Showing all newswire headlines

AriOS is the successor of mFatOS, an Ubuntu remaster we talked about a while back. AriOS 2.0 was released today and it's based on Ubuntu 10.10 - the new version tries to replicate Unity but as opposed to Unity, it's customizable thanks to Avant Window Navigator. In AriOS, everything works out of the box and most popular applications are installed by default which I'm sure those with a limited Internet connection will appreciate.

Caine is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04 for forensic scientists and security-conscious administrators. Poised to do battle against IT ne’er-do-wells, Caine has a comprehensive selection of software, a user-friendly GUI, and responsive support.

There is a word that is to me as a pebble in a shoe, as fingernails on a blackboard, and that is the word consumer. Consumer is a perfectly good word that has become incurably tainted. One dictionary definition is "a person who acquires goods and services for his or her own personal needs". Farther down on the same Dictionary.com page it says "one that utilizes economic goods; specifically : an individual who purchases goods for personal use as distinguished from commercial use". And so we have Consumer Reports, consumer protection laws, Consumer's Union, and other organizations devoted to protecting consumer's rights and interests.

I experienced a strong sense of deja vu and began to wonder if this was going to be a reprise of Sun’s sale to Oracle and the forking of OpenOffice, one of the crown jewels of GNU/Linux. The premise of this article, to paraphrase an American general, is that old software never dies, it just gets forked. The question therefore is: is OpenSUSE safe and what is Microsoft up to?

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin [cq] has ordered government agencies there to open-source software by 2015, according to translated documents. Putin's order, signed this month, follows news reports from October saying the Russian government was planning to drop Microsoft products in favor of a national open-source operating system based on Linux.

This year, I'm giving up making predictions. By my count, my record for 2010 was slightly worse than random chance, and my inability to impress readers individually with cold readings makes me conclude that I should leave fortune telling to the tarot readers.

The Indian KDE community will organize its first conference at Bengaluru in March 2011. The 5 day event will bring together KDE contributors, Qt developers, users and FOSS enthusiasts. We realise that there are not many KDE/Qt related events that are accessible to Indians. FOSS conferences or meetings are an excellent way to show people the technology first hand and ways to contribute to it. We not only dazzle them with the world of KDE, but show them first hand how simple it is to get involved and make a difference. This is our motivation for conducting this event.

There are not many download accelerators for Linux that integrate well with web browsers and have support for downloading links right from the browser. PyAxelWS Download Accelerator Extension for Chromium now allows users to accelerate downloads by using a simple python script PyAxelWS and HTML5 Web Sockets.

The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike "regular" Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.

The second release candidate of the Document Foundation's fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, has been made available and announced in the Document Foundation's blog. In the announcement, the developers say the release is "beta quality software", ask for users to play with it so they can test and give feedback, and list over 80 individuals who have contributed to development between the third beta and current release candidate.

Using free software in education is not just about saving money. It's also about preserving choice, not locking a student's experience into a certain way of doing something. With Linux, there's no vendor lock-in. Free software is more likely to be open-standards compliant, and it's going to be more open to different languages, localities and curricula.

I've been thinking and thinking about everything, and I've figured out what I need to explain to you next. Reading the log of the recent OpenSUSE board meeting discussing setting up a foundation for the project turned on the light in my head: you need to understand bylaws. Because corporations are setting up foundations to get you to donate code to, and they set them up to suit themselves, not to benefit you. There's a difference between the community setting up a foundation to be a project's home and a corporate sponsor doing it. I'm going to write about that in more detail later. To really explain it, I need to explain some things that you might think will be boring or too foreign, but if you can learn Perl, you can learn bylaws.

Firewall Builder is a firewall configuration and management GUI that supports configuring a wide range of firewalls from a single application. Supported firewalls include Linux iptables, BSD pf, Cisco ASA/PIX, Cisco router access lists and many more. In this tutorial we are going to cover how to use Firewall Builder to configure a NAT rule that translates both the source and destination IP addresses of the original packet. This type of NAT configuration can be useful in a variety of network configurations.

LXer Feature: 27-Dec-2010

Welcome to the last Roundup for 2010 and please accept my apologies for being a day late getting this to you. It seems the holiday festivities have caused me to lose track of time.. Enjoy!

Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of 'a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power

If you have an old cam that you are not using, you can use it as a security cam. Control Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion. The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system (using the video4linux interface). Motion is a command line based tool whose output can be either jpeg, ppm fies or mpeg video sequences. Motion is strictly command line driven and can run as a daemon with a rather small footprint.

AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you've been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.

Linux distributions tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are those, like Ubuntu and Fedora, that are aimed mostly at enthusiasts and others happy to teeter on the bleeding edge of technology. The other group consists of more stable, commercially supported software, designed for those after less excitement, and includes products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). New releases are a rarity in this category, so when a major new product like RHEL 6 comes along it's a big event, and one worthy of close attention.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.0 on a headless Ubuntu 10.10 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

It's a testament to how far Linux has come that users today don't typically have to use the command line if they don't want to. Such is the quality of the graphical user interfaces in many modern Linux distributions that there's simply no need, in general.