Open Source Pixels

Novell is making it easier for a Microsoft .NET developer to deploy their applications on Linux, whether they develop their applications on Windows or on Linux, with the release of Mono 2.4. Mono is a .NET on Linux implementation and the new version, released Monday, promises greater compatibility and better performance for deploying .NET apps on Linux. Also, Novell is also releasing MonoDevelop 2.0, an improved IDE (define) for building .NET applications

MEDICAL Information Integration offers OpenEMR with full support and customization as a hosted service or installed at the customer’s location. Official Press release follows.

When big companies release new software, they launch it with lots of hoopla: press tours, technical conferences, free T-shirts. Open-source projects, even the well-known ones, generally release their major new versions with a lot less fanfare. The FOSS (free and open-source software) community is often too busy coding and testing to bother with marketing, even when the new “point release” of the software is really remarkable. And there are plenty of remarkable open-source applications on the way this year. Quite a few projects are quietly (or not so quietly) working on major releases or significant upgrades that they aim to make available sometime during 2009. I’ve rounded up 25 of the most notable here.

Long, highly-technical, and animated discussion threads are certainly not
unheard of on the linux-kernel mailing list. Even by linux-kernel
standards, though, the
thread that followed the 2.6.29 announcement was impressive. Over the
course of hundreds of messages, kernel developers argued about several
aspects of how filesystems and block I/O work on contemporary Linux
systems. In the end (your editor will be optimistic and say that it has
mostly ended), we had a lot of heat – and some useful, concrete results.
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“Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries”– sounds promising, right? In the New York Times, no less, so it should be good. Well, no, I was rather disappointed at yet another security analysis that left out vital information– which operating systems and applications were vulnerable. If it were Linux or Mac do you think they would be so tight-lipped? Why is the Dalai Lama running Windows?

More and more rumours and bits of news are making their to the web about Apple’s upcoming Snow Leopard operating system. With the date set for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in early June (as usual), rumours have shifted focus away from features, but towards Snow Leopard’s release date. AppleInsider now claims to have the answer.

This article is a guide on how to solve problems with your FreeNAS server. It covers where to look for information about the problem as well as how to hunt down problems by being methodical. It also looks at the common problems people have with their FreeNAS servers including networking problems and possible solutions along with how to handle RAID failures.

The popular Linux distribution Ubuntu has it latest Beta version released, version 9.04. This Beta is running fine on several Netbooks, as both Liliputing.com & the Ubuntu Mini Blog are reporting.

IBM last week filed a patent application for an offshore outsourcing methodology that is intended to help companies minimize the financial risks associated with sending work overseas. The patent application describes a computer-driven approach for putting values on both the quantitative and qualitative attributes of a “global resource sourcing strategy.” For instance, the methodology takes into account the language skills and morale of offshore workers, as well as a list of the hard numbers involved in setting up an offshore operation, including labor rates and currency valuations. In short, IBM is attempting to reduce offshoring considerations to a mathematic model — or, in the words of the application, “a robust and reusable sourcing template” for identifying and analyzing “global resource pools.”

I personally hope that the Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido computer worm — that surfaced in October 2008 and targets the Microsoft Windows operating system, that activates on April 1st — shows Windows users just how insecure the Windows operating system is, and how slow Microsoft is to react to it, and “patch” it. … businesses stop production because of this worm … become spam websites, displaying advertisements and sending out thousands of spam and denial of service emails. … GNU/Linux might actually become mainstream, maybe even over night.