Showing all newswire headlines

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Rob Savoye has been engaged in numerous projects, but in his work on Gnash, a free implementation of the Adobe Flash Player, he found a hard nut to crack: how to decipher the protocol details of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) it uses. He has now presented his solution at the FOSDEM '09 conference in Belgium.

Just as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt hinted over the past few months, Google is moving from managing the world’s information to managing your personal energy data. On Monday night Google tells us it is developing an online tool called “PowerMeter” that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. For now Google is testing the web-based software with Google employees, but the search engine giant is looking to partner with utilities and smart energy device makers and will eventually roll out the tool to consumers.

More than a year ago, the netbooks took the hardware world by assault. What at first looked like an innocent mini laptop, turned out to be the best thing that happened to hardware providers in the last five years. It all started with Asus and their EeePC, and now there isn't a big name in the industry that hasn't either already started a line of netbooks or planning to launch one soon. From Acer to Dell to more underground firms, companies try to offer the cheapest and smallest laptops, providing at the same time functionality needed by today's standards.

Colin Turner is a dedicated Free Software activist and Fellowship member, working as a scientist and teacher at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. He has been advocating Free Software in schools and universities for many years and generously shared some of his experiences with us in this fourth instalment of our Fellowship interview series.

How to install ATI fglrx driver in debian. Fglrx is a proprietary, Linux binary-only driver for ATI graphic chips with support for 3D acceleration..This tutorial will explain How to install ATI fglrx driver in debian.

The vast majority of questions I get about combining GPL and proprietary software concern embedded systems, since Linux is a component of so many consumer products these days. It's impressive, for instance, to look at Sony's web site where they fulfill their GPL obligation, and see the dozens of TV models and many other products that contain Linux. So, this discussion concerns primarily embedded systems. (Desktop and server applications really only have one path to keeping Open Source and proprietary products separate: make them physically separate programs, each with its own license. Fortunately, most of the libraries on a Linux system are under licenses that allow them to be combined with a proprietary program without trouble.)

This weekend, I decided to check out GNOME Do’s latest 0.8 release with the new Docky task bar. As someone who has managed to avoid all the launcher hype bestowed on programs such as Launch Box, Quicksilver and Ubiquity, I have to admit that in the beginning, I was more than a little bit skeptical about GNOME Do. How useful can this program really be?

Work can be stressful. Take some time off and tune a NIC ;) Hope you're having an enjoyable Friday and are looking forward to getting out of the office just as badly as I am. It's a long story, but I can't even begin to explain how close I came to just snapping like a twig and going incendiary on my cubicle, the office, the parking lot, the CostCo down the street and pretty much the entire business district.

Virt-Manager (Virtual Machine Manager) is a graphical interface for managing KVM and Xen guests on the local and also on remote systems. You can use it to start, stop, pause, create, and delete guests, and you can connect to the guests using the graphical console. This guide shows how you can use it to manage KVM guests on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.

Install GLPI (IT and asset Managemet Software) from Ubuntu Repositories.GLPI stands for “Gestionnaire libre de parc informatique”, GLPI is the Information Resource Manager with an additional Administration- Interface. You can use it to build up a database with an inventory for your company (computer, software, printers…). It has enhanced functions to make the daily life for the administrators easier, like a job tracking system with mail-notification and methods to build a database with basic information about your network-topology.

Earlier this week Monty Widenius, original developer of the MySQL database, announced that he was leaving Sun Microsystems, the current owner of MySQL. Widenius originally announced his intention to leave Sun last year following a dispute with the company over the MySQL 5.1 release. Schalk Neethling of Open Source Release Feed spoke to Widenius and asked him what exactly happened.

Passwords are the basis for much of the security on the Internet. Over the years intruders have exposed thousands of account passwords on various sites. Analysis of these passwords reveal that users have a very bad understanding of their importance. This article explains how to create strong passwords, manage them, and keep them secure.

Each time I try a new Ubuntu release I notice nagging issues related to product quality. I wonder: Will Canonical need to change its approach and use a development schedule more like Microsoft's? Here's why I'm concerned

The European Commission (EC) has granted Mozilla, the open-source collaboration behind the Firefox Web browser, the right to join its antitrust case against Microsoft, a spokesman said Monday. The Commission, Europe's top antitrust authority, charged Microsoft last month with distorting competition in the market for Web browsers by bundling in its Internet Explorer (IE) browser with the Windows operating system. If the charges stick, then Microsoft could be forced to change the way it distributes IE, as well as pay a fine for monopoly abuse.

Linux, a mere tool? Blasphemy! Someone commented on one of my posts the other day, stating that Linux is a tool and not a religion. Can this be true? I would hate to think that for the past 15 years that I've invested in Linux, it would turn out that Linux is merely a tool, a--dare I say it--a monkey wrench?

The next version of the LiMo Linux-based mobile platform is getting closer to launch, and a number of operators are promising handsets during 2009, the LiMo Foundation said today. All the components that make up Release 2 have been delivered on time by the contributing members, according to the foundation. The new version will provide better multimedia support, location-based services, device management and enhanced security.

One of the distinctive — and perhaps, most successful — aspects of the One Laptop Per Child Program is the level to which individuals have been able to effect change on a global scale. The project's Open Source offerings are, of course, a prime example of this, but so too are the financial offerings that have put the program's product in the hands of some half-million users. The era of individual-based change is coming to an end, however, as an email leaked last week has revealed the end of the program's small-scale giving, known — ironically enough — as "Change the World."

Buried deep inside a recent interview with Linus Torvalds was the revelation that he had moved away from KDE and back to GNOME—which he famously abandoned in 2005. The cause of that switch was the problems he had with KDE 4.0, which seems to be a popular reaction to that release. Various media outlets, Slashdot in particular, elevated Torvalds's switch to the headline of the interview. That led, of course, to some loud complaints from the KDE community, but also a much more thoughtful response from KDE project lead Aaron Seigo. While it is somewhat interesting to know Torvalds's choice for his desktop, there are other, more important issues that stem from the controversy.

Welcome to this year's second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include a release update, Debian Summer of Code 08: Where are they now? Dedicating Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" to Thiemo "ths" Seufer, Open Source study conducted by Heise Open and much more.