FreeSoftNews

The Linux business is going well for Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL). In its second-quarter report for fiscal 2008 the company reported increased Linux business revenues that helped it post a profit for its overall business.

Novell’s CEO Ron Hovsepian used the investor call with analysts as an opportunity to land a low blow against Linux rival Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) and its desktop Linux business.

Revenue at Novell for the second quarter of 2008 hit $236 million, an incremental gain over the net revenue of $232 million reported for the second fiscal quarter 2007.

Read more at InternetNews.com

Google I/O Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Subversion, and it needed a new date parser.

One day, a coder came along and wrote one. But he insisted on tagging the source code with his John Hancock. And that was against the rules. Subversion’s founders said that name tags would undermine collaboration.

When the founders asked the coder to remove his name, he refused, threatening to leave the project and take his date parser with him. It was a good date parser - just want the project needed - but the founders stood their ground.

Read more at The Register

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we spoke to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, and in this article we chat to Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash.

Bash, or the Bourne-Again Shell is a Unix shell created in 1987 by Brian Fox. According to Wikipedia, the name is a pun on an earlier Unix shell by Stephen Bourne (called the Bourne shell), which was distributed with Version 7 Unix in 1978.

In 1990, Chet Ramey, Manager of the Network Engineering and Security Group in Technology Infrastructure Services at Case Western Reserve University, became the primary maintainer of the language.

Read more at LinuxWorld

Free software lovers can rejoice at this month’s release of gNewSense 2.0 (pronounced “guh-new-sense”), the latest version of the popular distribution based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Code-named DeltaH, this operating system includes only software where users have the right to run, study, adapt, redistribute, and improve all of the software and code. To that end, gNewSense is supported and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The strict freedom-ware requirement excludes a great deal of software, including proprietary drivers for wireless and video cards, leaving most users with a less functional — albeit less tainted — derivative of Ubuntu 8.04.

gNewSense is a great alternative to Gobuntu, the Canonical-sponsored free derivative of Ubuntu. According to its wiki page, the 8.04 version of Gobuntu hasn’t been released due to a less-than-optimal reaction from the community. Gobuntu used the same repositories as Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu live CD can achieve the same installation as Gobuntu by merely selecting the free-software-only option in the installer (press F6 twice at the boot menu). Also, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has indicated that he would rather focus on gNewSense because the work on that distribution can help the Ubuntu community as a whole.

Read more at Linux.com

Akademy 2008 is now open for registration. Akademy is KDE’s World Summit, a week long event for all KDE contributors, industry partners and users. The week starts with a two day conference, and is set to include a tutorial day and a embedded and mobile day. As always, attendance to Akademy is free of charge, but you must register. Registration should be in by the 15th of June if you want the Akademy Team to book your accommodation for you. See you in Belgium!

Read more at KDE.news

GTK+ 2.13.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gtk+/2.13/

gtk+-2.13.1.tar.bz2 md5sum: 16f57400a352aadda4b19f95aed14d0c
gtk+-2.13.1.tar.gz md5sum: 19875a16e2b1db06ac4d0e9744f0c3a4

This is the second development release leading up to GTK+ 2.14.

Notes:

* This is unstable development release. While it has had
a bit of testing, there are certainly plenty of bugs
remaining to be found. This release should not be used
in production.

* Installing this version will overwrite your existing
copy of GTK+. If you have problems, you’ll need
to reinstall GTK+ 2.12.

• Read more: GTK+ 2.13.1 released

GIMP 2.4.6 is a bug-fix release in the stable 2.4 series. The source can
be downloaded from ftp.gimp.org. Binary packages should become available
soon; please check the Downloads section on www.gimp.org.

Changes in GIMP 2.4.6
=====================

- fixed handling of the “antialias” tool option (bug #521069)
- when loading a TIFF image, always set a filename on it (bug #521436)
- fixed initial state of curve type in Curves tool (bug #523873)
- fixed potential crash in the Dicom load plug-in
- respect the brush mask in the Heal tool (bug #521433)
- plugged some minor memory leaks

• Read more: ANNOUNCE: GIMP 2.4.6

We are pleased to announce:
Issue 24 of openSUSE Weekly News is out! [0]

In this week’s issue:
    * Special LinuxTag edition
* openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1
* LinuxTag 2008
* People of openSUSE: Klaus Kämpf

[0] http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Weekly_News/24

Have a lot of fun!

–
Jan-Simon Möller

Hi,

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 2.4.1rc1 is available in the Build
Service OpenOffice.org:UNSTABLE project.

Call for testing:

It is the first release candidate of OOo-2.4.1 and we would like to ask you
for testing and reporting bugs.

Where to get it:

• Read more: OpenOffice_org 2.4.1rc1 available (call for testing)

This is release 1.0-rc3 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

What’s new in this release (see below for details):
- Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

Because of lags created by using mirrors, this message may reach you
before the release is available at the public sites. The sources will
be available from the following locations:

• Read more: Wine release 1.0-rc3

Viruses, dodgy printers, unsupported open source software and iTunes are all among the 10 most common tech problems that can cost money or lead to security breaches in organizations.

