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FVWM, the F Virtual Windows Manager, is a window manager for computers running the X Window System. While KDE and GNOME offer more features, they are also heavy on memory usage. FVWM is light and fast, and you can customize it to meet your needs, and apply these customizations throughout your organization. The default FVWM screen is very basic -- just a simple blue desktop. Clicking anywhere with the left mouse button brings up a menu with a couple of built-in options, including xterm. You can also move around the virtual desktop by moving mouse cursor off the edge of...

In 1999, Eric S. Raymond published The Cathedral & the Bazaar, a seminal tome on the open source movement in which he writes: "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch." Beloved old technologies don't die. They go open source. For some reason the open source model has enabled dead and dying technologies to stay alive long after commercial interests left them to rot. The names of once popular but now ancient technologies, such as Gopher, DecNet, Amiga and even the Atari 2600 -- the granddaddy of all video game systems -- still live in the...

ELKHART, Ind., Aug. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Linspire, Inc. and Wintergreen Systems announced today that Indiana high schools are currently testing desktop Linux machines in school systems across the state as part of a plan to provide every public high school student with a computer. If successful, the plan, called the Indiana Access Program, will provide each high school student in the state with an individual desktop Linux computer for instructional use in each classroom they visit during the day -- meaning a potential 300,000 Linux machines could be deployed over coming years. "Indiana schools aren't just talking about desktop Linux...

Novell plans to begin opening up development of one of its Linux products to outside programmers in a project called OpenSuse, a strategy similar to that taken by rival Red Hat, Novell is expected to announce next week. Novell is launching the project in an attempt to attract more outside developers, new users and, ultimately, market share, said Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, director of marketing for Linux and open source. Novell is the No. 2 seller of Linux after Red Hat. Novell and Red Hat each have two versions of Linux: a slow-changing, higher-priced product intended for conservative customers and a fast-changing...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., August 3, 2005 –– The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, today announced it has formed a wholly owned subsidiary company to be known as the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Corporation is a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and the vast Mozilla community. It will continue to leverage resources from diverse sources to create and distribute great open and free-of-charge end-user products -- such as the popular Mozilla Firefox Web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email client -- that promote choice and innovation on the...

Kaspersky Lab is expanding further into the American market with the U.S. debut of its antivirus software for Linux and Unix e-mail servers, file servers and workstations. Moscow-based Kaspersky announced Monday that it has launched the corporate products in the United States. It has sold them in Europe for the past six years. "Linux products are much more prevalent in Europe. But as Linux comes more and more online in the United States, there is a greater need for protection against malicious code," said Randy Drawas, a Kaspersky Lab spokesman. Treasure hunt sees Net gain Web video set to get...

Red Hat is making hay from a report on system security vulnerabilities that apparently gives Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a clean bill of health. A SANS Institute report has identified 20 top internet vulnerabilities of which only two affected RHEL, Red Hat said. According to Red Hat, patches have already been issued via the Red Hat network. Red Hat claimed the report proves RHEL subscribers were less susceptible to network security holes than users of other platforms. The statement, though, is apparently a repost to studies backed by Microsoft, designed to “prove” Windows is more secure than Linux and...

The New Zealand government has signed a deal with Novell that will give 2,600 schools across the country access to Linux servers and desktops for a reduced price The number of schools in New Zealand using open source software is likely to increase following a deal struck between the country's Ministry of Education and software provider Novell. Last week's deal allows 2,600 state schools in New Zealand to use Novell's software, including its SuSE Linux server and desktop operating systems, for a reduced price. Douglas Harré, a senior ICT consultant from the Ministry of Education, said this is likely to...

Fans of IBM's OS/2 operating system are petitioning the company to open source the discontinued operating system, or least portions of it. A petition on the OS/2 World website, which is signed by over 8000 people, argues that an open source version of OS/2 will ensure that current users will be well served. "Customers that are willing to continue using OS/2 will get the benefits of an open OS that will be continuously developed by individual developers and/or software companies, their ownership fees will decrease and they will have the enhanced security of an OS that will continue to be...

The open-source Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client will be updated for the second time in a week because of code changes that have unintentionally stopped some third-party extensions from functioning correctly. The updates will take Firefox and Thunderbird to version 1.0.6, while the Mozilla Suite will be updated to version 1.7.10, wrote representatives from the Mozilla Foundation on the group's developer news blog. Mozilla oversees the software's development. It appears security fixes in last week's 1.0.5 update caused the problems. "There is a very real chance that some of the general security improvements in last week's 1.0.5 update may...

