Showing all newswire headlines

Gerry Carr of Canonical made the announcement on the Canonical Blog yesterday stating, "It’s with some regret that we are announcing the end of the ShipIt Programme and the CD distributor programme."

After a lengthy public beta period, Mozilla has finally released version 4 of its popular web browser. Linux User kicks Firefox 4’s tyres and peek under the bonnet to find out whether it was worth the wait…

Novell has renewed its efforts in the mobile arena by today announcing the availability of Mono for Android, a set of tools for developing .NET applications for the Android platform using Microsoft Visual Studio. Following the Mono Project's core tenet of making Microsoft .NET applications capable of running cross-platform, Novell says that it is now enabling Visual Studio, .NET, and C# developers to utilize a common code base to create applications for the industry's most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based phones and tablets, Apple iPad, Apple iPod Touch, and Apple iPhone.

Charles H. Schulz answers some questions about LibreOffice, the Document Foundation and their present and future.

The MeeGo project released a pre-alpha version of its promised Tablet User Experience (UX), officially opening up development for the UI layer. Based on MeeGo v1.2 core and Linux 2.6.37, the preview version includes a touch-optimized user interface for tablets, as well as a new panel UI concept and a suite of built-in browser, personal information management, and media playback apps....

With all the noise about which OS is a better bet for developers, it's hard to know what's right. But be watchful for FUD as you make your decision because there appears to be a lot of it around these days.

"In the face of constant change, both in software technology itself and in people's attitudes toward it, long-term software projects need to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. I'm encouraged to see the GNOME community taking up this challenge, responding to the evolving needs of users and questioning the status quo," says Matt Zimmerman, Canonical CTO.

After five years of planning and design, GNOME 3.0 has been officially released.

Canonical, through Gerry Carr, announced last evening (April 5th) that it will no longer distribute free CDs with the Ubuntu operating system, via the ShipIt Programme.

I like a lot of KDE applications, but they were starting to slow down on my GNOME system. Plus, Gloobus Preview is awesome.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the April 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Using a for loop to examine a series of IP Addresses to use in a firewall script to block Zombie networks.

If you've been following the Gnome Shell development, you probably know that it doesn't provide a GUI tool to tweak some basic settings like changing the GTK, Gnome Shell theme or icon theme, re-enable the minimize and maximize buttons, and so on. For this reason, John Stowers has created "Gnome Tweak Tool", a 'power user' application you can use to tweak Gnome 3. But I think this tool will become very popular for any Gnome 3 user and not just power users considering how useful it already is. Read on!

Try-before-you-don't-buy moves to cloud Say goodbye to Ubuntu on CD. Canonical is killing the free distribution of its Linux on disc, while ramping up cloud trials for penguin-curious Windows fans.…

I just listened to this. It's all about rethinking our "relationship" with services such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like -- and what we can do about it to reclaim our freedom from a technological standpoint.

Who'd have predicted that overpriced slivers of silicon, covered in oleophobic glass trying its best to repel your sticky fingers, would become the first great technological innovation of the 21st century? Most of us thought this would happen decades ago. We were promised by those mouldy second-hand sci-fi books of our youth, and I've since wasted far too much time and money pretending the time has already come.

Many computer-aided design (CAD) users in the Linux community were thrilled recently with the beta release of DraftSight, a freeware (meaning zero-cost-but-proprietary) CAD package for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. DraftSight's creator, Dassault Systèmes, is a well-known CAD shop most famous for its Windows product SolidWorks. Although this new app is not open source, it is the first professional-level package available for free on Linux that can read and write the industry-standard .DWG file format. Free software CAD still has a long way to go, but for now DraftSight offers Linux users a rare glimmer of hope.

US market researcher comScore reports that 69.5 million US citizens own a smartphone, and that one third of these phones run Google's open source Android mobile operating system. On the popularity scale, RIM and Apple are next with 29% and 25% of users, leaving Microsoft (8%) and Palm (3%) far behind. According to market researcher Nielsen, the US sales figures for Android phones have already been above those for RIM and Apple since July 2010, but this is the first time that Android is also leading in terms of devices in use. comScore said that last November, RIM was in the lead with 34%, followed by Android and Apple with an almost identical share each of 25% of users.

Booting a computer is always more complex than one wants to think. On the PC side, it looks as if BIOS finally is retired and replaced by EFI (I wonder which was the last OS to use BIOS for anything that just loading a secondary bootloader). On Mac, EFI has been around for a while. On embedded Linux systems, however, u-boot has been a big player for a long time.

The Arduino has become a white-hot topic these days by granting the ability to allow anyone with a computer, a 30-dollar Arduino, and an incentive to route electrons through sensors and actuators and make them do interesting things. The latest book to make it to this topical pile-on is technologist Michael Margolis' Arduino Cookbook. Does it have the essential recipes to satisfy the discerning palettes of Arduino enthusiasts? Read on to find out.