time HP and DEC computers were made by engineers for engineers. The biggest difference between them was that some HP customers wore ties. Having just taken delivery of a HP Mini 5101 pre-loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Edition 11, it appears that HP still has some engineers left, hiding deep within, perhaps only coming out at night. Certainly the suits running HP don’t seem to want customers to know that Suse is an option. And Novell doesn’t seem all that keen on its adopted child, either.

(*) By “Unix”, I mean Linux, Unix, AIX, OS/X, and similar flavours. Way back when, about twenty or so years ago, I was a Unix admin, and a Unix developer. I had to be both, because I was the only person in the company who could spell Unix. My favourite game was to go along to presentations for Microsoft Windows ‘new features’ and say “Oh, but hasn’t Unix had that for the last twenty years?” Sure enough, there were countless things that Windows users and developers were just discovering (TCP/IP, shared libraries, multiple sessions on the same computer) that had been in Unix for some time. Linux was yet to make a mention, but as I’ve moved firmly into the Windows world, and left Unix behind, I’ve pretty much assumed that technologically speaking, if Windows has it, Unix and the like must also have the same functionality.

GPL is the the most successful copyright licence ever, says NZOSS president

The New Zealand Open Source Society is launching a project to demonstrate the viability of free open source software on public sector desktops.

The New Zealand Open Source Society is calling on Auditor-General to scrutinise government procurement of Microsoft software after the collapse of negotiations for a new three-year all-of-government software licensing deal.

In the wake of free software leader Richard Stallman’s visit to New Zealand, state-owned radio network Radio New Zealand has begun delivering some of its shows in the Free Software Foundation’s favoured Ogg Vorbis format.

Warrington School, in Otago, has decided to jump ship and deploy the GNU/Linux operating system with free software across the board by a target date of 2010, says the school's principal, Nathan Parker.

Unless you buy your hardware from Chen's Backyard Bamboo and Computer Emporium, you can go cheap on software. Not long ago it used to cost the equivalent of an African country's GDP to buy a computer.

Forums will discuss whether Microsoft’s format should be accepted as a standard alongside Open Document Format

Bill Gates famously missed the internet revolution and then innovated the web browser, several years after Netscape

Technological protection could close PC platforms to open source operating systems

Despite objects from New Zealand and five other countries, Microsoft's Open XML format will be put to the vote in August

Standards New Zealand, our representative organisation in dealings with the ISO, objects on the grounds that Open Document has already been approved