Linux/OSS News aggregator

mikrorechner writes "The H Online has a writeup of the problems encountered by LiMux (Wikipedia entry), one of the most prominent Linux migration projects in the world, trying to introduce free software into the highly heterogenous IT infrastructure of the City of Munich. Quoting: 'Florian Schiessl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned.'" Here is Shiessl's blog, in which he details some of the transition problems.

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RedNotebook is a nifty little diary application. According to its Web site: more>>

RedNotebook is a graphical diary and journal helping you keep track of notes and thoughts. It includes calendar navigation, customizable templates, export functionality and word clouds. You also can format, tag and search your entries.

Virtualization has come to be the hot pick for consolidating and cutting hardware costs. All those machines within machines raise questions about the safety of what's inside, though, and according to a recent study, some are seriously lacking in good answers. more>>

InfoWorld - Acknowledging the relationship between Microsoft and the open source community has been contentious, a Microsoft official Thursday nonetheless emphasized the company's embrace of the open source paradigm, even if it was not necessarily for altruistic purposes.

Novell support for NetWare ended on March 7, 2010, but the operating persists in many IT shops around the country. What are these NetWare shops going to do in the future?

PC World - Acquia hopes to make a hosted version of its Drupal open-source content management system widely available in about three months, the company's CTO said Wednesday.

Part 1 of this series introduced arpeggiators in general and profiled the QMidiArp application. This week we conclude our survey with a look at two more arpeggiators for Linux musicians: Hypercyclic and Arpage. more>>

MrSmith0011000100110 writes "The lovely people over at AndroidCentral have broken the announcement that Android 2.1 is finally coming to the Motorola Droid, with actual proof on Verizon's Droid support page (PDF). I don't know about my Droid brethren, but I'm pretty excited to see the new series of Android ROMs for the Droid phone that are based on a stock Android 2.1. As most of us know, the existing 2.1 ROMs can be buggy as hell and either running vanilla 2.1 or a custom ROM; but this phone is still a tinkerer's best friend."

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Red Hat's KVM virtualization underpins the new cloud software test and development service from IBM. This is just one of the recent Red Hat KVM wins, as the company tries to gain more virtualization market share.

What do you think each Linux distribution is "best for"? You can only pick one selection for each distribution (which, by the way, we know is going to be difficult). We'll compile results and share them in an upcoming article. Make sure your voice is heard! more>>

Each year, the Linux Foundation is responsible for putting on some of the biggest names of the conference season. LinuxCon, the Kernel and End-User Summits, the Linux Plumbers Conference — they all have the Foundation behind them. The next up on the schedule is the Collaboration Summit, and as of last week, attendees can now check the details on the Summit's who, what, where, and when. more>>

Glyn Moody writes "Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, has just published a piece called 'Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones.' In it, he notes that today's smartphones are all about the 'software stack,' not the 'radio stack,' and that 'as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device. In the interim, though, we should expect continued activity.' That 'activity' obviously means lawsuits against those producing those software stacks, and Gutierrez seems to be hinting strongly that Microsoft intends to join in. So where does that leave all the Linux-based stacks such as the increasingly-popular Android? Is this just a clever way for Microsoft to start a patent war on Linux without appearing to do so?"

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An anonymous reader writes "Wondering where all that bloat comes from, causing even the classic 'Hello world' to weigh in at 11 KB? An MIT programmer decided to make a Linux C program so simple, she could explain every byte of the assembly. She found that gcc was including libc even when you don't ask for it. The blog shows how to compile a much simpler 'Hello world,' using no libraries at all. This takes me back to the days of programming bare-metal on DOS!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PC World - Microsoft's next-generation Internet Explorer 9 browser may not be anywhere close to competition, but you can test drive a "platform preview" of the software that provides a taste of IE9's capabilities. So what's the deal with Redmond's upcoming browser, and how does it differ from IE8 and worthy competitors such as Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox, Opera Software's Opera, and Apple's Safari? Here's a quick primer.

PC World - Microsoft's next-generation Internet Explorer 9 browser may not be anywhere close to competition, but you can test drive a "platform preview" of the software that provides a taste of IE9's capabilities. So what's the deal with Redmond's upcoming browser, and how does it differ from IE8 and worthy competitors such as Google's Chrome, Mozilla's Firefox, Opera Software's Opera, and Apple's Safari? Here's a quick primer.