Open-source software has pros and cons, but can be very useful for the self-employed or small business owners....

The Java Community Process is evolving to accommodate the influence of open source....

Now is the time to get Sun and Solaris back into the IT conversation....

Ubuntu's deep software catalog, focus on usability and active community combine with long-term support to put desktop Linux's best face forward....

Sun's

With unique readers growing by 190 percent over the past year, Engineering News has been named by Nielson Online as South Africa’s fastest growing website. The publication’s sister sites, Mining Weekly and Polity, occupied the second and fourth places respectively. All three of the sites were moved onto an open source software platform a year [...]

The OpenOffice.org community has announced a public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The most immediately visible change to OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the new “Start Centre”, new fresh-looking icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar.

Throwing some of its not-inconsiderable weight behind open source software, Google has joined oCert, or the open source computer emergency response team. oCert is a volunteer organisation of security professionals that aims to co-ordinate responses to security threats in the open source software world, much like the national Cert bodies such as US-Cert.

The KDE Community today released KDE 4.0.4. This is the fourth bugfix and maintenance release. Better desktop pixmap usage and optimised caching will give KDE 4.0.4 a healthy speed boost. The KDE development team releases updates every month and will continue releasing updates every month until July when KDE 4.1 will be released.

Real geeks use text editors. Even when they should be using a proper word processor. But not all geeks use the same text editor. We’re partial to Gedit for serious writing and Vim for short scripts. Tell us what makes your words work.

Want to run web applications on your desktop without a browser? Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) does exactly that and now an alpha release for Linux is available. Adobe has already released AIR 1.0 for Windows and Mac but apparently the Linux version has been delayed while Adobe waited for Flash for Linux to be finalised. [...]

Its been been six months since Puppy Linux 3.01 was released and today Barry Kauler announced Puppy 4.00, aka Dingo. Clocking in at a minimal 87MB download, Puppy 4.00 is a lightweight desktop Linux alternative ideal for low-end machines, or for users who want a little less clutter and more speed from their desktop.

Struggling to work out which of your regular applications is chewing up memory and bogging down your Linux machine? Gmemusage, or the graphical memory usage viewer, is a simple application that gives you an instant graphical representation of the memory used by your running applications and services. Gmemusage is a clone of the SGI Irix [...]

A mere three years after starting the OpenSolaris project, Sun Microsystems today releases the first official OpenSolaris version. OpenSolaris includes the all-important Project Indiana, a project from Debian founder Ian Murdock to make OpenSolaris’ package management system more like that of Linux. OpenSolaris is based on the original Solaris kernel but includes features such as [...]

Entrepreneurs in Kenya are putting Linux to work to cut costs and maximise profits as they look for new ways to bring computing to users.One of these entrepreneurs is Patrick Mathenge, CEO of Mullard Electronic Limited, a firm trading in hardware and software from its Mombasa Road offices. The company is distributing Linux software that [...]