Showing all newswire headlines

In which the world ends - or doesn't. You'll just have to read it to find out.

Every now and then, I need to fill a blank OpenOffice.org Writer document with dummy text. While OpenOffice.org comes with a built-in feature that allows you to do that (type dt and press the F3 function key), it generates only one paragraph at a time and doesn't allow you to specify your own dummy text.

The Sun PDF Import Extension is one of the most popular OpenOffice.org extensions ever created. For the last two years, it has been near the top of the list of most popular downloads on the OpenOffice.org Extensions site -- and no wonder, considering that it is a free replacement for Adobe Acrobat, which is currently priced at $449US. However, the extension does have some quirks and limitations that you have to learn to work around.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is offering live streaming of many of the keynotes and conference sessions from its LinuxCon conference, being held this week in Boston.

Thanks to DoctorMos it is possible to mount google docs as a folder on your computer using gdocs mount GTK. Now instead of uploading your documents to google docs using a web browser, you can edit them in your favorite word processor and save them to a virtual drive in Nautilus.

In the past few years we’ve seen a lot of hardware-based innovation (or at the very least expansion). New products and markets have arisen built around hardware and its use. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and gaming systems are all examples of markets that have expanded and some if not most of the products make use of free software. This is great but why does it seem to be that the free-software products are second-generation, playing catch up. Where is the device innovation driven by free software? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

The original architects of the Internet got the big things right. By making the network open, they enabled the greatest exchange of ideas in history. By making the Internet scalable, they enabled explosive innovation in the infrastructure. It is imperative that we find ways to protect the future openness of the Internet and encourage the rapid deployment of broadband. Verizon and Google are pleased to discuss the principled compromise our companies have developed over the last year concerning the thorny issue of “network neutrality.”

The Federal Communications Commission has ended its closed-door negotiations with a small group of players on opposing sides of the net neutrality debate, talks that had been aimed at finding a consensus on rules for the transmission of Internet traffic.

[Indirectly related, of interest and prior discussion here though -Az]

Many Android Developers (and users) get confused that why a certain app isn’t showing up on the new Xperia X10 Mini (and few other) phones. This happens even if they support all android versions and have published their apps for all countries, so that shouldn’t be the issue. I came across this as well when few people mentioned that they couldn’t find my app Wi-Fi Keep Alive in the X10 mini marketplace. On some digging into the android docs and the X10 mini specs, I found the issue and here is the solution

If you haven’t heard, Google have announced they are pulling the plug on Wave, their interactive, real-time communication product. It’s a shame but I can understand why. It never really took off. Google have blamed lack of user adoption for the poor showing, and maybe that’s true, but in the end if people aren’t using your product: it’s not their fault - it’s yours. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

I don't know if that is a good news or bad news, but Ubuntu is going to be more popular than Linux itself according to some statistics via Google Trends and Google Insight.

This guide shows how you can upgrade your OpenSUSE 11.2 desktop and server installations to OpenSUSE 11.3.

In a country where the legal system is based on precedents, a judge's recent decision just may make the use of Linux a whole lot easier. From nearly the beginnings of entertainment DVDs, Linux users in certain countries either had to break the law to watch their legally obtained media on their computer, boot a Windows system, or not use them. Many chose to break the law and install decryption software. Perhaps those days are over.

The Dell Streak. Is it a tablet, or is a smartphone? Get your answers on a postcard, but not before checking out Linux User & Developer's review…

LXer Feature: 09-Aug-2010

A roundup of the big stories hitting our newswire from the previous week.

I've done between 60 and 200 (who can remember?) installations of Linux and the various BSD operating systems over the past few years, and while there's plenty of discussion about how hard it is to install a Linux distribution, nobody talks much about how easy/hard/frustrating it is to install Windows. I've never done it myself — install Windows, that is. Over the years I've upgraded a few boxes from Windows 98 or Me to Windows 2000, I've put a few Service Packs into 2000 and XP, but I've never done the whole thing — put Windows on a bare drive.

OpenVZ allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, known as containers, Virtual Private Servers (VPSs), or Virtual Environments (VEs). It is similar to FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones. In this tutorial you will see how to install OpenVZ in Centos, how to create a VPS or containers and how to install Vtonf- another control panel for OpenVZ.

The Phoronix Test Suite is one of the few mainstream projects that uses PHP-GTK, a PHP5 extension that provides bindings for the GTK+ tool-kit on the desktop, for its user-interface. Unfortunately, PHP5-GTK packages can be found in very few distribution repositories even while the Phoronix Test Suite can be found in most any modern distribution.

If you want to make your windows 7 Machines look like ubuntu you need to follow this procedure. Start with the visual style, if you haven’t already patch uxtheme.dll, this will remove the limitations on your system, in order to install new themes. Then download the Human Visual Style

There are many factors that help to make a game a classic. It could be the storyline, the graphics, the engine, the controls, even the different game modes. The folk at LinuxLinks have been obsessed with playing games over the past few months scouring as many titles as possible to find more great games for your enjoyment. Of course, in the final analysis it is the gamer which decides whether a game is a classic.