Showing all newswire headlines

In Canada, powerful actors want to make the Net more expensive, less open. [Canadians, let's start rock and rolling on this issue -- see http://openmedia.ca/ for additional info. - Barbara]

The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download. The Internet, January 25, 2011 - The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project. Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

VLC 1.1.6 is released, this new released comes with small features and fixing important bugs and a security issues.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see the year of the Linux Desktop or not, but it looks like 2011 is going to be the year of the Linux Tablet. The future success of Linux as a tablet and phone platform might not look as open and utopian as many supporters of free software would like, but it seems that it’s inevitable none the less.

Never let it be said that the Debian project does not listen. For some time there has been growing dissent about the presence of non-free binary blobs in the Debian GNU/Linux kernel. Identi.ca and other public arenas became almost hunting grounds for some of the more fanatical freedom advocates within the community. Recommendations for using gNewSense and other 100% free distributions became more prevalent as the concerns over the non-free Debian kernels grew. The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels will be available without the non-free blobs.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

The 3D powerhouse Blender is arguably the most complicated piece of desktop software in the open source world. It handles every part of the workflow used to create a CGI film or a 3D game: creating objects, rigging them to move, animating them, controlling lighting, rendering scenes, and even editing the resulting video. Each release packs in more new features than most people can understand without consulting a textbook (or two). One of the down sides, though, is that over the years Blender has developed the reputation of being difficult to learn. Fortunately, the latest release takes on that challenge head-first, and makes some major improvements.

Online advertising networks use cookies to recognise internet users and serve them tailored advertising. Users can defend against this practice by deleting cookies, not accepting cookies, or setting an opt-out cookie, which declares that they do not want their online activity to be tracked.

VLC is among the most popular open source video players. According to the VideoLAN project, the 1.1.5 release has had 58 million downloads. Now it's time for those 58 million downloaders to update to VLC 1.1.6, for some security, bug and stability fixes.

Fuduntu 14.8-3 update is now available as an update for existing Fuduntu users, and as downloadable media for new users interested in installing from scratch. This update brings the following changes to the Fuduntu Linux distribution.

A few times each month, I tire of the complexities of GNOME and KDE. Then I turn to a simpler, faster desktop for a couple of days or a week -- and that desktop, more often than not, is Xfce. No other desktop I’m aware of balances convenience and speed half so well.

Applications for Ubuntu/Linux are not at all in short supply. But picking the best from the rest is not an easy thing to do. There are a number of really good bit torrent clients for Ubuntu out there. Here we intend feature a collection of 5 really good bit torrent clients for Ubuntu which we think are among the best.

The Firefox 4 browser is edging closer to final release but still faces hurdles. Once the darling of the Internet digerati, the Firefox browser is still battling problems to issue a new release. Version 4 of the browser has suffered multiple setbacks and although it now looks likely to be released in February, the delays have caused Firefox to lose some of its shine.

Three well-known BSD clones are in their latest developmental cycles and have recently released test versions. FreeBSD is closing in on version 7.4 with a RC2, GhostBSD just released their 2.0 Beta 2, and PC-BSD 8.2 has seen its second release candidate as well.

LXer Feature: 23-Jan-2011

In this week's Roundup we have Glyn Moody in defense of hackers, LibreOffice keeps making waves, Xfce 4.8 is released, our own Paul Ferris explains how to be a catalyst for FOSS and just what is this 'Steve Jobs' dilemma Linux is supposed to have? Enjoy!

Amarok 2.4 codenamed "Slipstream" was released some days ago. Amarok has evolved a lot over the year and we had followed the Amarok evolution in its each and every step. Now with the release of Amarok 2.4 final, a lot has changed. Here is a quick preview.

This guide explains how to set up native ZFS on Ubuntu / Linux. It was tested with Linux 2.6.35-24-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP x86_64 GNU/Linux on Ubuntu 10.10 but should also work on Ubuntu 10.04.

Python is a high-level, object-oriented language with a comprehensive standard library. Typically, one can develop complex applications in Python very quickly compared to some other languages. Multimedia applications are used in a broad spectrum of fields. Writing applications that work with images, videos, and other sensory effects is great. Not every application gets to make full use of audio/visual effects, but a certain amount of multimedia makes any application very appealing.

CMU Sphinx is one of the most popular speech recognition applications for Linux and it can correctly capture words. it also gives the developers the ability to build speech systems, interact with voice and build something unique and useful.

Are you afraid that your system has been compromised by an unauthorized access? Have you got discovered abnormal network activities and/or do you suspect that your system has been infected by trojans or rootkit? Is this your nightmare? ;) No problem, there are some solutions which help system administrators to check their servers, so they can be more serene about security of their machines.

Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" and OpenBenchmarking.org are launching in late February from the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles during my talk about Making More Informed Linux Hardware Choices. However, for any Bavarians living near Munich, you may be able to get a sneak preview.