Price isn't the driver of the decision to use open source software, according to a report by Evans Data. The Santa Cruz, Calif.-based IT market research firm released Open Source Vision on Wednesday, a qualitative report focused on the business of open source software (OSS). While the lower cost of OSS is an important factor, it isn't the deciding factor, said Evans Data COO John Andrews. The survey said cost was in the top five decision criteria across small businesses to enterprises. "Everyone in the industry is conditioned to pay for value," he said. "People see different value points in...

The Mozilla Foundation's (Profile, Products, Articles) Firefox browser nibbled off a small market-share portion from Microsoft's (Profile, Products, Articles) Internet Explorer (IE) in June, continuing a consistent monthly trend this year. Firefox increased its market share to 8.71 percent, up from 8 percent in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56 percent from 87.23 percent, NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, California, maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage, said Thursday in a statement. Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of...

I recently had an e-mail conversation with an IT pro that knocked me for a loop. Responding to a presentation I did on open source, he said, "It's a great topic, but I would have liked to see a member of the open source community participating." Whoa! I didn't know that I wasn't a member of the open source community! So I wrote back, saying that I certainly consider myself part of the community. He responded by saying that in his opinion the open source community was confined to those individuals who are open source developers. That definition sure does...

Open source has won another convert in the local government sector, with soft migrations to Linux imminent across Vienna's municipal authority The Austrian capital city of Vienna's local government is due to start migrating its desktop PCs to open source software in the second quarter of this year. Erwin Gillich, the head of IT at Vienna's municipal authority, said this will be a 'soft migration' where users have the option of switching from Microsoft Office 2000 to the open source productivity application OpenOffice.org, and from Microsoft Windows 2000 to Linux. As OpenOffice.org runs on Windows as well as Linux, users...

Utah man sues Groklaw, Slashdot, and 200 others Groklaw and Slashdot "right wing websites" and socialists, natch By Adamson Rust: Friday 01 July 2005, 19:09 A MAN IN A place called Utah which is in a country called America, has taken legal action against Slashdot, Groklaw, Pamela Jones, and a number of other individuals and organisations amounting to around 230 or so. The case was filed in a district court in "Utah", on the 21st of June last. The nature of the case is a federal civil rights action with a geezer called Jeffrey Vernon Merkey seeking punitive damages and...

Recently, during FISL (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre) in Brazil, Eric Raymond gave a keynote speech about the open source model of development in which he said, "We don't need the GPL anymore. It's based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting it." Federico Biancuzzi decided to interview Eric Raymond to learn more about that. Why did you say we don't need the GPL anymore? It's 2005, not 1985. We've learned a lot in the last...

We've all had this nightmare. You turn on your functioning Windows/Linux PC, and all you get is a blank screen, or a message telling you that certain files are missing, or the kernel has panicked for some obscure reason. Nothing works, and you need the data on your machine. Yes, now's the time to whip out that trusty backup disk, and heave a sigh of relief that all the important stuff is backed up, right? Well, think again. Most people do not back up on a daily, or even a weekly basis. Some people do not back up at all....

People write a lot about utility computing these days. The interest seems high. VMware gave a seminar in Dallas this past week and had 850 attendees. That followed a well-attended seminar by IBM's business development group on "On-Demand Business". Yet even with the high visibility in the media over the past year, many IT managers seem lost when I discuss utility computing with them. I realize buzzwords come and go. People find it so easy to dismiss "utility computing" as another fad. Even after noting its undeniable benefits, people's eyes glaze over when one attempts to discuss this topic. I...

I have been exploring the use of free Open Source software as an alternative to Microsoft Software for quite some time now. I have been using Open Office for about 8 months now for my word processing needs. In a nutshell I am satisfied. Last week a new beta was released, I downloaded it as soon as it was made available, on first view, even though the key functionality in version 2.0 Beta remains largely intact, it promises dozens, possibly hundreds, of changes. NeLogic Content Management System The beta seems complete enough for a preliminary review. Changes to the installation,...

In an effort to meet the demand for more functionality from virtualization , IBM recently acquired Meiosys, a privately held software company based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Toulouse, France. Meiosys's software allows users to transfer a running application from one server to another (or to a virtual machine), without interruption. The technology is called stateful application transfer. Industry experts say that adding a tool to move applications around on the network will add significant value to Big Blue's virtualization portfolio, specifically its Tivoli line of management tools. "The premise of virtualization is to match resources with what you need....