Showing all newswire headlines

"This is one of the things which I feel is really hurting Linux... the inability to properly upgrade a distribution. Fedora and Ubuntu both have a 6 month time frame with releases, thats two versions a year. One would think that they would make upgrading as flawless as possible."

Uruguay has placed an order for 100,000 of the laptops aimed at children in the developing world, the first firm order received by the organisation.

Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues. This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future. My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality – a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source.

This month’s issue of Wired Magazine had an article in it about LaLa, a CD swapping service. In the article, Wired’s Cliff Kuang wrote “The arrangement exploits a loophole in copyright law: While distributing duplicates is verboten, it’s perfectly legal to trade your own property.”

Here are the latest numbers on browser marketshare on German websites in the last quarter (Q3/2007):

Sometimes the machine you're working on has a little oops. Maybe the reboot command has hung and the system will not shutdown or a kernel panic has occurred and although you still have shell access, there is little more you can do with the machine. The solution is simple: you need to hard reboot the machine. But you're in Phoenix and the machine is in L.A. Like any good system administrator, you have the machine hooked up to an IP-KVM (or serial over IP, if the machine is headless), but the magic SysRq keys won't send properly. So what's a sysadmin to do?

MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) are text-driven cooperative or competitive games that you can play either straight from your terminal using the Telnet protocol or through a separate application specially designed to play MUDs. The majority of MUDs are free to play. Here's how you can get started with them. To find a MUD that appeals to you, visit a MUD-list such as The Mud Connector or Mud Magic. Both have reviews and top-rated and "game of the month" features to help you find a MUD to jump into. I recommend Mud Magic for beginners, as it is easier to navigate and provides clear, comprehensive lists of top-10 MUDs.

Last week I wrote the first part of this series which discussed the installation of Mepis, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, and Freespire on my laptops. Now that I have had time to play with each of the operating systems I would like to discuss my impressions of the different distributions. I have not spent any time on OpenSuse yet so I will leave it out of the discussion.

Colin Walters of Red Hat chaired a FOSSCamp session about Hotwire, a unique and innovative graphical shell environment designed to improve the command-line user experience. I've been testing Hotwire releases for some time now, so the opportunity to see Walters present his invention in person seemed too good to pass up.

iRiver is readying a Linux-based media recorder/player comprised of a detachable mobile unit and tethered docking station. The Unit2's base station offers a DVD/CD player, TV tuner, and PC-style I/O, while the detachable display features a 7-inch WVGA (800x480) touchscreen, WiFi, and USB. Apparently, the idea is to use the docking station to record DVDs, music CDs, or TV content onto the portable unit, which can then be carried with the user.

The release of Fedora 8 (codenamed Werewolf) is due out for release in less than two weeks and comes with a host of new features. Fedora 8 will offer a Codec Buddy for installing audio/video codecs, an open-source Java stack now based upon IcedTea, improved laptop support, the Pulse Audio sound server, remote virtualization support, and much more. As a sneak peak at the final release of Fedora 8, taken from the Fedora 2007-10-24 Rawhide spin we have screenshots of the improvements to the Fedora Firstboot, the Fedora 8 GNOME desktop, and also the KDE version of Fedora 8. Enjoy!

Have you ever taken a picture which would be just great only if you could remove that strange unwanted object that showed up in the middle of nowhere and now kills the whole effect? Or perhaps you just want to get rid of your ex-girlfriend and keep the photo with a fantastic landscape alone? Whatever your secret plans are, GIMP Liquid rescale plugin is there for you. Just use it!

Ars was at FOSSCamp this weekend. Think of FOSSCamp as an "un-conference" without a set agenda where the minds behind open source projects get together and plot world domination (and, err, ways to improve their code). One fascinating session (and one that shows how FOSSCamp works and why it's so productive) was given by Mirco Müller, who discussed using OpenGL in GTK applications. Müller—the developer behind Cairo-Clock and the LowFat image viewer—talked about the state of OpenGL support in desktop applications and described various techniques that developers can use to make OpenGL content integrate better with conventional GTK user interfaces.

Back in 1995, I read an article about the scarcity of webmasters and switched my specialty. I often look for hot spots and retool to meet the needs. Before 1995, Oracle Financials was hot. I just didn’t care much for the rigidity of technology. But, I was an accountant and an IT guy so I had tooled up for database programming.read more

The funny thing about those telling developers it's a new way of thinking and to "give everything away" or to "build it and they shall come" are often those making their cash using tried and tested ways of working.

This weekend, ten KOffice hackers congregated once again in the hospitable Berlin KDAB headquarters. KOffice has come a long way in six months: all the groundwork has been laid for the new version, KOffice 2.0. From Krita to KPresenter, KWord to KSpread, KChart to Karbon, KPlato to Kexi, and from KFormula to Kivio, the big underlying frameworks are ready. This meeting was called to decide on common look & feel issues and a release plan and schedule.

Earlier this month we looked at the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi motherboard, which featured a new technology called Express Gate that was an instant-on Linux-based desktop environment that supported a web browser and the Skype VoIP client. This motherboard also featured integrated 802.11n wireless, Intel's X38 Chipset, and a variety of ASUS AI features. However, ASUS innovations are not limited to their motherboards but certainly extend to their wide graphics card selection as well. The EN8600GT OC GEAR/HTDP/256M graphics card is based upon NVIDIA's GeForce 8600GT GPU with ASUS OC Gear. OC Gear? This is the world's first hardware-based real-time overclocking device. The PCI Express graphics card ships with a controller device that can be installed into a 5.25" drive bay and via USB, it's able to overclock the graphics card with a turn of a dial. In this review today we'll tell you how well the ASUS EN8600GT OC Gear graphics card works under Linux.

So the latest IDC quarterly server report is saying that shipments of servers with Linux on them are on a downturn, compared to shipments of servers with Windows Server on them. Game over, Linux, you are defeated.

Internet-gentile mobile operator 3 finally released full details of its new Skype handset at an event in London today. Early adopters can expect free calls, but no guarantees of reliability.

Morgantown, WV, US and Thessaloniki, Greece, Oct 29, 2007 -- MEPIS has announced the "Lysistrata" release of antiX, a lightweight derivative of SimplyMEPIS 7.0. AntiX is built and maintained by MEPIS community member anticapitalista, as a free version of MEPIS for very old 32 bit PC hardware. The antiX web site is at antix.mepis.org and an antiX forum is hosted at http://www.mepislovers.org