Showing all newswire headlines

Everybody posts about applications to install after upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. That's interesting, and some applications in those posts are quite useful. But those are just lists of applications like any other "Top 10 Ubuntu applications" list. I'm not saying they are not interesting, I'll even post some links to such posts from other blogs (look at the bottom of the post) I really liked, but to get there, you must firstly fix everything that's not working for you, tweak some things and so on. From the tweaks in the post: Fix the Internet connection, ctrl + alt + backspace behavior, update manager behavior, disable the login sound, enable icons in menus and buttons, fix the popping sound, browser specific tweaks, etc.

A home computer makes an ideal appliance to store and stream music. The purpose of a music server is to deliver tracks when requested by a client. The server can deliver music to machines over a local area network as well as computers connected over the internet.

For the past two years we have hosted an annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we ask well over 20,000 users each time their video card preferences, driver information, and other questions about their view of the Linux graphics stack. This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.

A quarterly review of opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM, including the upgrades to the new versions of Apache OFBiz, Tomcat, and Funambol, and the recent community wish list for opentaps.

According to a report in the French language publication 01net, the French General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFiP) is switching to Mozilla's Thunderbird email client for 130,000 users. The switch is happening as part of a merger of two French tax authorities which had different email systems, The Directorate General Tax (DGI) which used Lotus Notes and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP) which used Microsoft Outlook.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from November 9th - 11th, 2009.

Freescale Semiconductor has begun taking orders for a Power Architecture development platform for Android-based products, opening a new category of embedded devices to Google's open-source mobile operating system.

A Qt developer has brought a piece of KDE to Maemo. After plasmoids, this week brings the Plasma desktop. Also a KDE Maemo mailing list.

This update includes enhancements to the JIT compiler, garbage collection technology, JVM serviceability, and an updated XML parser for Java.

An open memo from the U.S. DoD declares that open source software is no worse than traditional software, perhaps even useful.

The mobile phone market suffered a six percent drop in shipments year to year, but saw a 5.6 percent improvement over the previous quarter, says IDC. Meanwhile, Motorola, which showed a 6.4 percent yearly drop, according to IDC, posted 3Q earnings that beat analyst predictions.

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell's blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city's switch to Google's corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save. Still, the Novell blog post is intriguing because it's a missive from an open source-focused company criticizing the Los Angeles decision with barbs frequently aimed at open source solutions. It claims that L.A. should have opted for Novell's fee-based Groupwise solution. Huh?

When running a modern Linux graphics driver stack in a composited environment there is a lot less tearing -- particularly with regard to video playback, but OpenGL applications too -- now than there was in the past, but there is still room for improvement. One of the ways to improve this is by properly controlling the display of buffers with how often the swaps occur and to sync them with the monitor's refresh rate or the rate at which the compositor is running.

If you're fetching several resultsets that contain a lot of common data, it can make sense to obtain a single resultset that has all the data that's required, store it in a temporary table, and then select from this temporary table as needed.

Open Source philosophy fosters environments where people readily exchange knowledge and willingly share innovations as a way to develop skills for the betterment of humankind.

The Linux-Kongress is traditionally where kernel developers exchange honors and advice about new features and enhancements. This year a number of speakers presented performance improvement data and discussed what aspects of Linux can be drawn out even more.

While recent Ubuntu releases have been more about careful enhancement and distribution maintenance, the current version 9.10 offers a new look as well as a whole range of new technical features – the developers have restructured the distribution's standard filesystem, boot system and hardware maintenance, and they have introduced new software. Not everything is completely new; many changes were introduced into Ubuntu as part of a gradual development process and have now reached the maturity required for general use.

Securing your Linux server is important to protect your data, intellectual property, and time, from the hands of crackers and hackers. The system administrator is responsible for security Linux box. In this first part of a Linux server security series, I will provide 20 hardening tips for default installation of Linux system.

Back in 2005, I wrote a story for InternetNews.com where I wrote that I expected PHP 6 to be out in 2006. Here we are three years later and guess what? No PHP 6. What happened? Is it ever going to come out?

ZaReason is taking a small but significant step to help strengthen the Ubuntu brand. To help celebrate the Ubuntu 9.10 launch, the PC maker is offering “a stick of Ubuntu aluminum case badges with each computer ordered” October 29 through November 5. Here’s why you should care.