Showing all newswire headlines

There has been a lot of talking, lately, about Google’s Chrome OS. People didn’t take it too seriously initially; then, last week, Google started sending out demo netbooks which ran — hear hear — Google Chrome OS. Google Chrome OS is based on Google’s browser, Chrome — hence the name. The idea is that all you run on your laptop is your browser — that’s it. But this raises a lot of questions. In this article I propose a possibly interesting solution to Google’s issues, and how a possible (and not-so-painful) merge with Android should be possible. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

The folks over at Dropbox released version 1.0 yesterday. This release has been a long time coming and is a major upgrade for Windows, Mac and Linux. For Ubuntu users, the biggest changes include the introduction of selective sync, Indicator Applet support, and a much more efficient client-side engine.

While the best cards have not yet been dealt, for those hoping to see Valve's "Alien Swarm" game supported on Linux upon the Steam / Source Engine Linux release, you may be in luck. Windowing code within the Alien Swarm SDK is signalling that there may be support for this game coming to Linux.

More people than ever are using wireless networks as their primary networking medium. Great programs are available under X11 that give users a graphical interface to their wireless cards. Both GNOME and KDE include network management utilities, and a desktop-environment-agnostic utility called wicd also offers great functionality. But, what if you aren't running X11 and want to manage your wireless card?

Firefox 4 is knocking at the door and the latest beta release looks just awesome. The seventh beta release introduces several important changes, including a revamped user interface (with the tab location above the address bar and navigation buttons), tab grouping, improved bookmarking system, re-open recently closed windows, built-in synchronizing system, rendering engine improvements, and more. This article contains a screenshot gallery with all the main features and changes brought until now by Firefox 4.

Current U.S. court ruling could jeopardise the future of software innovation – Linux User & Developer magazine’s news reporter Rory MacDonald explains all…

New versions of Ubuntu Linux are released every six months and most of these are incremental steps forward as Ubuntu tries to evolve into a mainstream desktop operating system. Some have been more exciting than others but on the whole these six-monthly releases are more evolutionary than revolutionary.

While the big box stores and shopping malls run black Friday sales, and in recent years many of the online retailers have began to have black Monday sales. Leave it up to the wacky folks at Codeweavers to have a 30% off Winter Solstice Sales on CrossOver Mac and Linux.

Many of us are hoping for an eBook reader under the tree. A Kindle, a Nook, or perhaps just an Android device that runs eBook software. But if you don't get the gadget of your choice, or if you want to create content to fill one, you'll find plenty of eBook software for Linux as well as open source software to publish your own. The best of the lot? Calibre, a one stop solution for all your e-book needs.

Alien Arena 7.50 (a.k.a. Alien Arena 2011) was released yesterday and it comes with several new notable features regarding the physics engine, as well as two new maps, updated player and skins models, new music for various maps, revamped in-game IRC client, as well as several bug fixes and improvements.

Numerous changes to the network and storage code are to increase processing speed and improve the system's hardware support. Among the new additions are a PPTP stack, various drivers for Wi-Fi hardware by Atheros, Broadcom and Realtek, and code for hard disks with a logical sector size of 4 Kbytes.

I have received a mail regarding the early development of the OpenBSD IPSEC stack. It is alleged that some ex-developers (and the company they worked for) accepted US government money to put backdoors into our network stack, in particular the IPSEC stack. Around 2000-2001.

I've been doing a lot of shell scripting lately with Dash and Bash. Complicated scripts with lots of text handling make debugging difficult, especially when they are being used in sub-shells which obfuscate line numbers in error messages. One of my more common mistakes is an unmatched quote. These can be rather difficult to find so I wrote quote-count, a simple analysis tool that counts quotes in lines.

Two nights ago after many complaints, complements, bug reports, and themes myself and the Bodhi Linux Team pushed out our forth alpha release of the minimalistic, enlightenment using distribution. This release includes a few bug fixes, ELF Beta 3 packages, Firefox 4.0 B7, and a good deal of "polish around the edges" previous versions of the distro had lacked.

Canonical today announced Ubuntu Developer Day to take place in India on the 27th of January -- Ubuntu Developer Day will be the largest event in Bangalore next year

Opera 11 was released just a few hours earlier today, and it comes with several notable features, a new interface, and many other improvements. Written using the Qt toolkit and taking advantage of its own Presto engine, the Opera browser has been around for years, and it comes with unique features, which make it a popular browser even among the free software users on the Linux platform, with a respectable third position after Firefox and Google Chrome.

Screencasts have become a very popular way to make tutorials to explain how software or services work in recent years. Let’s look at how you can make them of your own cool project, or anything cool you’re doing with Linux…

Hulu Plus is the subscription based big brother to Hulu's free video streaming platform. It costs $7.99 a month, and really does open up the catalog of available titles. In fact, for subscribers, there are many shows that have the complete catalog of episodes from every season. (The Office, Family Guy, and many others)

Linux server admins are well-acquainted with its many sophisticated, secure remote administration tools. The Linux-based Android is the hot new mobile platform -- can it do remote server administration? Lugging a laptop around is preferable to commuting, but why not go even more portable with a smartphone or tablet? Can Android serve as a capable remote server administration platform? Android is based on Linux and is open source, so it seems it should be a natural for portable administration.

Like many so-called “power users”, the first thing I do after installing Linux is customize it. I set it to my preferred desktop settings, applications and configuration because I know what I like, and I normally go to great lengths to get it just right. Recently, after setting up a new Ubuntu Maverick install for my wife, I began to wonder what it would be like to run a system on the defaults. To try things their way – to use Ubuntu’s desktop settings, Ubuntu’s preferred applications and configuration. This meant I could not install any of my favorite applications (Chrome, VLC, Exaile…) if Ubuntu already provided an equivalent (Firefox, Totem, Rhythmbox…). How did it turn out? Frustrating, but with some surprising results. (Note: This is not your usual Ubuntu review, but my miscellaneous ramblings, and some praises. Read on for details.)