Showing all newswire headlines

Zenoss is a new open source, company-backed network management system. It manages applications as well as servers and network devices--we'll explain what that means shortly. We decided it was time to give it an honest run for its money. Wait, it is free, but still we wanted to give it a real review. This article will be a light how-to focused on our experiences and first impressions with Zenoss. Next, we'll attempt to convert a real production environment's monitoring system from Nagios to Zenoss.

When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 brings several significant improvements to the open-source office productivity suite, including easier upgrade paths for existing Microsoft Office users, improved measures to prevent security breaches, and an array of snazzy new features introduced in the suite's word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.

Microsoft, desperate to freeze a market, has started evangelizing a “new” version of Windows (called MinWin) that will correct Windows Vista's bloatware problems. But don’t blame Microsoft for the noise about MinWin and Windows 7.0. Blame the trade press. Here's why.

[Wow, you mean I can get a Windows OS that isn't stuffed full of everything I didn't want in the first place..in three years?. - Scott]

KDE will be participating at FOSS.IN/2007, India's premier FOSS event in Bangalore. KDE Project Day is this Wednesday 5th December. Project Day will have a complete starter course for eager contributors to jump into KDE. Speakers would showcase various avenues of contribution to KDE - artwork, documentation, translation, development, marketing et al, basics of Qt/KDE programming and the various frameworks as well as the state and future of KDE 4 and more. This is the biggest ever representation and splash by KDE on Indian soil. Read on for details including the new KDE India website.

Having spent the last few days really examining what Gutsy has to offer on the wireless front, I have been content with improvements made to the network-manager for GNOME. Having thoroughly tested my RT2500 and RT61 Ralink wireless cards, I was impressed with the new wireless stack and network-manager's ability to handle the wireless cards with zero hassle.

Linux.com ran an article headlined GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement on November 23. Jeff Waugh, the press officer on the GNOME Foundation Board, was prominently mentioned in that article and in several others to which it links. So was Roy Schestowitz, who wrote a post titled Anti-symbiosis: ODF, OOXML, Mono, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org on the Boycott Novell site, where he is a regular contributor. We thought getting them together might be illuminating.

It's finally official. The long-awaited release date of KDE 4.0 will now be January 11. Originally planned for a December release the development team held the release back to "solve a couple of essential issues".

After growing tired of install errors with Simply Mepis 7.0 Beta 5, I finally wrote it off as a Beta bug with my architecture on my notebook. After all, clean partitions and being able to run other releases of Mepis indicate that there are some bugs that have yet to be dealt with on that Beta release.

Only for the brave: The Ubuntu Linux team announced the release of Hardy Heron Alpha-1 over the weekend for testing purposes.

The Washington Post reported that global measles fatalities have been drastically reduced, with the number of African deaths dropping by 91 percent since 2000. The initiative, said to be the first to use hand-held computers in collecting data, uses open source software for data collection.

This document describes how to set up, configure and use Pybackpack on Fedora 8. The result is an easy to use backup system for desktop usage. Pybackpack creates incremental backups which can be stored locally or remotely (SSH) - the usage of removable devices is supported. You also have the option to burn the backup(s) directly on a CD/DVD.

Two recently released text-to-speech extensions can transform Firefox into a talking Web browser suitable for users with visual impairments -- and anyone else who can use a speech interface to the Web. Fire Vox is designed to be a full-fledged "screen reader in a browser," usable for daily browsing even for unsighted users. CLiCk, Speak provides point-and-click screen reading, which can be helpful for partially-sighted users or sighted users who have written language difficulties (such as dyslexia).

If there is one thing that frustrates me, it's articles like this that start off on the right track, only to show the writer's complete lack of understanding about the subject he has selected to write about.

LaTeX is good way to present neat and clean documents, it is easy to format documents, you just take care of the text while LaTeX take care of the format.

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! How many distributions have you installed? And what criteria do you use to evaluate them? Baris Paraskeva, a DistroWatch contributor, has summarised his experiences with many recent desktop distro releases in a grand overview - complete with ratings for ease of installation and use, package management and speed. In the news section, Ubuntu embarks on a new development journey, Mandriva announces two new products - Flash and Linutop, openSUSE launches a weekly newsletter, Mage Power interviews a leading developer of Source Mage GNU/Linux, and Foresight Linux unveils its plans for the upcoming version 2.0. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the November 2007 DistroWatch.com donation goes to MEPIS Linux. Happy reading!

Helios and company have begun a multi-part series on the ideal desktop for the New Linux User. Knowing helios is a kde-kind-of-guy, be warned that he works in that realm alone. He is asking the Linux folk to add their advice, experience and criticism...from there, Komputers4Kids can build on YOUR experience and knowledge.

This year a lot of stuff has happened in the Linux world. Here is a summary of a few of the most important events and news this year.

There are several things either happening, unraveling or in various stages of preparing to happen and I think we need to talk about them. In Texas, we have our own particular way of expressing our intent to take action at some unspecified time. Where I come from, "We're fixin' to get ready to have company" makes perfect sense. We have some issues to resolve before they get here.

The airline is looking to explore Web 2.0 technology and open source solutions to expand its online capabilities and business applications, according to its CIO.