Showing all newswire headlines

xmonad on the official website there is a phrase that strikes you and takes you to devour each page of the documentation or makes you close in a flash, the browser tab : “In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows.” If you recognize yourself in this sentence xmonad is for you.

MacPup 520 is a light weight distribution that is only 170 Megabytes in size (ISO) and can run entirely on RAM and yet has an attractive interface somewhat inspired by Mac OS X and is sleek and lightweight based on Enlightenment.

Now that the first KDE SC 4.7 beta is available, Martin Gräßlin, the lead developer of the KWin, has blogged about some of the underlying improvements made to the compositing window manager for KDE during this development cycle. Of course, most Phoronix graphics junkies will already know what's changed based upon previous articles, but here's an overview for those not caught up to speed...

Determinism in this sense means that a given action will occur within a fixed time interval, such as delivery of a stock quotation within some number of microseconds. Historically, Java has not been used to fill that role, because of some early design decisions in the platform. However, new options and new technologies are enabling IT organizations to use Java for both standard business needs and situations where deterministic, real-time requirements must be met.

I am not averse to changes. I like experimenting with new applications and features every now and then. I have no problem with that. But that is not the case with majority of Computer users out there. For them, Computer is just a tool to get things done in a much faster and efficient manner. The sooner Canonical realize this, the better.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based navigation satellite system consisting of a network of satellites which provide positioning, navigation, and timing services in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth.

I use Twitter quite a lot. For the longest time, I used Web-based Twitter clients, clients for my smartphone, or browser extensions to interact with my Twitter account. Why? The desktop clients for Linux left me feeling cold. They either did too much or too little, and just weren’t satisfying overall. One client that does come close to being everything that I need is Turpial. Written in Python, Turpial is fast and easy to use. And it does just enough – it doesn’t pack too many features, but it’s not bare bones either. Let’s take a look at how to tweet using Turpial.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, for an wide-ranging, hour-long conversation while at Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest. In his opening talk, Shuttleworth said that he wanted to "make the case" for contributor agreements, which is something he had not been successful in doing previously. In order to do that, he outlined a rather different vision than he has described before of how to increase Linux and free software adoption, particularly on the desktop, in order to reach his goal of 200 million Ubuntu users in the next four years. While some readers may not agree with various parts of that vision, it is definitely worth understanding Shuttleworth's thinking here.

The Mint project released the final Linux Mint 11, which is based on Ubuntu 11.04, but skips over the Unity and GNOME 3 desktops in favor of GNOME 2.32.1. Linux Mint 11 offers UI updates to the Software Manager and Update Manager, while also speeding the latter, and supplies new default apps in LibreOffice, Banshee, and gThumb, says the project....

When Attachmate acquired Novell and its SUSE Linux business, The VAR Guy openly wondered if Attachmate was committed to owning and growing Novell’s SUSE Linux organization. Now, Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn has offered a strong, clear commitment to the SUSE Linux business. Here’s the update.

The goal of the BareMetal project, which includes a stripped-down bootloader and a cluster computing platform is to get away from the inefficient obfuscated machine code generated by higher level languages like C/C++ and Java. By writing the OS in assembly, runtime speeds are increased, and there’s very little overhead for when every clock cycle counts.

Intel will respond to falling netbook sales by slashing the price of its upcoming "Cedar Trail" Atoms, bringing the cost of complete devices below $200, reports say. The 1.86GHz Atom N2800 and 1.6GHz Atom N2600 will both sport dual cores, while TDPs will be 3.5 and 6.5 Watts, respectively....

This week, the Commit Digest includes a featured article about Gluon, the free platform for creating and distributing games. Also in this week's KDE Commit-Digest: First implementation of a user secret agent in NetworkManagement along with further work on NM-0.9 support Better guessing of zoom levels and an offline address search database generator in Marble read more

After trying Gnome (S)hell for the first time I was very optimistic, I thought a good future lies ahead but no longer.

Looking a little bit more into Gnome (S)hell I have become very annoyed at the truth. The truth being Gnome (S)hell is designed for the mentally impaired.

Here is the proof.

Zero bugs is impossible, and that is a philosophical discussion. If you look through your current list of bugs, nearly every one looks scary to me and important to someone. You currently have 2,800 active bugs (http://bit.ly/LinuxBugs) The last time looked, I found the median age was 10 months. In general, bugs should be fixed in the next release and so therefore 3 months.

Alternative LibreOffice splash screens. If you don't like the default LibreOffice splash screen or if you just want to try something new, here is a collection of 4 LibreOffice splash screens for Ubuntu with installation instructions.

Still bummed about Microsoft buying Skype? Yeah, me too. Looking for a credible open source alternative. Yeah, me too.

Google TV is a flop so far. Consumers don't seem to care, the TV networks don't like it and most big gadget manufacturers haven't started selling it yet.

But Google TV is not dead yet.

Miro is an open source music / video player and converter that features an integrated BitTorrent client, podcast support and many other interesting features. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac.

The new Fedora 15 is released and people start to really get a feel of the new Gnome shell 3.0. But not the developers as they are working hard on the next major version 3.2 of the redesigned desktop. One of the changes is that there could be a world clock comes to gnome shell. One of the Google summer of coders this year, a person called ‘Stéphane Maniaci’ is working on improving the current incarnation of the clock menu. The new clock is supposedly will have capabilities to display times from different locations.