Monthly Archive:: November 2005

In a reversal, the state government of Massachusetts has thrown its support to Microsoft in an ongoing battle over office software formats and has launched an investigation into the state’s former IT chief, who had been championing open-source software. "The Commonwealth is very pleased with Microsoft’s progress in creating an open document format," said the state’s Administration and Finance Secretary Tom Trimarco in a short statement on Thanksgiving eve. "If Microsoft follows through as planned, we are optimistic that Office Open XML will meet our new standards for acceptable open formats."

Most developers (and the general public, for that matter) haven't yet gotten the idea that the next step in wireless applications is going to be all about location. Mologogo uses GoogleMaps with a Java and a GPS-enabled cell phone to show a target phone's position on a GoogleMap, allowing you to track it from your own phone or through the Web. This artcle provides insight into Mologogo and other Web 2.0 contenders and their privacy issues.

The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE 3.5 the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available. For a quick look at some of the new features see the visual guide to KDE 3.5. Packages are available now for ArchLinux, Kubuntu, Slackware and SuSE or try Konstruct to build it yourself.

This was a mixed Thanksgiving weekend for open source communities. We had a renewed PR onslaught from proprietary software vendors ("Linux is anti-commercial") and even hardball politics. But there were lot of interesting announcements made: Firefox 1.5, codenamed "Deer Park" will finally be unwrapped on November 29th (I have been using the beta, and I love it). Among all this activity and with little fan-fare, the Amanda project launched its new Wiki and Forums.

The second part of the comparison of Windows Vista beta and Mac OS X "Tiger" continues with an examination of the security, networking, and power management features in each system.

Envelope printing is the tax return of office suite tasks. Everyone has to do it, and everyone hates it. Printing envelopes in OpenOffice.org, or in any office suite, is complicated because of printers. When you take printers out of their comfort space of letter or A4 size paper, they get cranky. Well, not cranky; they just have different rules for how they print, and it's not always obvious what those are. OpenOffice expert Solveig Haugland walks users through custom envelope creation and design.

The Xbox-Linux team have got to work on trying to port Linux to the Xbox 360, in a project named 'Free 60'. The Free60 Project aims to port open source operating systems like GNU/Linux and Darwin to the Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming console. Here is some interesting documentation already from their website.

"One of the hottest topics in all of IT today is the subject of virtualization. While it has been around for some time, it has just recently started to garner the attention of the biggest names in tech. Everyone from Intel and AMD, to Microsoft, Sun, and virtually every commercial Linux vendor has either current or planned support for virtualization. So what is it, and why is everyone so head over heels about it?"

The ICT-Business is known for strategic terms. One of those terms, which was used quite a lot over this year, is services. The term is interpretable; however, the focus was on technical concepts implemented to serve for a sharply rendered use case, like managing user data and authentication. Services in that sense are served over a type of network. Despite the first impression, they are not served to a user but to a calling application. This client utilizes one or more services for internal purposes. Though, the user may be expected to provide data (the password, for example) or to wait and receive a gathered result.

"After reading the round-by-round account of our dual-core desktop CPU prizefight, it should come as no shock that AMD's Athlon 64 X2 chips are the runaway victors here, laying out the Intel Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition 840 chips pins up. If we had to call out one chip, AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4400+ is an outstanding bargain given the competition, but as our results show, any AMD dual-core CPU will serve you better than its similarly priced Intel equivalent."

"Linux-VServer allows you to create virtual private servers and security contexts which operate like a normal Linux server, but allow many independent servers to be run simultaneously in one box at full speed. All services, such as ssh, mail, Web, and databases, can be started on such a VPS, without modification, just like on any real server. Each virtual server has its own user account database and root password and doesn't interfere with other virtual servers." A guide for Debian is available here.

"The SkyOS service collection has been extended with a web server service. Thanks to Gareth Owen (developer of ghttpd) and Cody Mays (ported ghttpd to SkyOS) you can use SkyOS as a web server now. The web server configuration is done with the common graphical service configuration plugin for the System Manager. Using Nvu and Firefox you have great tools available to develop and maintain websites from within SkyOS." A screenshot's here. This web server and the service plugin will be made available in an update package, available via the SkyOS Software store.

"This is a step-by-step guide (with screenshots) for configuring a virtual machine and installing on it Sun Solaris 10. At the end you'll be able to run the virtual machine inside Workstation 5.5 or inside VMware Player 1.0, which is a free virtualization product."

"I have always wondered what is it that makes people embrace Ubuntu over other Linux distributions. After some pondering, it struck me that the unique selling point of Ubuntu is its user friendliness. Ubuntu is a distribution targeted at the non-techie crowd - those that want to get their job done and not spend time tinkering with the OS. And consequently, the developers at Ubuntu have bundled simple easy to use GUI front end tools to achieve common system administration tasks. Here I have put together 10 things in Ubuntu that make a new user's life that much simple."