Showing all newswire headlines

Mozilla Messaging has announced the official release of Thunderbird 3. Ars takes a hands-on look at the improvements in the new version—including tabbed messaging and enhanced search—and finds a lot to be excited about.

There is a hidden game in the Openoffice Spreadsheet program Calc, the game is an Easter Egg that let’s you play a simple version of Space Invaders, titled StarWars Galaxy, so if you are working with openoffice and you need a break, you know what to do ;).

D-Link unveiled its soon-to-be-released “Boxee Box” at Boxee’s preview of Boxee Beta in New York last night. Few details have been disclosed other than that it runs Boxee on Linux, provides HDMI and both analog and digital audio outputs, and hooks up to the Internet via either WiFi or Ethernet.

Mozilla has announced the availability of version 3 of its popular open source Thunderbird email and news client for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Mozilla Thunderbird 3 brings awesome features like:

Now that Google's Linux based ChromeOS has been fully revealed and is actually available for some machines, one thing appears clearly: ChromeOS is more like a Smartbook OS than a Netbook OS. Let's sum up what ChromeOS is about: it is the Chrome Browser as an operating system. Remember a few years ago when people said that the browser would become the OS? That's what Google did! Let's look at what this means...

Even the simplest project can quickly get out of hand if you don’t keep tabs on it. That’s why an application that can help you to deal with various aspects of managing your projects can prove indispensable…

This how to will allow you step by to configure a Postfix mail server with with virtual hosting. Virtual hosting means that you can add as many mail domains as you want and sub sequentially as many mailboxes for these domains as you want. Here we we use an LDAP backend for both the MTA (Postfix) and POP3/IMAP server (Dovecot), and a web based management interface. Optional in this how to is the use of Roundcube webmail and proftpd.

You’re confident your RFID passport is safe in its signal-blocking wallet as you pass through immigration. What you don’t know is that the man behind you is recording the data sent by your passport’s RFID chip as it is scanned.

Here is LWN's twelfth annual timeline of significant events in the Linux and free software world for the year. 2009 offered few surprises to those that have been following Linux and free software for as long as we have. As expected, there were new releases of many of the tools and underlying infrastructure that we use on a daily basis. There were also lawsuits over software patents, arguments over licensing, and various security flaws found and fixed. Distributions were packaged up and released, more phones and other devices with Linux and free software were sold, and so forth. All part of the march to "world domination". We look forward to 2010—and beyond.

How do you apply the principles behind open source to open hardware? It's not easy, but early examples are beginning to emerge, including not one but *two* open source car projects. As ever, a big problem is finding the right kind of licence.

Tomorrow will mark the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04, and while there is still a long journey ahead for this Long-Term Support release before it officially makes its debut in April, we could not pass up the opportunity to provide some early benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has already pulled in X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 and other updated graphics packages along with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel that it will be using in the final build, which already presents some core differences from the current stable release, Ubuntu 9.10.

I've been thinking the last few weeks about the evolution of the GPL violation. After ten years of being involved with GPL enforcement, it seems like a good time to think about how things have changed. Roughly, the typical GPL violation tracks almost directly the adoption and spread of Free Software. When I started finding GPL violations, it was in a day when Big Iron Unix was still king (although it was only a few years away from collapse), and the GNU tools were just becoming state of the art. Indeed, as a sysadmin, I typically took a proprietary Unix system, and built a /usr/local/ filled with the GNU tools, because I hated POSIX tools that didn't have all the GNU extensions.

Using open source software offers schools a unique opportunity to advance the information society that is fair and free, says Cenatic, Spain's resource centre on open source and open standards.

Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the design of objects whether 2D or 3D, real or virtual. It is heavily utilized in many applications, including animation, automotive, shipbuilding, aerospace industries, industrial and architectural design, prosthetics, and many others. Because of its enormous economic importance, CAD has been a major driving force for research in computational geometry, computer graphics (both hardware and software), and discrete differential geometry.

In the last decade, I've done plenty of formal research into corporate adoption of open source. For example, I designed a survey and wrote up the results of one research study about business open source use. So I can say authoritatively: At least as of that 2008 research, the major business executive barriers to FOSS adoption are product support, the awareness of available solutions (that is, vendors come calling with a sales pitch, but the CIO might not know an open source option is available), and lack of support by management (i.e. "the boss won't let us"). I've also written the Evans Data open source report for several years, so I know that developers' FOSS perceptions of what's important are very different than the murmurings on the deep-plush-carpeted executive floor.

A project that could bring an unofficial version of Google's Chrome OS to 64 bit computers has launched. Using the Chromium OS code that has been open sourced by Google, the ChromiumOS64 project allows people who like a little more RAM to consider the new operating system/browser hybrid concept from Google.

Symbio, a leader in next generation outsourced product development (OPD), today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the business operations of Helsinki-based Cubical Solutions, an established software engineering service company for the telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing industries. This acquisition adds market-leading specialization in open source software utilization and product development, strengthening Symbio's expertise in critical domain areas that enable rapid technology convergence between IT and telecom.

For many Linux desktop users, GNOME is their home. But it's a home that's in the process of a major renovation. In a session at the FUDcon Fedora Linux user and developer conference this week, contributors showed off some preliminary work for GNOME 3, the next major evolution of the GNOME platform. With GNOME 3, developers will be introducing a number of new concepts and technologies to the Linux desktop, including more advanced 3D as well as more tightly integrated messaging system.

Embedded specialist Wind River strives to win mobile network users with hardware compliance and its own Android branding.

As I’ve said before, I like Windows 7. In fact, I like the OS a lot. It reminds me a lot of the good ol’ NT4 days. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’ve fallen in love with Windows again because times are different and I enjoy a polyamorous existence where I use several different OSes. But Windows 7 has reminded me of the fact that when Windows is done right, it can be a cracking OS.