Officials at the London Borough of Newham have denied they had faked an interest in deploying Linux to force Microsoft to dramatically cut its licensing costs. Speaking at an event to launch a partnership between Newham and Microsoft, Richard Steel - Newham Council's head of ICT - insisted that a recent assessment of the various merits of Windows and open source had been fair and above board.
The recent announcement of RealPlayer 10 for Linux caught my eye and I decided it was worth taking it for a test drive. Since I was not sure how this might impact my production machines I decided to just slap a new instance of Slackware 10 on a spare partition of my test box. My main linux machines all run Slackware and Dropline Gnome so it seemed best to work with a 'plain vanilla' clean install.
The new version of KDE has a completely new email client, in one of many improvements designed to close the features gap with Windows
The final release of KDE 3.3, an open-source Linux desktop environment, is due in a few days and will give users greatly improved email facilities.
KDE is a popular desktop client for commercial Linux vendors with some, such as Novell's SUSE, offering it as their default desktop.
Chris Howells, a KDE developer, says that with this new release, KDE is strengthening its position against Microsoft.
Linus Torvalds has been called on to help Australia's peak Linux association in a battle to stop local companies attempting to trademark the word "Linux".
Torvalds has been called on to help Linux Australia Inc -- which represents open-source developers orbiting the Linux software platform -- prove his right to trademark the term in Australia much as he did in the United States in 1997.
Look under the hood of any modern Linux distribution, and you'll find an assortment of gems hidden inside. There's the Vi editor for all of your text processing needs; the SSH shell for secure connections; the Apache server for Web site publishing; the Samba suite of tools for file sharing...the list goes on and on.
Every operating system has different sound systems and APIs to access the sound card, so that no low-level coding is required to use the sound device. Programmers have many different choices concerning which system to use, especially under Linux -- and maybe that's the problem. This article illustrates free sound architectures on Linux, as well as the different interfaces a programmer can use.
Evans Data recently provided more proof that Linux is more secure than Windows. The researchers surveyed 500 Linux developers and found that 92 percent had never had a machine affected by malicious code. Fewer than 7 percent said they'd been victims of three or more hacker intrusions.
Only 22 percent said their systems had ever been hacked.
By comparison, last spring Evans did a study that found that 60 percent of non-Linux developers had been victimized by security breaches, and 32 percent said they'd been hit three or more times.
HP's top Linux executive says digital rights management, which uses encryption to protect content such as music and movies, is on a collision course with Linux.
Widespread use of Linux and open-source software is an inevitability, but the new programming technique is running into troubles with the important new technology of digital rights management, Hewlett-Packard's top Linux executive said on Tuesday.
A survey of 500 Linux developers carried out by Evans Data, a research company, and published last week, found that 78 percent of them claimed never to have been hacked. Of the 22 percent that had fallen victim to hacking, nearly a quarter said they had been attacked by internal users with valid login IDs. By comparison, earlier this year Evans Data surveyed a group of non-Linux users and found that a significantly higher proportion -- three in five -- of those had suffered a security breach.
Novell plans to release a new version of its flagship server Linux product on Tuesday, built around a recent update to the core of the open-source operating system, sources said. The software company is expected to unveil SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. Novell sells several editions of Linux, but SLES is its prime server product. The most recent version, SLES 8, was released in November 2002; SLES 9 will go on sale on Tuesday with an annual maintenance charge of $349 (£190) per year for a dual-processor server, sources said.
