Showing all newswire headlines

Here's my problem. I need a calendar app that rudely beeps to tell me when to go to meetings and such. In Ubuntu, that means the Evolution mail client, which has an extensive calendar function, or so I'm told. But I don't run Evolution. I use Thunderbird to manage my mail, and Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar function ... or does it?

[My apologies for the "Bohemian Rhapsody" pun in the headline - Steve]

Eclipse Galileo includes new features for applying patches, including the ability to copy a patch to the clipboard and paste it directly into the Project Explorer. This article introduces this and provides an overview of the method for creating and applying patches, and includes an overview of the patch format used by Eclipse.

The fundamentals of computation theory are not obvious. A group of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century needed decades to figure them out. If this information is not communicated to lawyers and judges they have no chance to understand what is going on and mistakes are sure to happen. All the errors I have found result from this omission. The purpose of this text is to help fill the gap.

[A long read, but definitely worth it for the philosophical defense of FOSS - gus3]

The Novell-backed OpenSUSE Linux distro project today released the final OpenSUSE 11.2, which received a mostly positive, in-depth review from eWEEK. Meanwhile, Novell released its Mono Tools for Visual Studio for developing .NET applications for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X, says another eWEEK story.

Last week I visited a Nepali primary school which is using the OLPC laptop. Here is what I found out.

Recently, we took on a project for a Iraqi couple who had spent 3 years in a refugee camp prior to finally getting to the US. Their names are Ziad and Mona and they need help far past my ability to help them. It's not just a matter of the system we gave them being Linux...these folks are not computer users and the concept of right and left mouse clicking eludes them. A challenge I know... Now try to imagine trying to teach them with the Language Barrier in place.

Some of the new and interesting features of this release include: KDE 4.3, a major update to the KDE platform, which offers improved networking support, and better integration of Firefox and OpenOffice.org with the KDE environment; GNOME 2.28, the latest release of the popular GNOME desktop, which includes a brand new theme Screenshots at SEO Expert Consultants

Our Russian friends at Unigine Corp, who have their very impressive Unigine Engine that is multi-platform and delivers the best graphics on Linux and have said they like Linux very much, last month released Unigine Heaven. Heaven is the most-impressive tech demo / benchmark yet, but when released in October it only came out for Windows with its DirectX 11 renderer. However, as we exclusively shared, Unigine Heaven is coming out to Linux.

An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago. I was in Nicaragua doing anthropological research, when I was asked to give a talk at the yearly Debian Day in the capital city of Managua. I spoke on Latex, which really had nothing to do with agriculture, but afterward Denis Cáceres of Debian Nicaragua approached me.

What the heck does ?€œ mean? Why do we see these, and what be done about them? Akkana Peck explores the mysteries of character sets and encodings.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2010.0 desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) 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.

Pidgin Embedded Video is a GTK plugin for the popular instant messaging client Pidgin. It transforms a simple conversation into a much more attractive and interesting experience. The purpose of this plugin is to provide a faster way to watch videos while chatting with your friends. No more additional browser windows!

Software updates aside, the real key to the new openSUSE release is about how the Novell-led community distribution itself comes together. "This cycle for us has been a lot about increasing the independence of the project and being able to allow contributors to work directly with openSUSE, as opposed to going through people that work with Novell," Brockmeier told InternetNews.com.

This is a tutorial to guide in the installation of Microsoft Office 2007 on Linux and Mac systems with Wine 1.1.32 Microsoft Office 2007 officially called "2007 Microsoft Office system" is the most recent version of Microsoft's productivity suite. This howto should also work on FreeBSD 7.0 or later.

I began using Linux as a desktop operating system around 1993, two years after Linux was created. Countless developers, engineers and hackers were doing the same. But at that point, it wasn't what most people would recognize as a desktop OS. The credit for creating and marketing the first Linux desktop designed for ordinary users goes to Corel Corp., which launched Corel Linux OS 10 years ago, in November 1999.

Byobu is a Japanese term for decorative screens .You can achieve decorative effects on your gnome terminal or xterm , or Konsole with Byobu software available from ubuntu launchpad. In fact, the new ubuntu 9.10 ships it by default

Programming is more fun when you keep score. The extreme programming (XP) development model popularized the idea of test-driven development (TDD) with professional programmers in mind. But TDD turns out to be even more useful for lone amateur programmers, because it provides much needed motivation in the form of more visible rewards for your work. This is true even when simple test runners are used, but I decided to make things a little snappier by including a couple of other types of measurement and generating a “scorecard” for the present state and progress of my Python software projects. Here’s how it works, and a download link for my script, which I call “PyRate”. Read the full howto at Free Software Magazine.

Cuberok is a music player and collection manager which resembles A LOT to the very popular Amarok 1.4. It is based on Qt4 and has a lightweight interface, music collection support and many features, e.g. music autorating and Last.FM scrobbler.
Cuberok works on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX but for now I have only tested it in Linux (Ubuntu).

Not content to dominate search and online advertising, two operating systems, and cross-platform browser, Google is now getting into the programming language business as well. Yesterday Google announced Go a brand-new systems programming language. Why does Google need Go? According to the FAQ on the site, Google saw a gap in the existing systems programming languages, and the company decided it was "worth trying again with a new language" that has taken ideas from other systems programming languages as well as scripting languages like Python and JavaScript.

Lerdorf announced his departure via the popular Web2.0rhea service Twitter. "Feels a bit odd to be unemployed. Probably crazy to leave the best job I have ever had," he wrote, "but after 7+ years it was time for something new." Twitter is also where Lerdorf voiced his opinion of Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft back in July. "As lame as I feared," he said. "Time to find a new job." Yahoo! told The Reg Lerdorf had resigned to pursue "other opportunities.' And Lerdorf told us: "There is no juicy story here. I was there for over 7 years. It is a great place to work, and like I said, I am probably crazy for leaving. It was just time to try something different."