Showing all newswire headlines

Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar has written in to report that he and his team at the Interactive Computing Lab in ENAC, Toulouse have been successful in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainlinue X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7), there is now multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions.

In its mission to bring to world+dog the joys of Hadoop - that open-source grid-computing platform based on Google arrogance - Cloudera has out-Amazoned Amazon. Today, the star-studded Hadoop startup told the world that its commercial stuffed-elephant distro can now be run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in tandem with so-called Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage volumes. EBS volumes are mounted directly onto EC2 server instances.

I first reviewed the ASUS Eee PC 901 when I was getting frustrated with the Xandros Linux customized installation that it came pre-installed with. Within a couple of days, I immediately installed Easy Peasy over it and had a significantly better experience. And while Canonical was pushing their Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I recently decided to install the desktop release and have my netbook run the standard 9.04 release of the Ubuntu distribution. Below are the results to my experience.

In November of 2006, Microsoft rocked the Linux world by signing a landmark patent and interoperability agreement with Novell. According to the two partners, it's an agreement that today, two and half years later is still paying off, even during the current recession. Heystee said that in just the past six months, the two companies have signed more than 100 new customers, which is double the rate in the first two years of their relationship.

Abuse. Intimidation. And support. You can find all that and more on the Ubuntu Users mailing list. An official support channel, the mailing list is where new users are directed by Canonical for technical support and discussions about new features and ideas. But there are some key problems with the mailing list. In the past few months, I believe there have been unacceptable comments posted — directed at peoples’ race, gender, sexual orientation and nationality. There’s no moderation and no consequences to stop people from repeating their offenses.

A small but intense code sprint took place in Oslo last weekend. Peder Osevoll Midthjell, Sveinung Dalatun and Anders Sandven, who work on mobile broadband connections for Linux as their thesis project, met with Darío Freddi, Will Stephenson and Frederik Gladhorn of KDE. Knut Yrvin spent his weekend with us to make us feel comfortable at Qt Software.

The most impressive F11 Xen related features seem to be the nice Xen 3.4.1 build with python 2.6 coming as default with F11 and graphical installer behavior during pygrub based PV DomU installation phase. F11 is supposed to be installed without libvirt to avoid conflict during Xen 3.4.1 port to Fedora 11 instance.

User GwydionDd commented on my previous anti-Vista rant post: "My daughter’s PC had Windows XP on it and as a teenage girl she likes to use the PC as an extension of her personal life (facebook, skype IM, etc, etc) and also as her media centre for music and DVD’s as well as her photo booth. Just your avarage typical home user. … I had enough of wiping Windows and I installed Pardus 2008 on the PC, setup her WiFi … imported her music and photo collection and sorted out the DVD codecs... "

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

Fedora 11 Leonidas Installation and Post-Installation guide. A detailed tutorial with screenshots to configure Fedora 11.

There are never adequate words to describe tragedies, especially those that involve loss of life. Today we find ourselves struggling for words to report the apparent suicide of LXLabs founder K. T. Lingesh on Monday.

Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 2.6.30, adding several new filesystems, including the NILFS2 log-structured filesystem. Linux 2.6.30 enhancements include a local caching layer for NFS data, the RDS server cluster communications protocol, the Tomoyo security module, and support for LZMA and BZIP2 compression algorithms.

Fastboot's inclusion in the kernel is one of the release's key elements, providing a mechanism for faster startup times within the mainline kernel itself. According to Red Hat, there is a difference between the aims and process of the new mainline Linux kernel's fastboot -- which was contributed to the community by Intel -- and the approach to faster startups taken in Fedora 11. "They're solving a different set of problems," Fedora kernel maintainer Dave Jones told InternetNews.com. "The Fedora work has been almost entirely done by improving init scripts in userspace, and by making applications more intelligent about the I/O they are doing."

The idea of memory compression—compress relatively unused pages and store them in memory itself—is simple and has been around for a long time. Compression, through the elimination of expensive disk I/O, is far faster than swapping those pages to secondary storage. When a page is needed again, it is decompressed and given back, which is, again, much faster than going to swap.

Due to a long succession of pleasing experiences and unfettered software freedom, Carla Schroder hereby nominates today, and every day, as Linux/FOSS Gratitude Day. You don't have to kiss a programmer, but you might take the time to thank some of the folks who have made all of this wonderful software freely available.

If you get on google, yahoo, bling, ming or any other search engine and type the words Ubuntu, Debian and upgrade you will get hundreds of articles relating to converting, or upgrading, Debian to Ubuntu. You will not find many that talk about going the other way. After all, why would you want to go back to Debian after you have tried Ubuntu?

Fedora makes a great choice for both beginners and advanced users as it balances stability and cutting edge applications. The Fedora distribution effectively fills the needs of home users, programmers and servers alike. Unlike many Linux distros, Fedora always includes the latest versions of software this adds to the excitement of its releases which happen every 6-8 months.

Stanislav Hoferek has announced the release of Greenie Linux 5j, an Ubuntu-based distribution and live CD optimised for Slovak and Czech speakers. What's new? Based on Ubuntu 8.10 "Jaunty Jackalope" (Linux kernel 2.6.28, OpenOffice.org 3.0.1), actualised with all recent security updates; new keyboard shortcuts for launching Firefox, calculator or any other application; availability of a meta package that can turn a standard Ubuntu install into Greenie Linux; new documentation; inclusion of Greenshot - a utility that takes a screenshot and uploads into to ImageShack in three seconds; availability of extra applications, including Skype, VLC and Opera via Greenport; new desktop theme....

The NetBeans developers have announced the start of the NetBeans 6.7 Community Acceptance Survey and are asking users to provide feedback on the current release candidate. The survey is part of the Community Acceptance Testing program (NetCAT) for NetBeans. The goal of NetCAT is to get early feedback from users and the NetBeans community on the main features and quality of the product, before release.

The world of open source development could be divided if the European Commission (EC) succeeds in passing a law extending consumer protection rules to software, according to experts. The EC proposes software companies be held liable in the European Union (EU) for the security and efficacy of their products. David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT Research at Ovum, thinks this may lead to a situation boosting current open source vendors' business models, but making it more difficult for independent developers to thrive.