Stories about: INS

Life just got easier for users of the downloadable or boxed retail versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 operating system who want easy and cheap ways of adding DVD playback and improved audio capabilities to their machines.

After migration to Linux on the desktop, New Zealand national plumbing products supplier Plumbing World also switched its business intelligence application from SAP's Business Objects to the Australian Yellowfin BI for compatibility.

Rich Internet application vendor Curl will announce Tuesday that it has completed its initial transition over to the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) with a set of Eclipse plug-ins, Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE).

The latest browsers are fighting back against the never-ending assault from online crooks who want to sneak malware infections through your browser and onto your PC. Opera 9.5, and, soon, Internet Explorer 8 add new security features that block known malware sites.

Zimbra has long been one of my favorite open source products. I remember getting a first demo of Zimbra from CEO Satish Dharmaraj at the Red Hat conference about three years ago, while they were still in stealth mode. Satish, Scott Dietzen and the rest of the crew weren't setting out to build a me-too mail client. They were attacking a much larger problem.

Ubuntu Linux Founder Mark Shuttleworth urged development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple has done in this space and aired a vision of software changing the world.

Last week I began to discuss a remarkable virtual-appliance-based system for network monitoring and management called Groundwork Monitor Community Edition.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

For three health care centers, the challenge was clear: Find a way to improve internal communications by expanding e-mail accounts to all employees, including doctors, nurses, security staffers, dietary workers and others, without breaking their IT budgets.

Only 59.1 percent of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers, putting the remainder at risk from growing threats from diligent hackers, according to a new study published by researchers in Switzerland.

No one loves to pay crazy per-user licensing fees, not to mention 15- 22 per cent annual support residuals. (And no one loves the endless, mind-numbing meetings with non-technical financial folks trying to pry budget for these tools from their clenched fists.) So today we're going to discuss tools that are free. However, we are not naming them to this list of "great" tools simply because they cost nothing. These are some of the best lesser-known tools out there.