Showing all newswire headlines

If you've been thinking of building yourself a dedicated storage server, this is a good time to do it. Prices are so low now that even a small home network can have a dedicated storage and backup server for not much money. SATA hard drives have large capacities and high speeds for low prices, and you don't need the latest greatest quad-core processor or trainloads of RAM. The ultimate in flexibility and reliability combines Linux software RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) and LVM (Linux Volume Manager).

There are so many sites that claim to tell you what hardware works with Linux and what hardware does not, but do any of them really work well?

The VAR Guy listened intently as Novell’s VP of Global Channel Sales, Pat Bernard, described her four-point strategy to rebuild the company’s partner organization. Although Novell faces an uphill climb in several areas, Bernard’s experience in the enterprise software space could be a plus. Here's the scoop.

I ran a quick, informal poll on the internal Gentoo developers' list last week, and tonight I began analyzing the results. 50 developers responded to my 9-question survey, and I'm going to post the results of 1 question at a time.

Usually, the North American computer giants introduce their latest and greatest products to the U.S. market first, with Europe an afterthought. Not this time. Dell is bringing its latest Ubuntu-powered laptop, the Inspiron 1525, to the Europeans first. Americans will need to wait until later in February for Dell's newest Ubuntu Linux computer.

As a developer, one of the most powerful tools that C/C++ arms you with to improve processing time and prevent memory corruption is the control over how memory is allocated or deallocated in your code. This tutorial demystifies memory management concepts by telling you how to create your very own memory manager for specific situations.

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future.

Perhaps the number one reason why people neglect to back up their desktops is the lack of workable solution. It can be difficult to find a method configurable enough to suite everyone's needs. One promising answer may be Restore, an application for enterprise and data center backup for Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix/Linux systems. It is GPLv2-licensed and freely available to download as a set of Debian/Ubuntu packages, virtual machine, or 455MB installable live CD.

At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it. Yet, in practice, community members judge distributions all the time. They don't use a single metric, and at times a distro's appeal is as simple as the fact that it is new or has released a new version. Yet, whenever community members choose a distribution to download or to build their own distribution upon, or to borrow a tool from, they are making a verdict on it.

Embrace the standards, nicely, or get out of browsers. If there was a functioning market for web browsers and operating systems, the past few weeks would have seen two announcements from Microsoft. After a firestorm of criticism from the web design community about Internet Explorer 8's misguided mode switching proposal, Redmond would have publicly backed down. Second, Microsoft would have bowed to 90,000 users demanding that Windows XP continue to be sold.

You're probably familiar with the live CD concept -- a fully functional operating system on a CD that can be run on any computer that boots from its optical drive, without affecting the one(s) already installed. In a similar vein, you can set up Linux to run from a USB hard drive drive on any computer that can boot from USB. The live system offers automatic detection and configuration of the display adapter and screen, storage devices, and other peripherals. A bootable USB drive can run a mainstream Linux distribution such as Debian GNU/Linux, and can be secured, personalised, upgraded, and otherwise modified to suit your needs.

"To quote you a number of years ago: 'Linux is evolution, not intelligent design'," noted Greg KH, quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Linus expanded on the statement, "evolution often does odd (and 'suboptimal') things exactly because it does incremental changes that DO NOT BREAK at any point." He continued, "in other words, exactly *because* evolution requires 'bisectability' (any non-viable point in between is a dead end by definition) and does things incrementally, it doesn't do big flips." When alternative examples in evolution were pointed out, Linus suggested that the kernel was much simpler than a mammal and more similar to bacteria:..

The debate over the OOXML (Office Open XML) format and the competing ODF (open document format) is still alive and kicking, but Microsoft just wants everyone to get along. The software giant had been lobbying for its OOXML format's ratification as an ISO standard at a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva later this month, after a failed attempt in September last year.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced DreamSpark – an ironic name, since it actually lays bare Microsoft's worst nightmare: that more and more of tomorrow's programmers are growing up using free software for their studies, which means that as they move out into the world, there will be less and less demand for Microsoft's tools, and even fewer programs written for its platforms. Its answer? This:..

Many companies offer LAMP hosting, but some of the cheaper LAMP providers do not allow SSH access, reserving that feature for higher-paying customers. Without SSH you may think you'll have trouble executing commands on the hosted server. Not so -- PHP Shell allows execution of some commands without having SSH access to the LAMP server.

This document describes how to set up master-master replication with MySQL 5 on Fedora 8. Since version 5, MySQL comes with built-in support for master-master replication, solving the problem that can happen with self-generated keys. In former MySQL versions, the problem with master-master replication was that conflicts arose immediately if node A and node B both inserted an auto-incrementing key on the same table. The advantages of master-master replication over the traditional master-slave replication are that you do not have to modify your applications to make write accesses only to the master, and that it is easier to provide high-availability because if the master fails, you still have the other master.

Microsoft Corp. is giving students free access to its most sophisticated tools for writing software and making media-rich Web sites, a move that intensifies its competition with Adobe Systems Inc. and could challenge open source software's popularity.

Ever wanted to review stuff online without being censored for telling the truth about a product or service? Behold the GNU Consumer Reports. We are open to doing reports on anything or anyone. Our system is simple. We rate the company based on a few different fair business practices, policies, quality, Linux Compatibility, and price. You can even comment on our reviews and tell us where we went wrong.

To Southern Californians February means several things. Winter storms bring snow to the San Gabriel Mountains. Most college students will have returned to school for another semester. Early flowering plants have started to bud and bloom, attracting bees. Most important of all however, is the coming of SCALE, the annual Southern California Linux Expo.

Let's be absolutely clear about this: it's difficult to recall a Microsoft product that has been so universally disliked - but MS is determined that you - yes, you - will use it whether you like it or not. But - perversely - we opine that Vista is the best thing to happen to the PC industry. Even Microsoft's usually powerful PR machine - which answers criticisms in the media and on blogs with answers on its own pages or in articles - has not been able to overcome the wave of distaste for its Vista operating system. If you doubt this, just look at blogs relating to laptops - they are over-run with users asking how to uninstall Vista and go back to XP. And corporate users are also simply reformatting the disks in new machines and putting XP on before deploying the machines.