Stories about: Fedora

Java started down the road to openness more than a year ago. Today it's finally free.

You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You've given us the best shot we'll ever have of taking the desktop.

Arjan van de Ven's kernel oops report always makes for interesting reading; it is a quick summary of what is making the most kernels crash over the past week. It thus points to where some of the most urgent bugs are to be found. Sometimes, though, this report can raise larger issues as well. Consider the June 16 report, which notes that quite a few kernel crashes were the result of a not-quite-ready wireless update shipped by Fedora. Ingo Molnar was quick to jump on this report with a process-related complaint:

A half-year after becoming president and CEO of Linux vendor Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst was in Boston last week for the annual Red Hat Summit. The former COO of Delta Air Lines sat down with Network World's Jon Brodkin to discuss open source, a new patent settlement, and Red Hat's moves in virtualization.

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22 per cent annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.

Over the past decade, Linux has emerged from a herd of obscure and nerdy operating systems to warrant a place in even the most technologically unsophisticated business environments. And in the past three years, a few distributions have made stupendous leaps in performance and usability, winning the affection of millions of mainstream desktop users.

For many of us, our first painful introduction to old-school Linux installs came from installing early versions of Red Hat. Like most early Linux installs, it was a highly technical, highly finicky process that was best left to the experts.

Red Hat Fedora users who wanted an easier way to use the popular and free community-supported Linux operating system on portable USB thumb drives have had their wishes granted.

Bill Kendrick is a software machine. He is the lead designer and developer of New Breed Software, a company creating free and open source games, libraries, tools and utilities across a range of operating systems, mobile devices, hand held and home video consoles. He has personally created a diverse range of classic Web-based games that run across all browsers, and has worked as a professional video game developer since 2003.

One day after the resignation of the One Laptop Per Child's president was publicly revealed, the educational project's founder and chairman says the group's XO laptop may evolve to use only Windows XP as the operating system, with open-source educational apps such as its home-built Sugar running on top.

Sun Microsystems is stepping up efforts to boost Java usage in Linux shops by working to remove some final encumbrances in the open-source Java platform.