Showing all newswire headlines

Canonical announced recently that is joining the GENIVI Alliance and that it will create a GENIVI-compliant Ubuntu IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) Remix operating system based on the Ubuntu Core sub-set.

With Natty Narwhal, Ubuntu underwent a major transformation. Gone was the plain and simple GNOME UI, and in came the shell interface with shiny new features. Though Canonical had high hopes from this release, the response Natty received was hugely disappointing. Many users felt that the release was a half-baked one with too many confusing features. However, a few good features did shine through leaving some users thoroughly impressed by Unity. Good or bad, Unity in its current avatar has plenty of room left for improvement. So, here are a few things we think can make Unity a better interface.

Former Canonical COO Matt Asay thinks it's time for the Ubuntu company to focus on fewer business priorities. But there are some great reasons for Canonical to maintain its diverse focus. Here's why.

PeaZip is an open-source file archiver with GTK and Qt interfaces, with support for all the major archives out there, including gzip, 7z, bzip2, zip, and arc.

Bodhi Linux is somewhat different to most Ubuntu derivatives: It uses Enlightenment 17 to provide a desktop environment, instead of the more common GNOME, KDE and XFCE based desktops.

In Part One of Scale Fail, I discussed some of the major issues which prevent web sites and applications from scaling. As was said there, most scalability issues are really management issues. The first article covered a few of the chronic bad decisions — or "anti-patterns" — which companies suffer from, including compulsive trendiness, lack of metrics, "barn door troubleshooting", and single-process programming. In Part Two, we'll explore some more general failures of technology management which lead to downtime.

Bradley Kuhn is well-known in the world of Free Software. That he works for the Software Freedom Conservancy - and what that august organisation does - is less well publicised.

Microsoft Windows updates took so long to install that my laptop fell asleep. I had to wake it up just to get my computer to shut down. Then it blames me. WHAT!?

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen has tipped plans for an upcoming update to the Boxee software for PC, Mac, and Linux desktops. Ronen says the update will bring the free desktop Boxee A/V player more into sync with what's available on D-Link's Boxee Box device, although it will continue to lag releases of Boxee for devices.

I have been a Compiz fan ever since I started using Linux. Compiz is also a very integral part of Ubuntu, more so with the introduction of new Unity desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. There are many Compiz effects that are not enabled by default and some of them are really good IMO. Useful Compiz tweaks for Ubuntu 11.04.

On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance - for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction - I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline.

Imagine you're a virtual archaeologist of the future reviewing last week's change logs for the Wikipedia entry for Paul Revere....

As Adobe faces increasingly stiff competition on different fronts, one might think the company would be eager to reach the broadest base of end-users possible. Yet its record of engagement within the open source channel remains lackluster at best. Let’s take a look at Adobe’s trends on this front, and what they might mean over the long-term.

Virtualization and cloud computing are here to stay. Negative commentary and paranoia won’t change that.

Things have been progressing nicely and we now even have 2 mash trees with install images for testing available for, one for ppc, the other for ppc64....

I took some time to contact Jeff Hoogland, lead developer for Bodhi Linux, and asked him a few questions about the distribution he is in charge with.

"Bachelors are not the only ones who can use GNU/Linux desktops," blogger Robert Pogson pointed out. "I have had students from grade 1 to 12 use it just fine. None of them needed to configure the clock..." Trenholme's article, in fact, "is an example of the trolls who visit my blog with some obscure problem never seen by other humans."

As expected, Python 2.7.2 and Python 3.1.4 have been released by the Python developers. Both releases contain the security fixes to stop redirection errors that were included in May's Python 2.5.6 and last week's Python 2.6.7 "security fixes only" releases, but these are general maintenance releases and therefore contain many more fixes and corrections – although only Python 2.7.2 is a current production version.

To celebrate World IPv6 Day, I thought I would join the “festivities”—one day late, unfortunately—and enable IPv6 on my home network, with a total switch-over if possible. The three most common services on my network are OpenSSH on all three nodes, and NFS and HTTP on my central server running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, so I wanted to make all three work over IPv6.

The VPN is very often critical to working within a company. With working from home being such a popular draw to many industries, it is still necessary to be able to access company folders and hardware that exists within the LAN. When outside of that LAN, one of the best ways to gain that access is with the help of a VPN. Many VPN solutions are costly, and/or challenging to set up and manage. Fortunately, for the open source/Linux community, there is a solution that is actually quite simple to set up, configure, and manage. OpenVPN is that solution and here you will learn how to set up the server end of that system.