Software company BDNA surveyed its customers and identified the 10 most important issues CIOs should be aware of to cut the risk of security breaches and effectively manage a modern IT environment.

The top 10 tech issues are:

Read more …

As I ate dinner at a recent LUG meeting, I found myself pleasantly surrounded by a group of people with the same intense passion. We all shared a thorough love for the beneficial and effective Linux operating system.

Yet, as I spoke with two in particular, it became evident to me that perhaps some of the ways in which we in the community evangelize could use some honing. As WJ talked to me about his plan to encourage (his word was “make”) leadership in his organization use more Linux and OSS, I got to thinking that it may be time for another community article.

From my conversations and my own personal perspective I include a list of the top five ways not to evangelize Linux, or perhaps restated, how not to screw up a good thing:

Read more at reallylinux.com

Ubuntu, arguably the most popular Linux distribution today, came out with its 8.04 release last month, dubbed Hardy Heron. That’s passé now; here’s the low down on what the future holds this October with Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.
First, the name: an ibex is a wild mountain goat with large recurved horns. It’s also known as a bouquetin or a steinbock. Such animals wander freely, roaming about as they please. With Ubuntu’s previous two heavily-publicised releases still not shipping with reliable WiFi drivers, the first question on my mind is whether Intrepid Ibex is the one which finally lets its users roam as freely as a wild mountain goat?

Read more at iTWire

South Africa was the first, but not the last. Now Brazil has sent a letter protesting the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard also, and Andy Updegrove says he has heard there will be more:

Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas (ABNT), the National Body representing Brazil, today filed an appeal to the approval of OOXML by ISO/IEC, bringing the current total of appeals to two, with as many as two additional appeals to come, based upon what I have heard from private sources. The text of the Brazilian appeal appears in full at the end of this blog entry, supplied by a trusted source in Brazil.

Read more at Groklaw

Google reportedly took a moment to show off a prototype mobile phone based on its Android operating system at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Android is Google’s open source, Linux-based mobile phone OS, middleware stack and software development platform. Android has the backing of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of hardware, software and telecom companies. If the Open Handset Alliance is the car, Google is essentially the driver.

Read more at LinuxInsider

Earlier this month, we released the single, largest release of Qt since the 4.0.0 release two years ago. Qt 4.4.0 is the result of 10 months of hard work by the Trolls, including numerous distractions. And while it’s being digested by our clients and users, we’re working on Qt 4.4.1, which will include fixes for bugs that were already known at the time of the 4.4.0 release, as well as some that people have reported.

In the meantime, we take two steps back, to the 4.3.x series, and then one step forward: we’re releasing today Qt version 4.3.5. This release is meant for those who cannot upgrade to Qt 4.4.0 yet, but need fixes for some important issues. All of the changes done for 4.3.5 will be present in 4.4.1 and some are even part of 4.4.0 already.

Read more at Trolltech Labs

Heya,

over the last few days I’ve been working on a video applet for Amarok 2, allowing you to view music videos directly in Amarok’s new context view.
As you can see, the video is nicely integrated in our user interface, thanks to Plasma magic. This feature is especially handy for watching Youtube videos, and we’re working on integrating it directly with our SeeqPod service, allowing to find and play videos from the net in the blink of an eye.

Read more ….

Novell, Inc. has announced financial results for its second fiscal quarter ended April 30, 2008. “For the second fiscal quarter 2008, Novell reported $30 million of product revenue from Open Platform Solutions of which $29 million was from Linux* Platform Products, up 31% year-over-year.

Read more at LWN.net

SIMchronise, a mobile technologies company based in the United Kingdom, recently launched a mobile data backup service called PhoneBackup.eu that is built on the Open Mobile Alliance’s Data Synchronization and Device Management standard (a.k.a. SyncML). SIMchronise principal Philippe Joly says that with the “high number of device models and manufacturers” of wireless phones, open standards make it easier for companies to provide data synchronization services.

Read more at Linux.com

Like many Linux Journal readers, I have been upgrading my Gibbons to Herons recently. And like many readers, I imagine, I have been finding a few little challenges along the way. That was no surprise, since it’s pretty much par for the course when carrying out a major upgrade. But something else did surprise me, although in retrospect I see that it shouldn’t have.

To begin with, I tried to fix things that the upgrade threw up on my own. I reasoned – somewhat optimistically, perhaps - that it was just a matter of applying some logic. But then I realised that this was a stupid thing to do – real closed-source thinking. After all, one of the central ideas behind open source is that if we collaborate, and build on the work of others, less effort will be required from each of us, and the end-result will be better. What was the point of re-inventing this particular wheel if others had been there before me?

Read more at LinuxJournal