Showing all newswire headlines

Literally expanded, it stands for Long Term Support. Yeah right, but what does it actually mean. Does it mean I’ll keep getting updates till eternity or what? The explanation is quite simple really.

Eucalyptus is an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon's EC2, using the Amazon command-line tools directly. Now RightScale, a leader in cloud computing management and support, has announced a partnership with the Eucalyptus team at U.C. Santa Barbara to foster cloud computing research, experimentation and adoption.

If you accidentally mangle your boot record and render your system unbootable, don't reinstall your operating system. Paul Ferrill shows how to rescue a non-booting computer with the Super Grub Disk, a sophisticated yet easy-to-use Free software application.

OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new group to help implementors create applications that conform to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) OASIS Standard. ODF defines a genuinely open XML file format for office productivity applications, including text, spreadsheets, charts, graphs, presentations, and databases. The new OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance (OIC) Committee will work to ensure that the growing number of ODF-compliant applications are able to interoperate and conform to the standard.

Members of the Debian community are up in arms following a surprise announcement over the way project participants are vetted and organized. The announcement, posted by Debian developer and administrator Joerg Jaspert, proposed - among other things - that a new class of non-technical Debian contributor be introduced. This person would have a lower status than full Debian developers and have limited access to project resources.

Each new Ubuntu release has raised the standard by which other Linux distros are judged. With the new Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, the focus is on mobility and 3G network support. I found Intrepid to be a fast and stable release, yet I experienced some minor issues that keep it from absolute perfection. I installed the 64-bit version of Intrepid on both my desktop computer and my laptop, which is a Gateway M-7315u with a 2GHz Pentium Dual Core T3200 Processor and 4GB of DDR2 RAM. When it comes to installing Ubuntu, you have the same options this time around as you did before, with one extra. The live CD installer is apparently unchanged. If you prefer a simpler text-mode installer, an alternate CD is available too.

One of these days I said, the perfect OS would be XP with more ram support (32 bit versions), the eyecandy from Leopard and the useful smart little features from Linux. Ubuntu is an african word meaning: if you want to run a usefull program you need to use wine (that in fact creates a virtual windows station with windows directories like windows / program files directly on your HDD).

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) yesterday announced the release of version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation Licence (FDL). The latest release of the licence now allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 licence.

With the economy as volatile as it has been, there has been a good deal of speculation (both positive and downright pessimistic) about how open source companies will negotiate the ups and downs to come. Today, Open-Xchange must be feeling quite optimistic, as it announced it's just closed a round of venture funding totaling $9 million and has four times the number of paid mailboxes now than it did last year. The company is focusing on a decidedly rosy looking future.

System administrators need to keep an eye on their servers to make sure things are running smoothly. If they find a problem, they need to see when it started, so investigations can focus on what happened at that time. That means logging information at regular intervals and having a quick way to analyse this data. Here's a look at several tools that let you monitor one or more servers from a Web interface.

A mainframe version of the OpenSolaris operating system is now available for download, IBM and Sun announced Monday. Both Solaris and the System z mainframe have a huge footprint in the financial services sector, and many customers will be interested in consolidating Solaris-based applications onto mainframe servers, says Forrester Research analyst Brad Day.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Many computer users know that if you want to save money, go open source. Open source software is programming that is freely available on the Internet and whose programming language -- literally the software's DNA -- is available to all users. There are open source software equivalents of nearly every professional software product on the market, most sporting the same features as their for-profit counterparts.

Back in August we had looked at the G45-based Super Micro C2SEA with its integrated Intel GMA X4500HD graphics. The X.Org graphics performance wasn't that bad for being an Intel IGP, but Intel had also introduced the G43 Chipset with Intel X4500 (non-HD) graphics. One of the motherboards to use Intel's G43 is the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD, which we happen to be looking at today. This motherboard that pairs the Intel G43 with an ICH10 Southbridge supports both DDR2 and DDR3 system memory and its video connectors include D-Sub, DVI-D, and DisplayPort.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, November 3, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories uncover several conspiracies, including a Linux love/hate relationship, Windows payoffs, er, uhm, bribes, business needs, GNOME support, and award-winning content management.

Could open source software benefit from more usability testing? It sure seems so, and usability labs are heavily emphasized at big proprietary software companies, especially Microsoft. In fact, early interface standards in Windows applications, such as common menu options, were largely driven by the experiences of usability testers. Here are some open source projects that are setting a good example when it comes to usability.

I don't get it. Why in the world are people reporting that seven out of ten Asus PCs is news. Hello. Wake up call. Nine in ten PCs, counting Macs as PCs, are already running Windows. The news, the real news, is that three out of ten Asus PCs are being sold with Linux.

Once upon a time, one computer was all you needed. All of your documents lived on that computer, or a stack of floppies or CD-Roms nearby, and nowhere else. Those days are gone, much like the one-car, one-TV, and one-iPod days. Today I have my home computer and my wife has hers. There's also my laptop, my daughter's laptop, my work computer, and my file server. At any time I could find myself sitting in front of any of these and wherever I happen to be sitting there is bound to be a file that is sitting on one of the others that I would prefer to be readily available. These files are mostly along the lines of current projects I'm working on. If inspiration strikes I want to be able to open up the appropriate file or create a new one and start writing without worry. I worry because keeping these files synchronized across all my logins on the various computers I might sit in front of in a single day is a big issue.

A look at simple steganography and one of the easiest ways to implement it keylessly. For this week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script, we're following up on what turned out to be a fairly popular script from last week that made it so you could get your local tv listings from the command line with bash. This week's script is an update to include cable and dish TV as well as provide greater coverage of your personal provider's schedule. The next paragraph is another litany of "other scripts we've done before that somewhat resemble this one."

There's no doubt about, when it comes to selling small laptops (or what's now often called a netbook) Asus is king of the hill. Just like most people think of Apple's iPod when it comes to MP3 players Asus' eee PC brand has become synonymous with small inexpensive laptops. I honestly can't remember the last university lecture where I didn't see at least one student with an eee PC and on a short 2h train-ride on the weekend I spotted 3 people using eee PCs.