Showing all newswire headlines

When we say that Linux is UNIX-like, what are we saying? At my college, we have a course that is named 'an introduction to UNIX using Linux'. All over I hear people use the phrase 'UNIX/Linux' when referring to UNIX-style systems. It is somewhat hilarious to me, as Linux and the surrounding community have, for the most part, left the UNIX philosophy behind.

LXer Feature: 28-Nov-2009

The idea is to store ones files on a cloud (Ubuntu One), so that they remain private, using encryption, but so that they can be transparently uploaded and downloaded and accessed, as if they are unencrypted files.

One of the frustrating things about learning how to program is that you have to start somewhere. I know there's no way of avoiding this, but when you learn your first programming language, you are also learning the basic structure of how to program in general. It's easy to get mixed up at this stage and lost in the details of a particular language, losing sight of the overall goal.

Desktop astronomy has become more accessible over the last few years as hardware and software have come down in price. For an outlay not much greater than a top of the range PC it is possible to put together a CCD powered telescope that is more than adequate for hunting comets or prospecting for asteroids, which are still popular pastimes among amateur astronomers. This optical hardware can be augmented by a substantial range of free software to process the raw images and guide amateur astronomers on where to look and what to see...

During a planning session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week, a decision emerged to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision has generated a bit of controversy, it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users. As a participant who attended the session in person, I want to shed some light on how and why the decision was made.

Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.6 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that's only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. The latest release includes several bug fixes, changes and updates.

Drop your bags, grab a drink, and grab the XP CD—it's time for the holiday ritual of fixing up your relatives' computer. Here are some tips and downloads to keep handy while you're cursing all the auto-starting cr@pware. For this guide, we're going to do a bit of assuming. We're assuming the relative with the busted computer is running a Windows system, and has an internet connection that works when the computer does. We're assuming all the physical pieces of the computer work—hard drive, memory, disc drives, and anything else that's crucial. We'll also assume the computer's in one of two states: Failing to boot and needing an OS re-installation, laden with unnecessary system tray/startup applications and/or spy/mal/ad-ware, or just needing a little optimization.

Ever since the Ubuntu One cloud service played an important role in Ubuntu 10.04, a new prototype of a KDE client has become available. A port to Fedora is also in the works.

If you just can't get away from email over the holidays, you can at least help test the release candidate for Thunderbird 3.0. The Mozilla folks released Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 on Tuesday with more than 100 changes in the release. It's been a long time in coming, the first release in the 2.0 series was back in 2007. But Thunderbird 3.0 looks like it might be worth the wait when the final is released.

Wind River and Kontron announced a global, multi-year agreement under which the embedded system manufacturer will distribute Wind River's VxWorks and Wind River Linux distributions. The agreement is expected to extend software and service offerings across a range of industries, says Wind River.

Even though Ubuntu Netbook Remix is already somewhat optimized, I don't like how some things work and also there is room for a lot more optimizations. I would like to share with you these optimizations, all with screen real estate and low power consumption in mind. A part of this article is for EeePC only, but most work on any netbook!

n this tutorial by Jonathan Williamson, we are going to examine the process behind creating a text-based logo in Blender. We will be looking at some modeling techniques mixed with several modifiers to create a background for the logo, and then we will move on to creating the actual text. Following that we will set up the lighting and render settings to produce our final image.

I won't go into every detail and feature because those have been covered ad nauseum already, including the fact that it has by far the best web browser(s) and the best multi-tasking experience of any comparable device out there right now. I will only focus on some of the features that are unique to the N900 and make it a real standout, and which, if any, could be considered the N900's “ killer feature”.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 9.10 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Chrome OS is Google's a direct attack against bitter rival Microsoft, but this time it may have bitten off more than it can chew.

OOo4Kids is a fork of OpenOffice that can run in much less RAM and has a much simpler user interface. This is an interview to one of the developers

Google's Android operating system is on track to slay all other mobile operating system, with one possible exception.

Computing’s greatest accomplishment of this decade will likely go unremarked in the popular press. I call it the “death of the black box EULA.” (Picture from the blog Fortunes Pawn Luncheonette, December 2007.) Free software wounded it in the early 1990s. The Internet stabbed it again. But it was open source, in this decade, that struck the fatal blow.

One early spring day as we were walking home from the bakery on the corner, we passed by a neighbor and struck up a conversation. He complained about his desktop being constantly attacked by viruses. We suggested Ubuntu. A professional man in his 50s, he said he wanted to try installing a Linux distribution on his desktop but that, “it looks too complicated. I probably couldn’t install Ubuntu. I don’t want the hassle.” My little five year old daughter had been snuggled in my arms while I was talking to this neighbor. She had been listening closely. When we got home, she said, “Mom, I can install Ubuntu. I bet I can. Can I try? Can I try?”

[A few weeks old, but waaay too good not to post -- Sander]

There's a provocatively titled article by Robert Strohmeyer over at PC World that professes "The Future of Linux is Google". But let's be honest though. Without Linux, Google might not have grown into the powerhouse you see today. I'm not saying it wouldn't have been a successful company, just not as successful. Let me explain.