Showing all newswire headlines

By using my Network Monitoring Appliance we noticed a link in MRTG always under heavy load. On this link a lot of different traffic aggregates, so we decided to analyze of what quantities of protocols and therefore applications the cumulative traffic consists.

Horizons Regional Council "would be remiss not to investigate alternatives" to Microsoft on the desktop, as it has a responsibility to the ratepayers that fund it to spend their money wisely, says William Gordon, IT team leader at the council.

DotNetNuke, which makes an open source content management system, seems to be gaining traction with channel partners. The company, which supports Microsoft .NET environments, has gone from zero to about 800 software partners in the past year. Here's how.

The 2010 edition of linux.conf.au was held on January 18 to 22 in Wellington, New Zealand. A number of the talks from this event have been covered elsewhere on LWN, with more to come; this article will talk about several other sessions and your editor's impressions of the conference as a whole. In brief: it was a highly successful event which easily lived up to the high standards set by LCA.

The Gloobus devs have been working on a Gloobus Flow integration with Nautilus with looks amazing! This tutorial will explain how to install it in Ubuntu (Clutter, Gloobus Flow and a patched Nautilus).

Announced today the release of Openoffice3.2 RC5, this is the 5TH release candidate of openoffice.org3.2 and the first RC under Oracle logo. The final release of Openoffice 3.2 was planned for XX January 2010.

LXer Feature: 05-Feb-2010

Tonight FOSDEM 2010 starts with the beer event, and tomorrow the main conference starts. It's held again at the University 'ULB' in Brussels south-east (near the embassies) in Belgium.

Just like last year, LXer will be there. I will try to go both days to cover some talks for you. The schedule promises some interesting talks like that of Greg Koah Hartman, another talk about the RepRap 'cheap' 3D printer that prints its own parts. There's also a Mozilla-room, a distro-room, an embedded room. a KDE and a Gnome room, the Drupal room, the 20-minute Lightning talks which could be about anything and many more.

Registration is open to the public for Texas Linux Fest 2010, to be held at the Monarch Event Center in Austin Texas.

Nokia, the new steward of Qt, and Linux kernel contributor, says it has has completed the largest transition from proprietary code to open source in software history.

Markdown is a formatting "language"1 like HTML that you can use to specify the final appearance of text. When you use a "word processor" like Microsoft Word or Openoffice.org Writer, the text you generate is "marked up" (or "marked down" as it were) with formatting codes that determine how the text looks on a screen or when printed out. If you were to look inside a PDF file you would find commands that do this as well. And, a web page is rendered properly in your browser because of formatting codes in HTML. (If you want to see what the HTML guts of this web page look like and you are using Firefox, just hit ctrl-U and a window with the raw HTML coding will pop up and amaze you.)

(Toronto, Canada: February 4, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) issued a call for volunteers to assist in the development of its world leading Linux certification program (http://www.lpi.org). Volunteers are sought for participation in a Job Task Analysis (JTA) survey for the organization's new specialty exam LPI-304 (High Availability and Virtualization).

One of the things I admire about the FLOSS community is the willingness to dig in and tackle problems facing a project, whether they're technical, structural (hosting, etc.), governance, licensing, and so on. But it would occasionally be a better idea to try to recruit expertise from the outside than to try to re-invent the wheel inside each project. Dave Neary writes about efforts in the GNOME project to raise money. Neary focuses on fund-raising in particular, something that community projects often struggle with.

When we last reviewed Linux Mint, it received high marks for usability and productivity. Does the new release also rate highly? Paul Ferrill takes it for a test drive to find out.

Backing up data can be difficult, especially when you only want to copy files that changed since the last backup. TimeVault is a backup utility for Ubuntu that addresses these problems.

After the program is finished searching and comparing between DNS it will give you the results including the fastest and nearest DNS in your area.

MySQL founder Monty Widenius, who left Sun Microsystems early last year, remained very vocal throughout the long machinations leading up to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, even mounting a letter writing campaign. With the Sun acquisition going forward, we reached out to Monty for an interview and he was kind enough to share his thoughts with us. In this second part of this two-part interview he adds to his thoughts on the Oracle acquisition of Sun, and more.

Palm hits the gas pedal: with a six-figure monetary award for the most downloaded webOS applications the California company wants to heat up the app development market.

Every few weeks, I like to browse the OpenOffice.org Extensions site to see what is available, and what people are using. New extensions that are both useful and well-designed seem to be getting few and far between. However, if you search patiently, you can still find extensions worth trying. Below, in no particular order, are the extensions that I have explored in the past couple of months. None radically transform the office suite, and some work better than others, but all of them show some aspect of what can be done or needs to be done to make OpenOffice.org more efficient or convenient.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft for a "System Information API" specifies JavaScript functions for accessing the battery, CPU, sensors and other hardware characteristics of a device. For this purpose, the window.navigator object's SystemInfo interface has to implement the get, set and watch methods. set can only be applied to some screen properties such as brightness and orientation, while all other hardware properties are marked as readonly. watch is used for monitoring readings, for example those of a heat sensor.

Google has pissed off some powerful people of late, but none so much as the CEO of Apple. Jobs is unhappy about the Nexus One and gunning for Google. Could Google live to regret the day it decided to go into the phone business?