Showing all newswire headlines

Recent moves by such companies as Sun Microsystems and Computer Associates to dip their toes into the world of open source have reawakened interest in how open-source software licenses work, and what benefits they bring to software companies—if any.

A group of high performance computing users and technology vendors led by Sun Microsystems, Dell, and Intel will launch on Tuesday an effort to make the InfiniBand input/output architecture easier to use with Linux, according to companies involved in the initiative.

Microsoft Corp., whose Windows software runs 95 percent of the world's personal computers, lost a contract for programs to run 14,000 PCs for the Munich city government to the free Linux software. The city's council voted in a closed-door meeting 50-29 in favor of a detailed plan to switch to Linux from Windows. Munich, which has spent more than a year studying how to make the move, will accept bids within a few months from Linux vendors. Companies such as International Business Machines Corp. and Novell Inc. are expected to fight for orders.

Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. Tom Adelstein wrote about GNU/Linux on the desktop and concluded that it can help enterprises, especially those short of resources like city governments.

Planet KDE is an aggregation of public weblogs written by contributors to the K Desktop Environment. The opinions expressed in these weblogs and hence this aggregation are those of the original authors. Planet KDE is not a product or publication of KDE e.V.; as such, it does not necessarily represent the views of the KDE project as a whole or the views of KDE e.V. Planet KDE is powered by Planet and is run by me. Mail me with the full address of your RSS feed and a short description of what you hack on if you want your blog added to the subscription list.

Munich may become the biggest Microsoft customer to switch to Linux software, as the city will this week decide whether to remove the Windows operating system from 14 000 municipal computers.

Scalix released a new version of its Linux-based e-mail and calendaring software and expanded desktop support. The San Mateo, Calif.-based vendor of messaging software said that Scalix 9.0, released on Monday, offers a migration path to Linux messaging by providing cross-platform interoperability.

Sun Microsystems said it will take an "aggressive" approach to opening up the source code of its core operating system. It just isn't saying when.

Let's be clear about this. There are four different reasons for choosing an open source solution. First, because you want to play around with the code; second, because you have ethical concerns over the extent to which proprietary vendors should be allowed to profit from their products; third, because you think the product is better or more suitable for what you want it for than any proprietary equivalent; and fourth, because it is cheaper.

Theoretically, the ultimate goal for a system administrator, whether you're in a large data center or a small home network, is to script yourself out of a job. The more you can automate tasks, the more time you can spend researching new technologies, deploying new services, and playing Quake! Experienced administrators generally have at least three scripting languages under their belts for regular use, and probably have books that cover one or two more for occasional use. Beginners, however, sometimes have a hard time deciding which tools to devote their learning cycles to. This article aims to help those users come to grips with the many options available.

Foreword: This whitepaper from esteemed Linux author and TimeSys Product Manager William von Hagen discusses the productivity advantages that graphical development tools can bring to embedded Linux development. It uses TimeSys's Eclipse-based TimeStorm tools by way of example, but material presented is largely vendor-neutral. Enjoy! . . .

The problem is a question of interoperability. Let's say I need to create an organization chart. OK, I fire up Kivio (a flowcharting tool that is part of KOffice, the KDE Office suite). I painstakingly draw the org chart, complete with subtle relationship among different levels and what not. Now I'm ready to use it. I would like to include it in a report that I'm writing on OpenOffice.org Writer. I then select everything in Kivio, copy it, and then paste it in OpenOffice.org. Boink. Real ugly, folks. All I can see in OpenOffice.org is a sort of XML gibberish I don't understand.

Latest release of open source email app helps users reclaim their Inbox

Computer sleuths interested in running forensic PC operations on a Linux machines should take a look at an open source tool called Foremost.

Much has been made about the open source revolution, and with good reason. The open source development model produces superior software.

How one university department set up labs between campuses.