Showing all newswire headlines

DockBarX 0.42 is released, this version comes with some improvements and a new feature codenamed "ScrollPeak" : " With ScrollPeak instead of rising windows while scrolling, the windows will simply be opacified one by one until you found the one you are looking for and when you move the mouse cursor away from the group button it will be raised. Nothing revolutionary but it should improve the work flow for some of you."

I took a few days off from writing any articles, partly to try to make a serious dent in transcribing the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits. We're in the home stretch, and a quiet weekend, marking on a curve, is perfect. I know there's lots going on, other than work. I also needed to take some time to think about the recent discovery about Novell taking money from Microsoft and contractually agreeing to show up at Open XML standards meetings and events. Should Groklaw stop helping people like that, I asked? Is it time to shut Groklaw down? If not, is there a way to carve out helping Linux and FOSS, which is what we are about, from helping self-interested executives and board members so that in essence we end up being used by them so they get larger piles of money because we worked ourselves to the bone and then they repay the community with such a deal as this?

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today. new verbs icodecs, msnasn1, opensymbol, wmi, xmllite; removed obsolete verbs audioio, dcom98, eadm, urlmon

Back in 1998 when I started using Linux, it was ugly. In those days you installed it by inserting around 40 floppy disks into your computer and praying that one of them wouldn't be a duffer and make you have to start again. After this lengthy installation process, you were typically presented with this not-entirely-intuitive interface:

Photoshop users who have switched to GIMP will notice that some of the PS features are not readily available in Gimp. Drawing arrows is one of them. As a tech blogger who have to edit plenty of screenshots everyday, there are times where I need to draw arrows on the images to illustrate the point. While this can be easily done in Photoshop, the feature is not available in the default installation of GIMP. Here is what you can do to enable the arrow feature in GIMP.

It's a third person High Fantasy RPG action game that immerses players deep into the awe inspiring fantasy world of Dilogus, allowing them to experience it from multiple perspectives of six unique characters in both single player and co-operative multiplayer mode on Linux and Windows platforms.

The Wine development release 1.3.10 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

K3b is a powerful, feature-complete burning application for KDE 4 which comes with support for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO images, Blu-ray discs, audio CDs, creating ISO images. K3b supports multisession mode, features on-screen display, sound notifications, it can copy from one device to another, allows to rip audio CDs using the transcode utility, rip Video CDs or DVDs or create eMoviX projects.

Are your friends convinced that they should be paying for their operating systems because Linux sounds too complicated or because they think it won't do what they want it to? Fear not, here's your guide to bringing your friends over to the light side...

"Windows users started taking games for granted a long time ago. As evidence, the average price Windows users are paying for the recent "Humble Indie Bundle #2" is $6.63." ... "GNU+Linux users seem to have a very different attitude towards games. With this scarcity of games, GNU+Linux users have become desperate."

There's the release of Wine 1.3.10 on this Christmas Eve for those with extra time to test the newest Wine over the holidays. Wine 1.3.10 has a number of changes worth checking out...

Ubuntu recovery mode is a basic boot configuration for repairing a broken system. In this mode it skips most configuration files and daemons in order to achieve a functioning root prompt. For the security-conscious administrator this itself is a problem.

In early November we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs on an early Linux 2.6.37 kernel as our latest round of tests comparing these two leading Linux file-systems. There were some changes in the Linux disk performance with these file-systems using the latest Linux kernel code, but overall it was not too interesting. However, as the Linux 2.6.37 kernel does introduce a new mount option for Btrfs, the space_cache option, we decided to explore its performance in today's article.

There is a discussion going on @ Ayatana mailing list regarding the merge of Me Menu (the applet that displays your name, used to set your status) and Messaging Menu (Chat, Email, etc.) and mockups have already started to be posted:

About 3 years ago when I started my my Linux adventure one of the challenges I initially had was finding an easy way to convert videos to formats I could play on my mobile phone. I remembered having to search through the web and the only option available then was FFmpeg which (don’t get me wrong) is a very power ?tool for converting from one video file format to another, but it was commandline and not something a newbie like me (coming fresh from windows) would want to try out. Fast forward to 2010 and the landscape has changed.

Xonotic preview 0.1 is released, this release is still a preview, which means that is not a stable release yet, in this release many things have progressed, both in features and graphics. Xonotic is a free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.

One of the strangest things that I have heard recently is that Microsoft is porting their Windows operating system to the ARM platform. By itself, that wouldn't seem all that strange. ARM is clearly an up-and-coming platform for which many different companies are writing a ton of software. The strange thing about this move by the Redmond Washington giant is that the port is almost completely unnecessary.

If 2010 was the year that taught open source "how to disappear completely," 2011 will be the year we're reminded that "anyone can play guitar"…or open source. At present, open source is de rigueur with the underdog class, those vendors seeking to challenge incumbents like Apple and Oracle.

Amid an enterprise environment that is now more receptive to utility computing and focused on service-based contracts, open source software adoption has grown over the past two years and entered the IT mainstream.

Today I present you an interview with Bertrand Florat the creator of Jajuk. “Jajuk is software that organizes and plays music. It is a full-featured application geared towards advanced users with large or scattered music collections. Using multiple perspectives, the software is designed to be intuitive and provide different visions of your collection.” Jajuk has many interesting features and being developed in Java is available for Linux (it’s available as package in the main distribution), Windows and Mac OS X. I found this great project some time ago (I’ve been the first Italian translator), but my work and laziness brought me away, today I’ve met again with Bertrand and he’s been so kind to give me some of his time for this interview.