Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft and its channel partners are bound together with the glue of mutual commercial success. That's a big reason why Microsoft VARs are always quick to defend the software giant's interests. Criticize Microsoft in front of a group of partners and you may find yourself being forced to run for cover.

[My issue with this article is the author uses some anonymous poster in a "Slashdot Report" as reference material. An anonymous post on Slashdot is not anything even remotely close to a reliable source if you ask me. - Scott]

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, February 12, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 51. On today's newscast . . . crappy economy gives rise to malicious insiders, healthy open source coders, a non-lethal snake bite, patent prior art, and a new Linux distribution that really is communist.

In January, a whole slew of Red Hat engineers and Fedora Project volunteers got together at the Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) to collaborate on features for Fedora 11, setting team objectives, and other initiatives. Contributors including QA experts, marketing gurus, community managers, and our friends from the One Laptop Per Child project all came together. They presented new ideas at technical talks, worked on tasks, and most of all had fun in the brilliant, vibrant atmosphere that defines Fedora

Inventor/Innovator who is also an open source enthusiast.

[Not directly related to Linux but I think still of note to our readers. - Scott]

Firefox provider Mozilla has released a new Web development tool called Bespin. The project should not only make programming Web applications easier, but make it a collaborative effort worldwide.

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has actively been working on improving power management with graphics processors via the various open-source X.Org drivers. There is quite a lot of work involved, but at the FOSDEM X.Org meeting he shared an update on his progress. In particular, Matthew is trying to conserve power with the GPU, memory, outputs, and displays.

Google, Microsoft and Apple are in a constant battle for domination of our computing lives, so it comes as a bit of a shock when you find examples of the companies actually cooperating.

As I commented last night, this is ridiculous - why can't OLPC perform remotely as well as every other computer manufacturer on the planet? Especially with a first-mover product with (for now) unmatched features. I want 1-laptop deployments, 5-laptop deployments, and 10-laptop deployments. I really hope there's a good reason why that's not as easy as it seems. Here's a business plan for selling laptops, the profits (if any) can go back into (re-)hiring and paying programmers, continuing R&D for the next generation OLPC XO-2, deployment personnel, and any excess could be offered as grants to create low-cost pilot projects or backstop community/peer support groups by defraying shipping costs and providing free parts.

The open source community is not quite as free-wheeling as it was a decade ago. Now, industry titans like IBM and even one-time nemesis Microsoft are part of the ecosystem, blurring the lines between open and proprietary models.

Mozilla Labs has shown Bespin for the first time. Bespin is a project to create a new cloud and web based development environment which will act as a collaborative working space for coders. The project has been incubating for some months and in it's debut the Mozilla developers show web based editing and project browsing using HTML5 features, such as Canvas, to create a clean and stylish interface, which is already quite responsive.

This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on a Fedora 10 system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver - in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.

No split brain here; only split hairs ;) Today's post is going to be fairly specific. I'm either tapped-out on creativity or I'm writing this post after working into the night, or both ;) Here's a little something I picked up today concerning VCS and service groups for either the Unix or Linux version.

It's been one of the loudest excuses I've heard for people not wanting to use Linux. "Linux won't play my games." Well first, that's not near as true as it was a short year ago. Second - if it is so, it's because the people that write the games don't think you are a market force worth investing in. That, it seems, is changing as well. Linux Community...Prepare to get Goo'ed.

As Valentine's Day once again approaches, can we help it if our attentions turn to Linux? Of course not. So, here are a handful of tips for spreading the Linux love to your heart's desire. After all, what's *not* to love about Linux?

The release of a stable version of Debian GNU/Linux is normally a time of rejoicing and celebration for the 1000-plus geeks who provide Linux users with one of the best distributions going. But the emergence of Lenny, or version 5.0, on Saturday, February 14, will be tinged with some sadness as well, following the death of a developer in a tragic accident last year. Debian project leader (DPL) Steve Mcintyre said: "We will be dedicating the Lenny release to our long-term contributor and friend Thiemo Seufer, who was tragically killed in a car accident in Germany on December 26 last year.

Google's expertise in translation has begun to pay dividends for an entirely separate project, its Chrome browser--as well as any other software using the open-source spell-checking package called Hunspell. Chrome combines WebKit's spell-check infrastructure with Hunspell's multilanguage library of correctly spelled words to supply spell-check in 27 languages. But many widely used words were missing from Hunspell, and Google used its translation expertise to fill in the gaps.

If you have ever read any of the articles I have written on Free Software Magazine you might just have noticed that my opinion of politicians is lower than a limbo dancer’s pole. A brief brush with political activism many years ago left me with a deep and visceral distrust and dislike of everything political and a determination never to become entangled with politics ever again. So, I was not exactly impressed when I read that George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor of the British Conservative Party, had recently advocated the adoption of “open source” in government IT contracts to reduce costs. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? But it isn’t and here’s why. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

I would have rated the hardware in this unit highly if it hadn't failed on me on two consecutive systems. I understand that two units is hardly a scientific sample and that I may just have had really bad luck. Unfortunately the software proved to be a disaster as well.

The process of installing Logical Volume Management on install…is well…a task that can present issues for most users. So I have tried to lay out a screen shot and description of this process on Debian 5 “Lenny” because many people will want to use LVM once they understand the value and the process.

Valentines Day. That one day a year when geeks everywhere find themselves whisked away from their terminals for a night filled with flowers, chocolate, and — dare we say it? — romance. This year, however, significant others of the Debian set may find it more difficult to drag their beloved beyond the box, as, barring a lovers quarrel, the Debian community and the long-awaited Debian 5, better known as Lenny, will finally tie the knot.