Showing all newswire headlines

I've long lamented the fact that Linux lacks any real marketing strategy. Of course, when a product is free of cost, there is no ROI so what's the point? Canonical beat the odds with Ubuntu. The fan-base became so large, so fast that Universal Awareness of Ubuntu can be credited to a simple grass-roots effort that expanded across the globe. It wasn't television or radio advertising. It wasn't billboards. It was good old fashioned proselytizing. Gimmee that old-time religion any day.

I’m a subscriber to Debian Developer Raphael Hertzog’s e-mail updates, which I recommend highly — as I do visiting his website when those updates come through. He’s a developer who has a great interest in helping out the end user, and I appreciate all he does very much. One thing in a recent entry caught my eye: Raphael is looking for people who want to start getting involved in Debian.

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Congratulations! If you could read that sentence that means you have the skills necessary to make a meaningful contribution to GNU/Linux and the FOSS world. In a lot of ways the lack of good documentation is the Achille's Heel of Linux. I'm going to discuss some of the things I've learned along the way about writing documentation and show how you too can jump in and make Linux better!

After you’ve installed plugins to configure your WordPress site for your server and protect your site from spam, it’s time to get your site up to speed. You may have guessed this will partly require more plugins. Some will be for the purpose of visibility, to help people find you. Others will enable you to offer different kinds of content. For example, a music site would probably install a plugin to work with YouTube videos; a photography site would want to make sure to have an effective way to offer slide shows. At this point, every site’s needs are unique.

Fedora 15 was recently released and I decided to snag a copy to review. Since there are a billion reviews already of the default desktop version with GNOME 3, I’ll be covering the KDE version in this review (though I may circle back to the GNOME version at some point for a review). As I noted in my column “The Many Faces of Fedora,” there are quite a lot of Fedora spins now available. You can get spins that focus on gaming, design, security or that use different desktops (such as LXDE, KDE, Xfce or GNOME).

Microsoft has continued to push its patent claims into Android territory by signing a patent agreement with General Dynamics' rugged device subsidiary Itronix. The agreement provides broad coverage under Microsoft?s patent portfolio for Android devices, says Microsoft....

I've noticed a disturbing trend occurring with software. Until recent months it was largely limited to closed source software such as iOS, but today we see it even in the FOSS world...

LXer Feature: 27-Jun-2011

I like netbooks a lot. Portable, long battery life, sharp bright screens-- what's not to like? I took ZaReason's Teo netbook on a torture trip and learned a few things.

The secure shell, ssh, and its companion, scp, are tools that I use more or less on a daily basis. Being able to move files between machines without having to setup SAMBA or NFS is very handy when working with multiple systems. All that you need is to enable the secure shell daemon - sshd.

Tomboy is one of the most powerful notetaking desktop applications out there. Though these days, many people are switching to web-based tools like Evernote and Springpad, Tomboy can still serve as a good alternative for folks who like doing things old school. Tomboy has many interesting features, and knowing even half of them can make you more organized. So, here are 5 tips which will help you get the most out of Tomboy.

This tutorial describes how to migrate from trac to redmine. Originally written to perform an upgrade from trac 0.10.3 (old etch server) to Redmine 1.0.1 (squeeze) but was successfully tested with trac 0.11 and 0.12, as well as Redmine 1.0.5 and 1.1.2 (1.2 is also working. This version was also tested to produce the upstream patch but not intensively).

Do you know the difference between desktop virtualization and virtual desktop infrastructure? Wonder no more. Remove the confusion and join the discussion about these two exciting technologies.

Using the commands tucked under the Import menu, you can offload photos from your camera, storage card, or USB stick directly into the application. What’s more, the Import dialog box offers a few clever features that allow you to configure the import operation.

The KDE team has announced on June 25th Release Candidate version for the upcoming KDE Software Compilation 4.7. This morning, the Free Software Foundation released GCC 4.6.1 with lots of interesting changes.

LXer Feature: 27-Jun-2011

Here is a roundup of the big stories to hit our newswire this past week. Enjoy!

Where cloud storage fails is when you just need to get access to one or two files, and your local application does not have any functionality for accessing files stored online. I find myself in this situation all the time with a few OpenOffice documents that are synced with a Dropbox account, but the Dropbox account itself is not synced with all the devices I use. Editing files in this siutation is a case of logging into Dropbox, downloading the file, making some changes, and uploading it again. It's a tedious process. This is where the Ooo2gd (which stands for OpenOffice.org 2 Google Docs) extension comes in handy.

With two recent releases of Linux operating systems, Ubuntu and Fedora, new age of desktop environments began. These two operating systems bring you new user interfaces: Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 and GNOME 3 in Fedora. Are these new interfaces good or evil for Linux community? Let's try to analyse.

I’ve been running my Debian Squeeze LXDE system today, and all of a sudden the CPU was pegged at 100 percent during a Firefox/Iceweasel session. I opened up a terminal and took a look. Five Gnash processes were doing all of the damage.

There are 60-something updates waiting for me in Debian Squeeze at the moment, and such a large number of packages staring at me from Update Manager usually means a “major” Debian Stable update. Whether or not this is some kind of milestone (it's not, I think), it's a good time as any to assess where I've been on the Linux and BSD desktop over the past few years. Am I setting a personal longevity record with Debian Squeeze?

For the multiple Linux kernel power regressions that I've talked about on Phoronix now for a number of weeks and have been affecting mobile Linux users en mass, I said I was looking for a better power measuring approach by using an AC power meter / UPS rather than a notebook battery to use in nailing these regressions. Using such a power meter would lead to a fully-automated process by the Phoronix Test Suite as no longer would I need to keep pulling the power plug from a laptop, could use much faster hardware, and allow for some other interesting possibilities. Well, last week I bought a power meter that plays with Linux. So now there's some news to share...