Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
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SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
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Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- After Microsoft's Bankruptcy in Russia Android (Linux) Will Dominate Asia Completely
- Windows probably peaked in "XP" or "2000"
- India: Windows Falls to 50% in Desktops/Laptops and 8% Overall
- laptops/desktops fell to 16% of the whole
- statCounter: GNU/Linux Up to 4.7% "Market Share" This Month
- 30,000 Microsoft jobs may be eliminated by year's end
- Microsoft is in Trouble and Microsofters Know It
- "I've been happy on Win 3.11 for years."
- Links 02/06/2025: Political Leftovers, DRM, and Patents
- Links for the day
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- Last Article From Australia's Sam Varghese Was a Year Ago and It Covered the Release of Julian Assange, Who Will Apparently Come Back as 'Politician'
- It'll soon be exactly 12 months
- Hungary Seems Hungry for Linux
- Windows down by a lot
- Like in Europe, Bad News for Microsoft in US and Canada
- If it loses those "regions", then what's left?
- About 8 Waves of Mass Layoffs at Microsoft in 2025 (in Less Than 5 Months), Now Vista 11 "Market Share" Decreases
- Really bad news for shareholders of Microsoft
- statCounter Sees Bing "Share" Falling Over 0.5% in One Month, Now Lower Than Before the ChatGPT/Bing Chat Hype
- Bing has been part of the mass layoffs for quite some time
- Microsoft's Demise is a Global Phenomenon
- mass layoffs justified using mindless buzzwords
- All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux in EU and the UK, All-Time Lows for Microsoft
- Combining ChromeOS and GNU/Linux, it adds up to and almost reaches 6%
- [Video] New Introduction to Richard Stallman's Contributions Including GNU Emacs, GNU/Linux, and Software Freedom
- from the channel previously bullied for supporting RMS
- Links 02/06/2025: South Korea to Vote, Russia Blitzed From Within
- Links for the day
- Links 02/06/2025: Microsoft Spins Layoffs as "Slop", Frontier Settles Lawsuit
- Links for the day
- When You Publicly Boast About Wanting to Violently Attack People (Even Colleagues) Finding a Job Will Prove Difficult
- there's a lesson to be learned here
- The Web We Lost, the Information Lost Due to Microsoft's Attacks on Companies Like Yahoo! (Before the LLM Slop Frenzy)
- When it comes to news sites, what can we say?
- Covering Corruption in Poland, Including a War on Science (Due to Bad Politicians)
- What we're about to show is that skilled and experienced scientists in Poland are besieged by bureaucrats
- Gemini Links 02/06/2025: "Star Wars Day" and "Security Day"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 01, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 01, 2025
- The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part II: Lying to the IRS is a Big Issue
- The OSI of today pretends to be something that it is not
- Bloodlust and Love of Blades (Fascination With Murder) Nothing New Among Microsofters
- Violence is not a joke and no group is magically entitled to make such "jokes"
- Links 01/06/2025: Bird Flu, Food Price Inflation, and Growing US-China Hostilities
- Links for the day
- Links 01/06/2025: "Vibe Coding" Turns Out to be a Fraud and Amazon Merits Boycott, Argue Bloggers
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 01/06/2025: "Stardust" and Ideal PC Setup
- Links for the day
- Links 01/06/2025: Windows TCO, Openwashing, "It's FOSS" Still Promoting Microsoft
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 01/06/2025: Simplification and Networks Everywhere
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 31, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, May 31, 2025
- Google Bribes EFF. EFF Promotes LLM Slop as 'Fair Use'. To GAFAM It's a Low-Cost Lobby Hedge.
- So the bribes pay off ("slush fund") and the word spreads
- Slopwatch: Fake Text and Images, Financial Bubbles, and Scams in "Intelligent" Clothing
- Sometimes what they mean by "AI" is just cheap labour somewhere else, as we discussed in IRC a few hours ago
- Why Microsoft is Collapsing (Similar to What's Happening at IBM), As Insiders See It
- IBM seems like one heck of a mess
- Reliable Computing Means Free (Libre) Computing
- Sites that want to promote security ought to deal with the biggest issues
- Links 31/05/2025: US Court Orders Sides With RFE/RL, War Updates From Ukraine
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 31/05/2025: ARM Server and power_supply Subsystem
- Links for the day
- Links 31/05/2025: Slop Stigmatised as Disinformation, Catalyst/Driver of "Death of Communication"
- Links for the day
- Common Sense 101: Do Not Write Blog Posts Saying You Want to Murder Colleagues (or Yourself)
- Only crazy people would think stabbings are a joke
- Microsoft Bankruptcy
- "Microsoft unit in Russia to file for bankruptcy, database shows"
- Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
- People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
- Links 31/05/2025: Microsoft-Connected Builder.ai is a Fraud and US is Purging Students Based on Race/Nationality
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Limmat, Doomscrollers, and Arguments Parsing
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, May 30, 2025