Showing all newswire headlines

A few months ago I stumbled across a screenshot utility called Shutter. I liked it. A lot. So I decided to give it some well deserved publicity. I wasn’t the only one. It has been been getting rave reviews and it will be or should be in everyone’s toolbox. Bog standard screenshot software has been available as bundled software in both Gnome and KDE desktops for ever. They’re good at what they do but they are limited to relatively simple tasks. If you want to do more serious, integrated stuff then Shutter’s the kiddie. The latest version of Shutter (0.80) takes the “serious stuff” to the next level by adding six new features to the Edit tool. Shutter’s screenshot-taking features alone make it worth installing but the additions for editing make it the software of choice. This article describes the latest tools. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Reports that Microsoft had to release the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPLv2 because they had violated the GPL have been rebutted by Microsoft and Vyatta. Vyatta had been referenced by reports as the source of the accusation.

The forthcoming standard for the object-oriented language C++ will not be released before 2010. It will also lack the planned 'concepts' mechanism. This is according to information in a Dr. Dobbs Journal article by C++'s inventor, Bjarne Stroustrup. Concepts have been "decoupled" – or in Stroustrup's words "yanked out" – by the ISO group responsible for the standard, Working Group 21.

khtml2png is a helpful tool for capturing an image of a webpage with ease. It's nice to use because it will get the entire length of the site, no matter whether it is fully visible in the browser. And, it sure beats shell scripting Firefox to open on a different display and capturing an image with Imagemagick, which is a royal pain in the butt. I embed this application in PHP scripts to create web design roundups over at my other blog. I was able to capture 75 minimal web designs without much hassle.

Over the last few years, various figures have been put forth as measures of Ubuntu’s desktop market share, with some sources contradicting themselves and most sources contradicting the other ones. This piece takes a look at different attempts to put a number on Ubuntu’s popularity, and explores the various shortcomings and ambiguities involved in all of them.

How can anyone make a living writing Free software? Why should a coder work for free? These questions, and others, are answered in this two-part series. Today we learn why Free and Open Source software are very important even to end users who are not coders.

In the dispute over bankruptcy-threatened SCO Group's legal claims, the company has submitted testimonyPDF in which it confirms having paid $100,000 to investor Steven Norris. According to the testimony, the money didn't actually come from Germany, but rather from its non-debtor Japanese subsidiary. The gift of personal funds from SCO boss Darl McBride is also mentioned. The payments to which IBM lawyers are objecting represent, according to the deposition, a baseless, sham argument, saying that "IBM and Novell are interested only in putting SCO out of business so it canot pursue its legal claims against them." SCO is in dispute with Novell and IBM over the copyright to Unix and over code allegedly illegally copied from Unix into Linux to which SCO claims it has copyright.

Let's get real, that's what it's all about. It's not because we all wear tin foil hats or that we're harmful to the community and should be expelled. It's because we don't like Mono. And we don't like Mono, because we don't trust Microsoft. And we don't trust Microsoft, because.. Well, do I really have to repeat the whole story again?

Microsoft released a set of Linux drivers for its Hyper-V software under the General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) not because of "perceived obligations" to that license but because it is the preferred license of the Linux community and would benefit both Microsoft customers and users of Linux, according to a company executive. In a statement by Microsoft Senior Director of Platform Strategy Sam Ramji posted to the company's Port 25 blog late Thursday, Microsoft stood by its original reasoning to release technology called the Linux Device Driver for Virtualization on Monday under the GPLv2. Microsoft had not previously released code under this open-source license and had, in fact, criticized it.

While nearly all of Intel's attention is focused on their newer LGA-1366 platform with the high-end Core i7 processors and then the forthcoming Core i5 series, there are still plenty of viable processors left for the LGA-775 motherboards. There are of course a number of different Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Core 2 Extreme CPUs on the market, but beyond that Intel's Celeron family does still exist. Most computer enthusiasts simply write off the Celeron products as being too slow, but among the newer Celeron parts there are even some dual-core processors. For a forthcoming article we had picked up an Intel Celeron E1400 for looking at the Linux video decoding performance on a slow system (similar to our HD Video Playback With A $20 CPU & $30 GPU On Linux article), but as we have never published performance results for a dual-core Celeron on Linux, we have decided to get those numbers out there today for those that are interested.

The creator of the C++ programming language brings us a new textbook in programming principles that could well become a classic tome. Read the review at Freesoftware Magazine.

One of the big problem of Linux is that it is difficult to estimate its market share. Web metrics give vastly different numbers based on the methodology used: from 2.11% for W3counter to 0.99% for Netstats. I thus propose a fun way to gauge the relative importance of Operating Systems: by Twibbon.

Screencasting software takes a series of screenshots of a running application, recording the user's actions, and creating a video file. The movies can be output in a variety of different formats such as Theora, Macromedia Flash (SWF), AVI, and Flash Video (FLV).

This tutorial covers the setup of PHP 5.3.0/Lighttpd on Debian (Lenny) with imap, mysql, mysqli, sqlite3, ImageMagick and mycrypt support.

While my name is on some of these, understand that these children associate what they have with the person they saw place it there...they have no idea that it was you that put those computers into their homes...it was you that opened the doors to their futures...that gave them choices they may never have had otherwise. I've made sure the staff passes that along when the opportunity presents itself. Just so you know. I want you to have these:

Intel's Wind River subsidiary is now the leader in embedded Linux, at least when it comes to revenues, according to the market analysis by VDC Research. Wind River, which was acquired in June by Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) for $884 million, has more than 30 percent of the total market revenue for embedded Linux, VDC found. Rival MontaVista Linux sees another story.

Desktop Activities is a desktop usability concept that allows you to have multiple style and other settings for your desktop or desktops. There you have it, my attempt at a one sentence definition. Of course, that only pleases people who write dictionaries and encyclopedias. As for us, regular users, what we like to see are tutorials that actually show us what we are talking about. So, I will try to do that now for you as well. For this tutorial, I will be using KDE 4.2.4 as found in Fedora 11.

During the final days of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the fourth edition of Akademy-es was held in the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Akademy-es is the sister of Akademy aimed at Spanish speakers. Akademy-es started on Friday 10th with a talk by Cenatic, a governmental foundation with the aim to promote and improve knowledge of free software in public administrations, companies, universities, etc. For that, the foundation is creating and developing different courses both online and at site based on free software. They want to create a specific course for the KDE desktop, so they asked for collaboration from KDE España, the Spanish organisation to support and promote the KDE project in Spain. The president of Cenatic showed his interest in the project and this collaboration will be starting in the coming months.

Using Bash Shell Scripts for Twitter Updates and Information Posting These scripts are used to both send tweets from the command line and to automate information to your Twitter account. You can use your Linux server or desktop to help present useful information to your account, not Spam. This creates a way to present tips, FAQ, and other information to people as they follow your account.

The development of the next version of Ubuntu continues with the third alpha release of Karmic Koala. According to the announcement, this alpha contains software updates which "are now ready for large scale testing". Alpha 3 is one of a number of milestones which the Ubuntu developers release as they progress towards the final October release of Ubuntu 9.10.