Showing all newswire headlines

According to the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital blog, Oracle and Sun expect that the European Commission will approve the acquisition of Sun Microsystems some time this week. The report which cites sources close to both companies, comes as the 27th of January deadline for the Commission's decision approaches and suggests that the official announcement of the successful acquisition will be issued in early February.

Architectural Web site Arch Daily points to a design competition at Open Source House for individuals or teams to create a eco-friendly sustainable single-family house for a specifically designated spot in Ghana. The contest, which runs until May 15, 2010, encourages designers to "think big" and come up with ways their initial designs can be implemented on a larger scale.

This is our first Digital Camera, but from what I have heard there are many Linux compatible digital cameras, somewhere at Microsoft somebody just cringed.

At first glance, Red Hat’s biggest rival is Microsoft. But take a closer look and Red Hat seems to be equally concerned about two other fierce rivals. They are (1) Free Linux and (2) so-called low-cost Linux support offerings from Novell and Oracle. Here’s the story.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article on free games for Linux and thought it was time to write a bit more on the subject. Actually, I had a lot of fun doing the research for this article and telling my sons that I really was "working." I don't really play that many games, so when I do, there are a few things that I look for.

The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it's paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabrielle took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.

If you are an geeky user who keeps installing various software and updates then with the passage of time you will feel that your system is messed up. Here is what you need to do.

When I first started using Ubuntu some 3 years ago, I found it really hard to get applications similar to the ones I used in Windows. After browsing for a long time, I made this amazing discovery. You don't have to look for "similar" apps, you can have even better apps here in Ubuntu/Linux.

As free and open source software becomes more and more a part of mainstream computing, it is common to find large commercial organisations taking a big interest in FOSS projects, sometimes to the extent of taking over such projects.

This is the first chapter in my new cybersecurity eBook in which...

Slackware is the most stripped down and UNIX-like of Linux distributions and is designed to be a workhorse for developers or sysadmins, who do not want "to be met with GUI greeters, setup wizards, beginner-oriented defaults, and enabled-by-default automatic updates."

Via Technologies announced a 2.36 x 2.36-inch computer-on-module (COM) based on its new Mobile-ITX form factor. The Via Epia-T700 is built around a 1GHz Via Eden ULV processor with 512MB soldered DDR2 memory, and supports the development of ultra-compact embedded devices in medical, military, and in-vehicle applications, says the company.

Disney has announced that it has released the Ptex "Per-Face Texture Mapping" library as open source under a BSD license. The code, which was used for "virtually ever surface" on the animated feature film Bolt, has been integrated into Pixar's RenderMan Pro server. Ptex's major feature is that it removes the need to carry out manual assignment when "UV mapping" textures to remove seams and joins, a process which is often regarded as one of the more tedious parts of creating 3D animation.

Firefox has dropped version 3.7 from its roadmap and will roll out new features in the next few weeks together with 3.6.

Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and various Tier 1 vendors have extensive server product lines mostly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Enterprise Linux. There are more OEM options than ever; here is roundup of 5 distinctly different OEM Linux servers.

Alot of people ask me the easiest way to record their experiences while using Ubuntu. You can do this several ways but using an application named recordMyDesktop seems to be the most popular method. This video tutorial will show you how to install recordMyDesktop, create a video in .ogv format, and convert it to an .avi.

ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Ubuntu 9.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Over the past week there has been a lot of talk about the EXT4 file-system following the announcement that Google is migrating their EXT2 file-systems to EXT4. Their reasons for this transition to EXT4 are attributed to the easy migration process and Google engineers are pleased with this file-system's performance. However, as we mentioned in that news post last week and in many other articles over the past weeks and months, EXT4 is not as great of a contender as it was in the past, well, for some tests at least. The performance of the EXT4 file-system commonly goes down with new kernel releases and not up, as kernel developers continue to introduce new safeguards to address potential data loss problems that initially plagued some EXT4 users. For our latest EXT4 benchmarks we have numbers that show this file-system's performance using a vanilla 2.6.28 kernel (when EXT4 was marked as stable) and then every major kernel release up through the latest Linux 2.6.33 release candidate.

Moonlight was written in three weeks in June of 2007 by a group of Mono developers working round the clock to fulfil a promise made by Miguel de Icaza. Despite such heroics Moonlight continues to face resistance from the wider developer community...