Showing all newswire headlines

The "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit took another step toward trial — or settlement — Tuesday when US District Court Judge Marsha Pechman denied Microsoft's request for dismissal. The suit was filed in March by a pair of miffed PC buyers. Their claim: Microsoft's prerelease "Windows Vista Capable" campaign was a sham because the Vista in "Vista Capable" is merely Home Basic and not Home Premium or Ultimate. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog reports the ruling means Microsoft will have to answer in court at least two of the plaintiff's four claims, "that Microsoft's marketing violated the Consumer Protection Act, and that the company was unjustly enriched."

In Linux you run processes in two different modes of execution. There is userspace (aka user mode) which you run your everyday applications, like Firefox, Pidgin, irssi. From the kernel’s point of view, this is unprivileged mode, meaning user space applications don’t have access to hardware, or bits of the system critical to its function. The next mode is kernelspace, in this mode a process runs in privileged mode, giving it access to hardware and low-level system processes. In this article I show how to write a kernel module.

It’s too early to say for certain, but there are very encouraging signs that the world’s standards bodies will vote in favour of a single unified ISO (”International Standards Organisation”) document format standard. There is already one document format standard - ODF, and currently the ISO is considering a proposal to bless an alternative, Microsoft’s OpenXML, as another standard. In the latest developments, standards committees in South Africa and the United States have both said they will vote against a second standard and thereby issue a strong call for unity and a sensible, open, common standard for business documents in word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

When picking a media center solution for your PC, it tends to be a matter of compromise. There are solutions that are visually attractive, solutions that are Free/open source software, solutions that are more complete than others and solutions that integrate well with a desktop environment. In the past there have been few, if any, that have been all of these things. After an extensive beta testing period a new version of LinuxMCE, release 0704, was recently made available to the public that shows how we can indeed have our media center cake and eat it too. Read on for details of this release and future plans for KDE integration.

One of the first things many decision-makers want for any given software product is a roadmap, so they can plan around releases. However, the Linux kernel is and always has been bereft of a roadmap. To counter this, the Linux Foundation announced today that it is offering a Linux Weather Forecast to help provide some guidance to developers and organizations that need to know where the kernel is going.

Google and MapQuest do a great job of creating maps of the outside world on the fly. But what about our workspaces? This article shows how to define and map places and people inside a building. Search, track, and plot individual cubicles, rooms, employees, or assets. Graph the location of individuals or groups of employees based on job function, or track unused office space visually.

The Ruby on Rails community embraces testing like the USA embraces American Idol. They watch their test case results roll by with great regularity. Ruby developers talk about testing; they blog about it; they even participate behind the scenes, not with cell phone votes but by contributing open source frameworks.

In a surprising move, Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros announced on Aug. 15 a messaging protocol license and collaboration agreement that will allow Scalix e-mail servers interoperability with Microsoft mobile- and PC-based e-mail applications.

The Linux Foundation has set up of the Linux Weather Forecast to monitor progress on Linux kernel projects.

Traditionally, the Linux operating system (OS) has been viewed as being too big, too slow, and without the real-time capabilities needed for mobile devices. But as 20 million Linux-based mobile handsets have shipped over the last two years it's difficult to ignore the fact that the Linux OS has quickly taken its place among the top four OS's for high-end "Smartphone" devices.

A corporation is not the person the legal fiction makes it so much as a collection of different interests. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping for a laptop. Remembering that Hewlett-Packard almost singlehandedly solved the basic problem of laser printer support for GNU/Linux, I ended up buying one of the company's laptops. Consumer reports, price, and HP's listing as one of the greener hardware manufacturers according toGreenpeace also affected my decision, but my impression of HP as a free software friendly company was a large criteria.

The Red Hat Crash Utility is a kernel-specific debugger. It is usually used for performing postmortem system analysis when the system panicked, locked up, or appears unresponsive. In this short article, Eugene Teo will give a quick overview of how you can install crash and how you can use it to get important information from the crash dump files for debugging and root-cause analysis purposes.

IBM's customer training and support group SHARE is holding a week-long seminar and conference at the Manchester Grand Hyatt here this week. SHARE dates back to 1955, and the folks gathered in San Diego include programmers, sysadmins, and IT directors who have spent decades running mainframe systems for the world's largest companies and governments. Most of the classes and labs focus on"big iron" products like the mainframe operating system MVS and the CICS transaction server, but Linux is getting strong promotion as well. IBM champions Linux for its zSeries mainframes as the industrial-strength virtualization platform, and judging by the turnout at the Linux and VM program sessions, interest is high.

This month's Open Tuesday took place last night with guest speaker Anton de Wet giving an informative talk offering tips on how to start up and succeed with an open source business, peppered with entertaining anecdotes.

Jeff Campbell (aka "Mr. Zonbu") has updated the blog chronicling his experiences with Zonbu, a mini-sized Linux-powered network computer for home users. The latest posting, based on two weeks with the device, finds Campbell happy but still full of suggestions.

The first beta of KDE 4.0 was released earlier this month and Warren Woodford of the MEPIS project has now built a version of SimplyMEPIS 7 that is based upon Debian Etch with the 32-bit and 64-bit KDE 4.0 Beta 1 packages. With some great work going into version 4 of the K Desktop Environment, we've enclosed some screenshots from this MEPIS testing build.

The miracle of near-native virtualization technologies has saved professionals countless hours of OS thrashing. Excluding 3D graphics, systems administrators can accomplish nearly any task requiring a multitude of platforms within the comfort of the Linux workstation.

Here you can see a comparison side-by-side of the installation steps of XP, Vista and Feisty, see how Ubuntu is easier to install from scratch that Windows.

Thanks to recent commits in the RandR 1.2 branch for the open-source X.Org Radeon driver, it's now possible to use S-Video and composite TV output on your ATI graphics card without any patches. This is not limited to the R200 series but will also work with the R300 series and theoretically any graphics card supported by the xf86-video-ati driver. In this guide have outlined the instructions for enabling TV output support from the Radeon driver git code as well as some of the current limitations.

In this tutorial, we will use an online bookstore as our model website, but the techniques we cook up can be applied to a wide variety of other sites as well, from weblogs to portfolios, from market-facing business sites to corporate intranets.