Showing all newswire headlines

The Android based, VoIP-capable Glass phone with a chip each for operating system and telephony plus an 8" touchscreen is supposed to welcome a new era in business telephony.

It's always fun to stand and watch as two big names slug it out, and they don't come much bigger than Microsoft. Sophos, it has to be said, is no small fry either when it comes to the world of IT Security. So when a Sophos blog posting from it's Chief Technology Office, Richard Jacobs, started with the playground taunt equivalent of 'I've been kissing your mum' by saying "Windows 7's planned XP compatibility mode risks undoing much of the progress that Microsoft has made on the security front in the last few years and reveals the true colours of the OS giant" you kind of new things would get nasty, and quick.

RAID 1 is usually implemented as mirroring; a drive has its data duplicated on two different drives using either a hardware RAID controller or software (generally via the operating system). If either drive fails, the other continues to function as a single drive until the failed drive is replaced. Conceptually simple, RAID 1 is popular for those who require fault tolerance and don't need top-notch read performance. A variant of RAID 1 is duplexing, which duplicates the controller card as well as the drive, providing tolerance against failures of either a drive or a controller. It is much less commonly seen than straight mirroring.

Pidgin 2.6.1 brings in the much awaited Voice and Video support for XMPP and are hoping to get these killer features to other protocols as well. In layman's terms, what it means is that now you can use voice chat and video chat in gmail. Install latest Pidgin 2.6.1 in Ubuntu the easy way.

Linux enjoys a very large software library of games, the vast majority of which can be downloaded without any payment. Helping to identify great games is made difficult by the fact that to a large extent games are a matter of taste. Furthermore, some players prefer games of tactics, others enjoy the communication with fellow gamers. There are those who hanker for games that require quick reflexes, or which truly challenge the mind.

For those that missed it, there was quite a bit happening this week in the Linux world when it comes to graphics drivers. The KMS page-flipping ioctl is ready for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, KMS and GEM comes to the Neo FreeRunner, and the Assembly shader rework was merged into the mainline Mesa tree was among the open-source driver news. Also taking place this past week was the release of AMD Catalyst 9.8, which finally brought support for the Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels, but continues to lack real public support for XvBA. X.Org 7.5 was also supposed to be released, but to no surprise that did not happen.

Here are 5 of the most popular, standalone feed reader applications for Linux. I didn't include feed readers which come with applications like Firefox, Opera or Thunderbird for example, but these can also be considered a viable alternative to the ones below.

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

"First, if you are unfamiliar with the problem, go to YouTube, pick any video, and double-click on the video, or click on the little fullscreen icon, and you’ll see that the video begins to get really slow, and choppy, from dropping frames."

People contribute to free software in many ways. Some write the stuff; some write *about* the stuff, spreading the word; and some actually spread open source directly by giving away systems to those who need them. We hear a lot about the stars of first group, and the second group make a lot of noise on their own. But too often we take the third group for granted. I want to talk about one of the unsung heroes of open source – someone who has helped many, and now needs a little help from us.

If you are a Linux distributor, you have a number of possible ways to upset your user base. Breaking existing, well-established functionality is one of them. Another would be to install software which appears to be monitoring user activity behind their backs. Seeming to make money off of these activities will not help. Extra points are awarded for doing it all as a surprise. Ubuntu has risked all of the above with the "multisearch" Firefox extension included in the current "Karmic Koala" alpha release.

Emesene is An IM for the WLM (Windows Live Messenger) network for Windows and Linux. Emesene 1.5 brings a lot of new features and bugfixes, most notable being the webcam (video) support.

Ubuntu Jaunty comes by default with GIMP 2.6 included in the repositories, but you can try the latest development version available, which is 2.7.0. This last release is a step forward the next stable GIMP version and contains a lot of user interface improvements and changes, GEGL migration, two new plug-ins to mention the major ones. To compile and install it in Ubuntu, just follow the steps below:

Every once in a while, the KDE community stumbles across a third party application that is well integrated into KDE, but has somehow managed to fly completely beneath the radar. One such application is called simon (small 's' intentional), a speech recognition program that integrates well with KDE and provides a means of interacting with KDE using voice recognition.

Gimp is an incredibly powerful tool, but with that power comes some complexity. Plugins make it easy to perform common tasks without worrying about the details.

So, you have read lartc's guide on 'Routing for multiple uplinks/providers' and it all makes sense (and does work). However, there's a catch for you: Instead of having static network configurations, your ISPs use DHCP to set your network connections and you don't intend to sit all day long waiting for DHCP event to happen to reconfigure the whole thing, do you? That's what I thought

Debian Lenny comes by default with OpenOffice 2.6.4, but in the meantime OpenOffice 3.1 was released. You can easily install it on your Debian box by using the Debian Lenny backports repository, which is a repository including newer versions of applications than the ones which come by default with Lenny. Just follow the steps below:

Many computer users realize how invaluable a backup scheme can be and most linux distros already include the required software for a simple backup scheme. I am going to show you how to write a simple bash script that will archive specified files in your home directory and add the date/time to the filename of the archive.

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works.

One of the greatest Linux Advocates alive today, at least in my mind, has nearly worked himself to death. And no, I am not kidding. He came close to dying. this is submitted ONLY to let the community know how he is doing and to show you that his sense of humor is still intact. The community outreach has been tremendous so take this only as a report...nothing more. And Bless The HeliOS Project.