Showing all newswire headlines

In this article by Alfonso Romero, we will learn how to configure NetBeans, VirtualBox and the Turnkey LAMP Appliance to develop complex PHP applications in a virtual environment. This article explains the process of creating a virtual machine, configuring the NetBeans PHP IDE, and managing a WordPress project with NetBeans in a step wise manner.

Network device drivers have been using the increasingly misnamed NAPI ("new API") interface for some time now. NAPI allows a network driver to turn off interrupts from an interface and go into a polling mode. Polling is often seen as a bad thing, but it's really only a problem when poll attempts turn up no useful work to do. With a busy network interface, there will always be new packets to process; "polling," in this situation, really means "going off to deal with the accumulated work." When there is always work to do, interrupts informing the system of that fact are really just added noise. Your editor likes to compare the situation to email notifications; anybody who gets a reasonable volume of email is quite likely to turn such notifications off. They are distracting, and there is probably always email waiting whenever one gets around to checking.

A federal appeals court Monday overturned a 2007 decision that Novell owns the Unix code, and the ruling now clears the way for SCO to pursue a $1 billion copyright infringement case against IBM. In a 54-page decision, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said it was reversing the 2007 summary judgment decision by Judge Dale Kimball of the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, which found that Novell was the owner of Unix and UnixWare copyrights.

This tutorial explains how to install and use Back In Time on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. Back In Time is a simple backup tool for Linux inspired from "flyback project" and "TimeVault". The backup is done by taking snapshots of a specified set of directories.

Over the years, Xfce gained a reputation of being a lightweight alternative for the two major desktop environments on Linux, KDE and GNOME. This comes from the fact that Xfce usually uses less resources, comes with applications which offer basic functionality and clean, simple interfaces, and the general performance of Xfce is better, at least when it comes to memory cost, than both KDE or GNOME. Xubuntu uses Xfce and very often it is recommended for older hardware which can't handle the latest releases of Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

Many Linux users, even the newest ones, love Linux because it is highly customizable. KDE in particular is one desktop environment that is very easy and fun to customize. Whether you want three panels and a rotating slideshow of wallpaper photos from your vacation in Peru, or simply want to make sure text files always open in your favorite text editor, KDE can deliver. One important customization features is file association.

KernelCheck is a a program that automatically compiles and installs the latest Kernel for Debian based Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.). The program also allows for automatic installation of proprietary video drivers via EnvyNG. Features • Fetch latest kernel information (mature kernel, mature kernel patch, stable development prepatch) • Download and compile any 2.6 kernel into a .deb package • Auto-fix for ALSA sound in new kernels • Auto-optimize new kernel • Option to configure kernel options manually • Option to install the nVidia kernel module/driver on reboot • Option to reconfigure the X server • Custom kernel patching • Multiple CPU jobs for faster compilation

As WorksWithU reported last week, the Gnome application Empathy was set to become the default instant-messaging client in Ubuntu 9.10 upon its release October, replacing Pidgin. But Ubuntu developers have been reconsidering that decision in the last few days. Here’s the story, with some thoughts.

It was with much joy that the Linux community saw two harmful myths about open source get put in their places recently. Myth #1: Linux is bad for business. Linux Foundation: More than 70 percent of work on the kernel today is done by developers who are being paid for their efforts. Myth #2: Linux netbooks have a high rate of customer returns. Dell: No more so than Windows netbooks.

See...we''re not just giving computers away, we are brutally smashing open an opportunity that has been locked away from these kids. Be it through proprietary and expensive software, lousy parenting, mismanaged finances or just being plain poor, I personally don''t give a d@mn. They will have a Linux-Powered computer...and they will have it just as soon as we can get it to them. Now I need your help to do it.

Install Ubuntu kernel updates without rebooting using Ksplice Uptrack. Ksplice Uptrack is an update service for the Linux kernel; it automatically delivers security and reliability improvements to your machine, without the disruption of rebooting.

Recently the dot carried an article about the first public release of PySide, LGPL python bindings to Qt. We conducted a short interview with one of the people behind PySide, Nokia employee Matti Airas

Last week we provided benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, but Ubuntu is not the only Linux distribution preparing for a major update in the coming months. Also released in the past few days were OpenSuSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and Mandriva Linux 2010.0 Beta 1. To see how these three popular distributions compare, we set out to do our usual Linux benchmarking dance.

Write yourself some bash scripts that will automate much of the work for you. This way you won't have to spend so much time in front of the computer. I usually install the system, go watch a movie, then run some bash scripts and grab a bite to eat while the scripts do the work for me.

Today's tutorial will be on the infamous Quorum disk. When I first setup my GFS2 shared Cluster of 3 nodes, I was quite impressed with the fact that 3 nodes were sharing the same file system. Now that everything was up and running, I wanted to see what would happen if I brought down, 2 out of the 3 nodes in the cluster. I turned off 1st node and all was well, I was still able to access my GFS2 mount on the other 2 nodes. Then I decided to reboot the 2nd node, and guess what happened???? QUORUM DISSOLVED!!! Now on my final node the GFS2 file system was still mounted but I could not touch a file or run a ls on the mount... It just hung there!!

For Linux Pro Magazine readers, the name Tonido will sound familiar. I covered this sleek and user-friendly solution that lets you turn an Ubuntu-based machine into a nifty server in issue 105. Recently, CodeLathe, the company behind Tonido, launched TonidoPlug -- a tiny Ubuntu-based server running the Tonido software.

Pidgin 2.6.0 was made available a few days ago, on August 19, 2009, and today Pidgin 2.6.1 was released as a bug fix version to the new stable 2.6 series. Among the features and improvements which come with 2.6.0 are:

Google's Chromium project announced it is working on its first 64-bit version of its Chrome web browser, which will will arrive first on Linux. Meanwhile, Linux is increasingly driving development of 64-bit software -- simply because Linux power users are demanding it, says an industry blog. The mailing-list entry from the Chromium project's Dean McNamee last Thursday did not mention an expected launch date for the 64-bit Linux version of the Chromium browser, but suggested that the build was progressing nicely. Chromium, which is an open source version of the Windows Vista-based Chrome browser for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows XP, was recently made available in a 32-bit developers version for Linux.

I wanted to take a moment to admire the software we use everyday. There is something beautiful in the power we are granted. We can change any piece of our software to suit our needs. We have tens of thousands of software packages available to use at any point in time, and those packages can run on a platform that is radically diverse. Each GNU/Linux machine that I have seen is far different from every other GNU/Linux machine I have seen.

According to its developers Guitarix is a monaural amplifier designed for creating the distorted sounds typical of thrash, heavy metal, blues, and other rock guitar styles. In fact, Guitarix is capable of much more than distortion sounds. In this article I'll remove the software speaker grill and pull out the virtual chassis to take a closer look at the sonic possibilities of this "simple mono amplifier".