Showing all newswire headlines

Last week I made a review of the excellent media player for Linux and Windows Smplayer. This week the developer behind this great Mplayer front-end granted me an email interview.

Every two weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team will be publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you're at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for the KDE 4 port of K3b which is currently underway. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the K3b Icons Survey now.

A while back I wrote about using Apache as a dynamic reverse proxy. Anyone who has done even minimal research into web servers knows that Apache is the swiss army knife. It trys to be everything for everyone, and like a swiss army knife may not be as good as a more refined too at least as far as efficiency is concerned. (read the full article on transparent dynamic reverse proxy with nginx at cmdln.org)

First stable version of a new Linux distro, Kongoni version 1.12.2, launched on July 12th 2009

Is a nice collection of icons for Ubuntu and Gnome

This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices in a round-robin fashion and thus written concurrently) across four single storage servers (running Debian Lenny) with GlusterFS. The client system (Debian Lenny as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

During this time I had already grown extremely comfortable with GNU/Linux. Especially when it came to the text editor tools. I have always been a fan of vim (vi improved); but when I would hop from one platform to the other, I always found myself getting stuck with the way Solaris and now, OpenSolaris default their environment.

Remember Dapper Drake? All the fuss around it, being a LTS (long-term support) release, the three-month delay in order to make things stable, all the forum discussions regarding the 3-month delay in order to polish it well.

During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Frank Karlitschek announced the open-pc initiative. The aim of this ambitious project is to cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community. Read on for more information about this initiative from the team.

I, like most Linux advocates, have demonstrated the power of Linux to people who had no idea such power existed in technology, much less in free technology. When I help them set it up, they get frustrated and quit. These are the problems faced by many a Linux demonstrator.

Computer monitoring systems are used to gather data for the purpose of real-time incident notification, performance analysis, and system health verification. Without such a tool, a system administrator would have to login to each machine to collect information on a regular basis. This kind of repetitive task can be automated using a system monitoring tool.

CMus (C* Music Player) is an ncurses-based audio player which can be run in a shell, with no need for an X server which is very configurable with Vi-like commands, multiple views and keyboard shortcuts. It supports various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, AAC or WMA. CMus comes with everything you need: playlist support, queue system, seek, Last.fm (if compiled from source and then apply a patch - see below) and well, basically every feature you see in a fully-featured audio player.

Peek presents the community a challenge to get Linux running on their small handhelds, without much fanfare.

Microsoft's monopoly is being threatened from all sides. In the past, Microsoft used to be untouchable. Today, things seem to be shifting drastically. Microsoft still has a monopoly on the desktop computer market but it is being threatened from numerous sides. The latest threat is coming from Google who is creating their own operating system and competing head on with Microsoft Windows.

With the announcement of Google's Chrome OS this week many have been wondering what this means for Ubuntu. It goes without saying that Canonical does not have the resources available to it that Google has. Or does it?

A small revolution in the IT world is about to happen, and we are about to witness it. Microsoft Windows’ domination has been challenged many times: first by OS/2 (failed), then Apple (failed), then Java and network computing (failed), then GNU/Linux and Ubuntu (failed, so far). And now, Google’s Chrome OS. After such a long list of failures, what makes me think that this latest attempt will actually succeed? There is a list of factors. Let’s have a look. Why is Tony Mobily so optimistic? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

The young Gitg project, which visualizes a graphical representation of git data for Mac OS X under Gtk+/GNOME, allows check-ins and merges in its newest release 0.0.4, among other things.

One of the best things about a Linux system is its flexibility. Even though I’ve been a heavy Linux user for years, I still come across features in the OS a related applications that surprise me. A while back I learned to run multiple desktop environments at the same time, using nothing but the features of the software already built in to my distribution, and it’s been very useful for me. It may not sound like much, but it can be VERY useful to be able to run Gnome, KDE, Window Maker, and any other desktops all at the same time. You can flip from Gnome to Window Maker in seconds without having to log out or stop applications or use any kind of virtualization software. X already has everything you need.

The Symbian Foundation, established under a Nokia initiative, has released the first part of its Symbian Platform Security package under the free Eclipse Public License (EPL).

What happens when One Laptop Per Child has an international internship program but without the deep funding from a One Here One There donation scheme? You get the forgotten South America internships of Peru and Uruguay.