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
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXIX - Undermining US Election While Engaging in Lawfare in England (BBC) Against Publishers That Cover Anti-Election Violence
- The elephant in the room is back doors in voting machines
- The Tower of Babel
- More is not better
- When Large American "Tech" Companies Can No Longer Complete Payroll
- In spite of several very large waves of Dell layoffs, which the media reported on, it seems like they are still experienceng payroll problems, maybe that's why money is being borrowed
- Writing for Good
- The Web has an abundance of junk
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- Malaysia Seems to be Exploring Digital Independence With GNU/Linux and More
- not too bad
- Microsoft Windows is Crashing in Republic of South Korea
- Like in Japan, they seem to be shutting the lid on decades of Microsoft-isms
- Think Less, Aim for Less (When It Comes to Hardware)
- An abundance of hardware being wasted on a pyramid scheme will become a cautionary tale one day
- Gemini Links 03/11/2026: Stargazing, Linux-Powered Prism "Ambient Computer", and Abandoning Streaming Disservices
- Links for the day
- GNU/Linux Made Big Strides in Portugal This Year
- Microsoft had many layoffs in Portugal in recent years
- GNU/Linux in Argentina Now Measured at 8% "Market Share"
- Argentina is known for exporting skilled footballers, not advanced technology, but it has a large population, which we can hope will dump Windows
- Microsoft is Borrowing Loads of Money While Telling 60,000 Workers to Take the "Offer" and Leave, Microsoft Wants Bailouts From the Dictator
- Vote in elections and also vote with your wallet
- Microsoft and Spoilt Food
- Some whistleblowers may be needed here
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 02, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, November 02, 2026
- Links 02/11/2026: Bracing for US Election and New Zealand Has November 7 Election
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 02/11/2026: Beginning With Gemini Protocol, Looking for CoCs, and Slop for Local Data
- Links for the day
- NDA-Compatible PIPs and RAs at IBM Red Hat
- We welcome Red Hat whistleblowers who can share with us the NDA/s passed their way
- GNU/Linux Rises in African's Largest Population
- 15% in Nigeria [...] A country with over 200 million people
- The Register MS Has Just Published a Fake Article With "AI" 28 Times in the Page (Communist Party of China Entity Paid for That)
- In IRC, someone has just pointed out that an article at The Register MS repeats Microsoft's lies about its financial situation
- Windows Down to All-Time Low, Says statCounter, While Microsoft Tells 60,000 Workers They're No Longer Necessary
- Microsoft must be feeling "salty" right now
- A British Uphill Battle to Eliminate Microsoft and Its American Back Doors
- There are places of work and homes where GNU/Linux is installed and regularly used, not as a mere hobby but as a hyper-productive, practical tool
- Technical Coverage of US Elections
- When elections are done by computers and decided by computers it becomes a tech issue
- By Killing the "Linux News Section" in Softpedia (the Most Popular Section, Based on Its Editor) Softpedia Killed Itself
- Enjoy Ballmer
- Linkspam in "It's FOSS" Today (and It's Not Even FOSS)
- free-to-access ad for some dodgy companies and the URLs are 'tampered' for cashback
- Links 02/11/2026: Slop Destroying Mathematics and "Democracy is Not on the Ballot" (in US)
- Links for the day
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- Any time we adopt or spread slop imagery we are participating in the problem
- Year-Long Celebration Starts on Saturday
- This coming Saturday we turn 20
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXVIII - Microsoft Doesn't Want People to Speak About Microsoft-Controlled Restricted ('Secure') Boot, a Silent Injustice and Back Door/Kill Switch
- Can we please stop treating this as normal or acceptable?
- On Desktops/Laptops, Clownflare Sees Windows at Under 60% and GNU/Linux at 15% This Past Weekend
- Impressive if accurate
- Microsoft Lunduke is Slop
- Microsoft Lunduke is just trying to stir up hatred
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXVII - Shooting the Messengers (People Who Oppose Microsoft Back Doors), Even Across the Atlantic
- Keep this in mind later this week when a dictator either discredits the voting or covertly tampers with the voting process
- Microsoft Wants 60,000 Employees Gone (One Way or Another)
- At IBM, 15% of staff got marked as candidates for removal; at Microsoft it's almost 30%
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Sunday, November 01, 2026
- Jean-Claude Van Linus
- Claude talking?
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- Links for the day
- IBM Vapourware on a Budget (to Grab Bailouts From US Taxpayers)
- Anderon is the sort of thing that makes IBMers uncomfortable
- Links 01/11/2026: Digital Minimalism and "Palantir Cofounder Announces Cruel Plan to Breed Thousands of Lab Monkeys for Medical Experiments"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Accenture in Trouble, Accenture’s Debt Skyrockets
- Seeing a wave of adoption of Free software in Europe, it's not exactly shocking that "consultants" from Microsoft Accenture are no longer in demand
- Microsoft Says Its "Goodwill" Value Has Been Declining for Years, But It Also Claimed That Doubled in One Year
- Wall Street deserves far more criticism or scepticism (at the very least)
- SkyChatz: From Nothing to #2 in IRC (in Less Than a Year)
- Second only to Libera.Chat
- Making Up Words or Inventing a Vocabulary
- Or why Large Language Models are useless
- Assange on What Lula Means to Free Press
- Here in the UK we've also found our 'Lulas'
- GNU/Linux is No Underdog (But There Are Attempts to Put It "To Sleep")
- There's a moral imperative
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXVI - The "Law and Order" Candidate Who Crushes Both Law and Order and Even Rejects Election Outcomes (Insurrection Follows)
- A world without real technical security is a world void of democracy, justice, and human rights
- Links 01/11/2026: Malaysian Media Perishing, France Belatedly Identifies Social Control Media as Weaponised Yellow Press
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 01/11/2026: "Trick-or-Treating seems to be dead, at least in our neighborhood"; BaseFree Numerical System and Human Emacs
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
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- IRC logs for Saturday, October 31, 2026