Showing all newswire headlines

Samsung Electronics announced its much-anticipated Android consumer tablet, due to ship in Europe in mid-September. The Samsung Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, and offers a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera, a front-facing videocam, 802.11n, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, and 3G with voice telephony, says the company.

The next version of WriteType (1.0.98) is now available for download! WriteType is a word processor designed to make typing easier and more efficient for young students and students with disabilities.

As MP3 players and mobile devices become very common, more and more people are beginning to convert their audio CD collection to music files so they will listen to them while on the move. In Windows and Mac, the conversion can be done automatically with Windows Media Player or iTunes. What about Linux? Let’s take a look.

early four years after its launch, hackers have finally succeeded in jailbreaking the Playstation 3 (PS3) game console and circumventing its copy protection system. Just days after Sony obtained an injunction preventing the sale of a USB dongle for jailbreaking the PS3, hackers have now published source code under the name "PSGroove". This apparently allows a programmable USB development board with an AT90USB microcontroller to be used to circumvent the PS3's security systems and execute unsigned code. In contrast to the PS3 jailbreak, currently PSGroove can't be used to illegally copy PS3 games.

Nagios sent me a reminder yesterday, which I finally got around to reading today, to update to the latest version of Nagios Core, 3.2.2. We were running 3.2.0, so we were a couple versions behind, so after browsing through the list of fixed bugs I thought it would be good to go ahead and upgrade. I had a meeting in fifteen minutes, and Nagios was actively monitoring servers in production. I considered for a moment waiting till after the meeting. After all, what if something went wrong during the upgrade, what if there was some unforeseen problem that caused disastrous results and caused me to miss the meeting? And then I remembered, this is Nagios. I did the upgrade, and made the meeting in time to get a cup of coffee on the way. This is how upgrades should work for everything.

My guide on how to make a webcam server has had a lot of feedback and so I decided to give two other methods to achieve it with two different software webcam-server and ZoneMinder Webcam-server is absolutely the easiest way to show on the net what is seen from your webcam, the software is very stable (I’ve just installed Ubuntu, and shows the date 2004) is based on Java and to make it work is enough to give these commands: #> aptitude install webcam-server #> export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so #> webcam-server Now point your browser at localhost:8888 and see a snapshot of that seen from the webcam.

ApacheCon 2010 is now open for registration. The three-day convention takes place in Atlanta at the Westin Peachtree hotel. Lots of speakers and informative sessions. There will be professional training sessions during the two days prior to the conference. Early bird special runs now to September 10.

As you might know Medfloss.org (formerly medfoss.apfelkraut.org) tries to provide a comprehensive and structured overview of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects for the health care domain. After the initial launch 6 months ago it recently welcomed the 200th project in its repository: the GPL-licensed iDART software - iDART is the abbreviation of "Intelligent Dispensing of Antiretroviral Treatment" and according to its authors addresses many of the challenges faced by public ART dispensing pharmacies in developing countries.

It was bound to happen. Google is now roping in the power of hardware acceleration to boost the performance of its Chrome browser. In a post on the Chromium blog late last week the Chromium developers announced that they would add GPU (graphics processing unit) support to future editions of the Chrome browser, bringing Google's application in line with other major browsers.

(São Paulo, Brazil: September 2, 2010) - The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced an upcoming blog to report on wider activities within the LPI community of Linux professionals, affiliates and training partners. The blog--"Community Corner"(http://www.lpi.org/communitycorner)--will feature commentary and regular contributions from Jon "maddog" Hall, a widely recognized mentor and leader in the programming community and a longtime and respected champion of Free and Open Source Software. Mr. Hall is also Executive Director of Linux International (http://www.li.org/).

Your editor was recently amused to encounter this ZDNet article on "Android's dirty little secret." According to that article, the openness of Android has led to an increase in the control held by handset manufacturers and wireless carriers and the fragmentation of the platform. The Open Handset Alliance is in a "shambles," and Android phones have undone all the gains won by that great standard bearer for openness and freedom - the iPhone. One might easily conclude that Android is just business as usual for the mobile telephony industry, but there are a few things worth contemplating here.

my first report from the OpenOffice.org 2010 conference in Budapest: Cool extensions, the power of OpenDocument, what Oracle thinks of OpenOffice and what Microsoft thinks of office files standards

A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the Beta version of the up-coming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system, due for release in October 10th, 2010.

In the previous article, A look inside a MySQL Daemon plugin, we were introduced to the MySQL Plugin API. It talked about the most simple plugin type—Daemon plugins. It starts with the basic structure of a plugin—what a plugin declaration should look like, what plugin types are, and so on. Then it described features common to all plugin types—initialization and de-initialization callbacks, status variables, and configuration system variables.

A personal information manager (often known as a PIM tool) is a type of collaborative software that can help you manage your life by offering personal organising functionality. This type of software enables you to more efficiently manage and plan your business and personal life by keeping track of contact information, appointments, tasks, diaries, to-do lists, and birthdays.

Many of the facts about Samsung's Galaxy Tab Android tablet were already available before IFA, but today's presentation at the consumer electronics fair in Berlin did offer a further few surprises: The 7 inch device includes a fully functional mobile phone and could, therefore, also be regarded as a giant smartphone. This also means that it meets the access criteria Google has stipulated for the Android Market – and that users can conveniently tap into a vast selection of apps, which is not the case with most of the other Android tablets currently available.

Samsung showed off its Galaxy Tab, an Android-powered iPad alternative at Germany's IFA 2010 trade show. The device features a 7-inch display, front-facing camera, 3G and is the first tablet to come loaded with Android 2.2 Froyo and Flash 10.1.

To me its apparent that trying to develop the Linux desktop marketplace using traditional ideas and avenues simply hasn't and isn't going to work. We've been waiting for a decade for the year of the Linux Desktop to happen. I think thats proof enough that using proprietary ideas to drive the Linux desktop market forward is not working.

Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

As browser competition continues to heat up, 2010 looks like the year when the market was repeatedly disrupted. Internet Explorer has not managed to gain share for a third month in a row. Firefox is leveling out while Chrome and Safari continue to grow. Opera? It's hanging on to relevance. Between July and August, Internet Explorer dropped 0.34 percent, a drop smaller than June's or July's gain. Firefox, meanwhile, went up 0.02 percent, Chrome gained 0.36 percent, Safari was up 0.07, and Opera dipped 0.08 percent.