Showing all newswire headlines

Breaking tradition (or continuing it, depending on how often you read this blog ;) we're going to have part 2 of yesterday's two-parter tomorrow and put up our final Perl script to find the maximum guaranteed number sets, or lists, within larger number pools. There's not too much else to explain about it, but we will lay out this road map, so that you can see (or possibly revisit or avoid ;) all of the different topics we covered that are included in this script and/or are directly relevant (kind of a list of directions to this post and its attached script).

Back in 2001, I landed my (then) dream job as a full-time Linux kernel developer and distribution maintainer for a small embedded systems company. I was thrilled - and horrified. I'd only been working as a programmer for a couple of years and I was sure it was only a matter of time before my new employer figured out they'd hired an idiot. The only solution was to learn more about operating systems, and quickly. So I pulled out my favorite operating systems textbook and read and re-read it obsessively over the course of the next year. It worked well enough that my company tried very hard to convince me not to quit when I got bored with my "dream job" and left to work at Sun.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.

The combination of the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers, plus the excellent choice of apps (it has pretty much everything I use day to day) makes the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Cub and Hunter two of the best choices out there — for me anyway. Adding to Wolvix's flexibility, it can run as a live CD, or be installed in a traditional or "frugal" manner. I've chosen traditional installs, and the install process in Wolvix is excellent. It's easy to create as many partitions as you need, you get a choice of GRUB or LILO bootloaders, and once you do have it installed, slapt-get and Gslapt are ready to bring all the apps up to date from both the Wolvix and Slackware repositories.

Making what now seems like the next logical step for operating system evolution, VMware today told the world about Virtual Datacenter OS, which it positions as a way to "pool all types of hardware resources--servers, storage and network--into an aggregated on-premise cloud." The solution gives enterprise administrators flexibility and options in terms of application environments and computing power than had been previously possible.

CodeWeavers, a company whose mission is to enable selected Windows programs to run seamlessly on Linux via WINE technology, has released a preliminary version of Google Chrome for Linux. It works!

The hacking attempt started around the time that the giant machine was about to circulate its first particles, under the spotlight of the world's media. On Wednesday afternoon, as the world held its breath as the machine sparked up, CMS team members were scouring computers at the machine for half a dozen files uploaded by the hackers on September 9 and 10. "We think that someone from Fermilab's Tevatron (the competing atom smasher in America) had their access details compromised," said one of the scientists working on the machine. "What happened wasn't a big deal, just goes to show people are out there always on the prowl."

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye). According to a blog post, the site was launched quietly on Friday, and a primary goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them. Project Kenai is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems. How will this compete with similar sites?

PyTube is a GUI for various command-line tools such as:youtube-dl, sox, mplayer, mencoder, ffmpeg and others.It allows you to resize, rotate, apply an external mp3 into a video, generate a 10 to 30 seconds mp3 ring tone. PyTube offers many features using top quality OpenSource tools such as GTK+ for smooth user interface, ffmpeg/mencoder/sox for format conversion and the easeness of the Python programming language to implement new features in a matter of minutes.

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. Inexpensive add-on applications that will provide audio codecs and a DVD player to expand the multimedia capabilities of the four-year-old Linux operating system are now available for purchase in the Ubuntu online store.

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Mark Shuttleworth is tap-dancing to work these days, he writes on his blog. Why? His Ubuntu Linux project has hired a team of "designers, user experience champions, and interaction design visionaries" tasked with the heady chore of making Linux the world's most usable operating system. After acknowledging the significance of the challenge, Shuttleworth admitted that he does not yet have all the answers. But, he said Ubuntu's new "upstream" team -- which will work separately from its "platform" team, to avoid conflicts of interest -- would focus initially on participation in the X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, GNOME, and KDE projects.

Unified Threat Management (UTM) devices unify all network security elements into a single device. They often include a combination of routing, firewall, intrusion detection, content filtering, URL filtering, spam filtering, VPN, and antivirus functionalities. These devices usually cost thousands of dollars and require subscriptions. However, you can secure your network and save money at the same time with Endian Firewall Community, a free, open source alternative to costly UTM devices. Endian Firewall Community is a Red Hat-based OS running on kernel 2.6.9-55. Endian designed this UTM with usability, flexibility, and ease of deployment in mind. It includes a stateful packet inspection firewall, an application-level proxy with antivirus support, content Web filtering, spam filtering, and VPN support that uses Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or OpenVPN. The latest version is v2.2 RC2, but it's still in the development stage. The current stable version, which I used, is 2.1.2.

After buying my new Acer Aspire 7520G and to be honest I have been using its default OS for 4 month! That is a Windows using record for me and I am not happy with it since Acer been joking around with the CD-ROM player since it was requested on order. Alright to get to work with Debian I had to replace the OEM CD/DVD Player.

In the wake of free software leader Richard Stallman’s visit to New Zealand, state-owned radio network Radio New Zealand has begun delivering some of its shows in the Free Software Foundation’s favoured Ogg Vorbis format.

Phoronix.com is the definitive Linux hardware review site, featuring articles on motherboards, processors, memory, power supplies, cases, and other components. While other sites throw a hardware review into the mix occasionally, hardware reviews are the primary focus of Phoronix.com. Phoronix founder and executive editor Michael Larabel has it down to a science -- so much so that he was able to package and released his primary tools as an open source hardware testing suite. Now it is easy for anyone to obtain reliable and repeatable benchmarks for the components in their personal computer.

Eric Geier is back with more tips and tricks on transitioning to OpenOffice.org (OOo). This tutorial continues by highlighting OOo Options you may want to change, discusses the PDF exporting feature, and shows how to overcome two vexing issues you may encounter when working with images.

We've written about the folks at CodeWeavers before. They make a customized, commercial version of Wine called CrossOverLinux. and have been major contributors to Wine. (Wine allows Linux users to run Windows applications.) This post from the CodeWeavers blog details how the company has succesfully ported versions of Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser--for Mac and Linux. The ports are free and available here. You won't want to run these ports as your main browser, but as proof-of-concept for cross-platform versions of Chrome, this is good news.

I've been using KMail for several years, but I get in ruts and don't notice new features until I trip over them by accident. One such feature is Templates, which has become one of my biggest time-savers.

One brake on the GIMP's popularity is that, while it boasts dozens of filters, a rival like Photoshop boasts thousands. You may only occasionally need a special effect that imitates a pencil sketch or a famous style of painting such as Impressionism or Cubism, but, when you do, having a filter to create the effect instantly saves serious amount of time. To help bridge this divide, the GIMP is reviving the User Filter from its 1.x releases. This filter is a kind of meta-plugin that allows users to import and manage Photoship filters or, if they have the knowledge, to write their own. The GIMP User Filter is available from the project's SourceForge.net site as source code or as a Debian package that may or may not work on Ubuntu, to judge from mailing list chatter. Once you install it, you will find it under Filter - > Generic -> User Filter.