Showing all newswire headlines

Today we're going to dig into ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, a good tool for managing your Linux sound devices. It's good for managing multiple sound devices, and it works in all Linux environments including other window managers, or no X Windows at all.

The VAR Guy has been negative on Novell for a few years, and he frequently questioned the company’s open source software strategy. But according to a new piece of financial news, the Linux provider is performing better than Wall Street expected. Here’s the scoop, which surprised our resident blogger.

Sun has claimed that completing its purchase of the open source database developer MySQL will enable it to become the most complete provider of open source server software. Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive, said in a conference call on Tuesday that the US$1 billion acquisition "completed our capability to deliver a holistic, secure, open source platform for networks", providing the last, key piece in a software stack that now rivals Microsoft's.

Ubuntu just launched Brainstorm, a system similar to Dell's Ideastorm that lets users propose improvements to Ubuntu and vote others' proposals up or down. The system has great potential in giving all Ubuntu users a voice in the future of the operating system.

Medsphere, an open-source VistA vendor and their customers, gave a talk on their system and their strategy at HIMSS yesterday. Relative to the number of vendors present at HIMSS, very few held a session at the "University" section of the tradeshow. Medsphere did and highlighted several of their key successes. Overall, I was impressed. Read on after the gap for my review of the session.

There are lots of ways that software gets included in Fedora releases. Because Fedora is a community-powered Linux distribution, the most common (and likely the easiest) method is when a community member packages and “owns” the task of building it for Fedora. This story follows that process.

Linux Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) can help you protect world-writeable shared directories from abuse. This article for Linux system administrators lays out the steps to enable namespaces with PAM. The pam_namespace module creates a separate namespace for users on your system when they login to protect users from several types of security attacks.

TheDailyPlate.com is a free, online eating journal with a lot of features that make it useful for the health conscious. The site is developed completely in PHP on MySQL, Apache, and Linux. LAMP was a natural choice, the founders say, because so many other Internet companies have experienced success with the now-ubiquitous platform.

Product revenue grew 9 percent year-over-year - Achieved non-GAAP operating margin of 10 percent

From the concept of copyleft to the status of community projects, free and open source software (FOSS) raises endless legal issues, many of which are subject to rumors and misconceptions floating around the community. To help reduce the confusion for those managing software projects, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has released a freely distributable guide entitled "A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects."

Of all the theories behind Microsoft's assimilation of Yahoo (I think it's about eliminating a competitor under a mountain of cash), this is the most intriguing I've seen yet: According to Linux-Watch, Microsoft wants Yahoo because no huge Web-based companies use Windows products to run their back-end ... except Microsoft, of course, and this might give the rest of the world a reason to consider Windows for their servers ... or it could crush Yahoo under the weight of a soul-sucking software sea change. ("Sea change" ... that's as idiotic as "change agent" and "best practices" ... sorry for using it ...).

The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brusssels was a great experience (as usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from the KDE perspective.

Most portable audio players can play music encoded in the MP3 audio format, but some consumers also have music in Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MPC, or even WMA files. How do you change from one format to another when you need to? Here are some of the best audio conversion tools available in Linux. One of the simplest and most elegant ways to convert audio files is by using the audio-convert script. It makes use of Zenity to display GUI messages and windows, but does the rest of its work from the command line.

What’s this pv_ops business all about? Well, as Dan explained, for a long time we’ve been forward-porting Xensource’s (now 2.6.18 based) kernel tree in an effort to try and have our Xen kernel not lag behind Fedora’s bare-metal kernel. Now that the upstream kernel has gained the ability to run on Xen using pv_ops (but only as i386 DomU, currently) we’ve taken the decision to stop wasting our time forward porting Xensource’s tree and put all our focus into improving the feature set of pv_ops based Xen.

News that Microsoft is to be hit with yet another fine from the European Union has naturally attracted plenty of attention, but it has also raised the old questions of whether such interventions by governments are justified or even do any good.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature. However, you can add geographical information to your photos (i.e., geotag them) even if you don't have a fancy camera or GPS receiver using the Geotag tool.

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is.

The organizers of Open Source Software Summit (OSSummit) Asia are now looking to hold the conference in mainland China. The event, organized by the Apache Software Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, was originally set to be held in Hong Kong in November last year, but was postponed due to the lack of response.

This document describes how to set up, configure and use Fwbackups on a Fedora 8 desktop. The result is an easy-to-use backup system for desktop usage. Fwbackups creates partial backups which can be stored locally or on a removable device. You have also the option to run scheduled backups.

Imagine standing on the road. An oncoming car is heading rapidly towards you. You have a choice to move, or to stay. Now consider that in business you need to choose a server platform wisely but often Windows shops become entrenched because it is the status quo. A couple of user experiences show why you ought to think about it more.