Opera 8 Launched

Opera 8 released
Often overlooked in the browser wars, the Norwegian browser Opera has served as an alternative for those dissatisfied with more popular alternatives from Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, or Apple. Opera Software today launched Opera 8 for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and a public beta of Opera 8 for Mac OS X.

Where Have Portals Gone?

Portals Fostering Open-Source Success
If you go to the open-source development site sourceforge.net and search on the term “portal,” you’ll get hundreds of hits. In fact, you could reasonably argue that, when it comes to open-source enterprise applications, portals have been the biggest success story.

In addition to being highly effective and capable on their own, open-source portals have served to demonstrate the effectiveness of other open-source technologies, especially the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language. This is clearly illustrated in probably the most popular open-source portal application, PHP-Nuke (www.phpnuke.org), which is easily customized and includes pretty much any feature you would want from a portal, including content and document management, forums, chat, and blogging. PHP-Nuke has spawned additional open-source portals, including PostNuke (www.postnuke.com).

Looks like Open Source is the place to g oif you’re looking for portal software. Once a buzz word, portals have quietly become the norm for site development in many areas. I suspect aht blogs and such will follow a similar path.

New Releases for Debian and SUSE

Slashdot | New Releases for Debian and SUSE
With the recent SUSE LINUX 9.3 Live DVD ISO released, we get a sneak peek. (screenshots) of this much anticipated OS update. Cool updates in 9.3 includes Firefox 1.0, OpenOffice.org 2.0, Gimp 2.2, Beagle. Xen, VoIP client, and more.” And while Debian’s Sarge isn’t here yet (give Branden Robinson a chance to find his plush new office!), wrochal points out that the fifth update to Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (“Woody” ) has arrived. 3.0 (r5) “mainly adds security updates to the stable release, along with a few corrections to serious problems.

Bash Blogger

Bash Blogger
Bash Blogger is a small, bash-powered, weblog engine. It generates valid, semantic, XHTML 1.1 webpages styled with a single CSS for layout and appearance without relying on popular, server-side scripting languages (i.e. Perl, Python, PHP, ASP, SSI, etc.).

Rater of Change in Linux 2.6 Kerenl Sparks Debate

Kernel Changes Draw Concern from Open-Source Community
Members of the open-source community are expressing concern over rapid feature changes in the Linux 2.6 kernel, which they say are too focused on the desktop and could make the kernel too large.

The inclusion of features for gamers and music, as well as uncertainty about the future of virtualization in the kernel are causing concern for some of the large corporations feeding off of Linux. This will certainly get worse before it gets better. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see a fork in the code in the not to distant future with the BigCos taking on the development of an ‘enterprise’ kernel and the volunteer developers continuing on with a kernel for the rest of us.