Showing all newswire headlines

China is one of the fastest growing nations on the Earth, and Red Hat Inc. is taking advantage of that fact. Red Hat, the Linux and open-source distributor, is focusing on the continent of Asia, expecting gains of more than 50% in growth.

It looks like Asus is going to seriously expand the "Eee PC" product line. The new family of low-cost, Eee products will include the E-DT (desktop), E-TV, and E-Monitor

I was pleased to learn that the Los Angeles Daily News' Rick Orlov -- L.A.'s most esteemed City Hall reporter -- recently bought an ASUS Eee-PC, and in his quest to make it run as well as it can, has begun reading this blog. Well, if hundreds of rambling posts about my Linux and BSD highs and lows helps, I'm glad to be of service.

The Linux desktop may be moving forward slowly in the United States, but it's a vastly different story in Europe. Today, Jan. 30, Chris Kenyon, Canonical's director of business development, announced on a Canonical blog that "the Gendarmerie Nationale [the French national police force] announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next three years."

Sun Presentation Minimizer (SPM) represents free software's answer to PPTminimizer. Designed for OpenOffice.org 2.3 or StarOffice 8 Impress and released under the Lesser GNU General Public License, SPM is an extension that creates a wizard that guides you through reducing the size of your presentation, making it easier to transport and, on some systems, quicker to run. Those who present large slide shows -- especially graphics-heavy ones -- will find it a well-designed and effective addition, although several features require more work.

Trend Micro is suing Barracuda Networks over its use of the free open source antivirus software, ClamAV. If it wins, open-source advocates fear it threatens all users of the free software and will legitimize the use of patent law to attack OSS. Following months of legal threats issued to Barracuda Networks, Trend Micro is suing its rival over its use of ClamAV--a product maintained by U.S. open-source company Sourcefire--on the grounds that Barracuda Network's use of the software in some of its own products infringes a patent held by Trend Micro on applying AV via gateway proxy servers.

[Here is your overblown article title for the day - Scott]

A great editorial article discussing the eruption of Linux-related FUD brought on by huge corporations that fear the little penguin that could.

The article by Keyto explains how to run SLAX-a 6.0 (RC 6) on a USB memory stick straight away. But what many similar guides don't mention, it actually explains how it works underneath.

The Free software sector and its twin branch, open source, have grown quickly in recent years. Yet there are still factors that, if changed, would further speed adoption.

Think about the differences between stories and facts. Between generating interest and pursuing knowledge. Between grabbing attention and building out what we know. Then think about the connections between the freedom to build code and the freedom to inform one's self and others. Because the former is a model for the latter.

Alex Brown will be the "Convenor" of the OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) that will run from February 25 through 29 in Geneva, Switzerland. In that role, he will have a variety of important powers, including interpreting various vague Directives and other ISO/IEC JTC1 rules and practices that were created for what might be described as kinder, gentler times (not to mention for shorter specifications).

Libferris allows you to index and perform full text search on a number of file formats, including PDF, manual pages, and office documents. The recent availability of packages of libferris and its dependencies for Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE makes it simpler to use the library to provide a file server search interface for the Web. Libferris was initially created to provide a virtual filesystem interface, similar to GnomeVFS and KDE's KIO. Over time libferris has gained sophisticated support for indexing and searching filesystems

The French gendarmerie has blown a big framboise at Microsoft by ditching Windows XP in favour of Ubuntu. The paramilitary police force is to switch 70,000 desktops over to the Linux OS, two years after switching its browsers to Firefox, and three years after dumping MS Office for OpenOffice. Deputy director of the force’s IT department Colonel Nicholas Geraud said the change will be gradual, according to the AFP. 5,000 to 8,000 machines are to make the switch this year, with the rest swapping over the next four years.

This Ubuntu application adds actions to the corners of the screen in GNOME, such as switching virtual desktops and controlling the volume. You can even enable the screensaver and control the screen brightness on your laptop.

In mid-January of 2008, the French Linux distribution maker Mandriva and its Japanese counterpart, Turbolinux, announced a partnership to create a common base Linux system, as well as a joint development lab, logically dubbed "Manbo-Labs". As each each player in the distribution game seeks to offer a compelling product that sets itself apart in a competitive, innovation-packed marketplace, we are curious to know how the players themselves view their strategies. Linux Journal Products Editor, James Gray, recently caught up with Mandriva CEO, François Bancilhon, to find out his take on the new partnership.

What was a standard law suit between two companies, Trend Micro and Barracuda, has been turned into a complicated situation involving open-source software by FUD.

Yesterday I had a nice surprise in my email inbox. Paul Grinberg from PCLinuxOS contacted us with a the announcement that he had built a server rpm which provides a painless setup of the GNUmed server backend. Imagine my surprise when a few tweaks to the spec file were enough to make this work on openSUSE. Wow. We now have the full end to end solution available for users. All it takes is: 'zypper install gnumed-client gnumed-server'

In April 2007, I bought my wife a digital SLR for her birthday. I also took this chance to install Fedora 7 on her computer. I am familiar with using digital cameras under Linux and had no desire to figure it out on Windows. Within a couple hours, Fedora 7 was installed, and I was able to download images from the camera to her computer. We tried several photo management programs like gthumb and f-spot. We stuck with gthumb, using the standard directories, as this was more natural for how we worked.

This is the third release (0.3) of Bordeaux, this release has many fixes and improvements over the 0.2 release. The Application Manger and Winetricks manager are now merged in to a single UI for ease of use.

The public release of AMD's "tcore" sample code is imminent, thereby steering the open-source development efforts toward R600 2D acceleration and the basis of the 3D support for the RadeonHD driver. However, in somewhat of a surprise, this afternoon XAA and EXA support was added to the RadeonHD driver for the R500 series. For those that aren't X enthusiasts or Linux veterans, XAA and EXA are architectures for providing 2D graphics acceleration. With this accelerated 2D support, we have benchmarked both XAA and EXA on the xf86-video-radeonhd driver as well as with the xf86-video-ati driver and the binary fglrx driver.