linux

Replacing Microsoft's ISA server

By adopting open source software you can slash costs, vastly improve speed and reliability and, perhaps even more importantly, wrest control back from proprietary IT suppliers.

In this column we look at providing secure, fast and reliable Internet access for your business. We will be replacing a widely used, yet heavily criticised Microsoft product, Internet Security and Acceleration server (ISA).

What’s involved

Happy Birthday Debian

Today marks the seventeenth birthday for Debian, a free operating system based on Linux and GNU.

Debian has successfully grown and developed into being one of the strongest Open Source Operating Systems available. For a distribution which is produced by volunteers rather than with commercial backing, this is a great achievement, and a testament to Open Source development,

Becta's Home Access Scheme...not really a scam

I was asked by a colleague in Holland to explain Becta's Home Access scheme and give an update on how it was going. He was concerned that 'it had all gone a bit quiet' and he could not find out much about it.

As an (sorry, the only) accredited supplier of Free Open Source software to schools we had looked into tendering to become an accredited supplier of the Home Access Package so this presumably is why he thought we might know something.

My current interest in the topic was quite low but was given a fillip by two things:

Becta's Next Generation Learning ... or the Starship Enterprise ran on Linux

It must be true. Consider; the Enterprise's computers never blue-screened... even under attack (did you know Vista still reports a BSOD message when it crashes?...who said MS did not do irony?) and its engineers were always telling the bridge that it was not possible to do whatever it was no matter how simple in the time allocated...hah proof!

Linux Users, the coolest cats in town.

Only one topic in town this week and that's bullying …

This post however was originally inspired by Glynn Moody's unrelated latest blog (in Computer World) which broadly was a treatise on the simile between organising Open Source folk on any large scale and herding cats...

...this activity is, as we all imagine, a futile pastime ... and moreover transposed into an office context, represents for a manager of 'cats' a role of terrifying proportions.

Open Source 2010: New Year's predictions.

New Year predictions are of course a licence to speculate. What's more the normal boundaries of sanity are loosened sufficiently to make the predictions fun rather than libellous.

Harry Tuxxer and the Amazing Kindle

Harry stared gloomily at his laptop as he closed the browser. Life at the new steel and glass Academy just outside a large housing estate some where in the North of England was dull compared to the fun he had had at Bogwarts with its towers and oak panels. Now it was all personal target setting and endless magic exams.

'Things had really changed since the death of Stallmandore,' Harry mused ruefully. He was supposedly poisoned by too much junk food. That's what they said, but Harry knew better.

Is Open Source selling out?

This post poses questions rather than positing answers. It's about the development of modern technology and asks whether it is time to stand back and take stock of where it is taking us.

If time had stopped on the day Michael Jackson did his first 'Moon Walk' we would not now have the PC which brought us word processing, electronic spreadsheets, relational databases and image manipulation software. We would not have the global communication infrastructure which created electronic trading, e-mail, mobile telephony, satellite navigation and the world wide web.

Linux in an Age of Austerity

COP15, the United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009, is only a month away. For many it represents the 'Last Chance Saloon' for combined action against climate change. As one would expect, the Conference's web site displays plenty of windmills and hybrid cars. No doubt it will be very well attended and trill to the sound of a thousand Blackberries and iPhones e-mailing and Twittering the latest forecasts of doom.

Open Source can save schools billions

Sometimes I think the BBC's on-line news front page is written just to wind me up. This weekend it carried a Gov report from the DCSF (Department for the most recent Government Edu Acronym) who commissioned ex WHSmith Chairman, Richard Handover, to conduct a "value for money review" in education.