Showing all newswire headlines

Reports that the Linux netbook is dead or dying are incorrect, at least globally, according to an analyst firm. Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year. That number contradicts third-party market figures, trumpeted by Microsoft, that showed Linux shipping on as few as 4% of U.S. netbooks.

There's something both exciting and frightening about the announcement of a new Linux file system. It's exciting because file systems represent new territory for interesting advances. It's frightening because a file system in the early stages tends to be experimental and not quite ready for prime time. But sometimes these announcements are about investments in the future of Linux, and a recent announcement for 2.6.30-rc1 indicates a very interesting future, indeed. In the past few quarters, Linux has had three major file system announcements. Late 2008 brought in the B-Tree File System (Btrfs), and more recently, two other unique file systems were introduced: NiLFS(2) and exofs.

Running Phoronix.com and developing the Phoronix Test Suite software consumes much time and is an enormous undertaking. You can support our Linux efforts already by joining Phoronix Premium, supporting our advertisers, making a donation, or using our Amazon.com affiliate link when shopping...

Skype announced that it is working on an open source UI layer for its Linux VoIP client. Although apparently not fully open source, the upcoming version of the Skype client for Linux could enable more open development of client front ends, including mobile devices.

This year's Kernel Summit saw Linux developers, led by Linus Torvalds, discussing the development process and gaining an insight into how Google uses the Linux kernel in-house. Ulrich Drepper and Alan Cox think universal binaries in Linux are a step in the wrong direction. Various graphics drivers have recently been updated to add new functionality.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a CentOS 5.4 x86_64 server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

There's the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix Global, and PTS Desktop Live as our family of free software products to provide extensive benchmarking and automated testing capabilities atop Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD, and Mac OS X operating systems. The Phoronix Test Suite has more than 120 test profiles and 50 test suites with new suites and tests continuing to come in through its extensible architecture, but for organizations with multiple test systems or entire testing farm(s) devoted to performance monitoring and regression tracking, they have had to strap the Phoronix Test Suite atop their own management systems or hack away at simple scripts to deploy our testing software across an array of systems. Today though we are announcing the public beta launch of Phoromatic. Phoromatic is a remote test management system that allows controlling any number of PTS-powered systems through a single web-based interface, which also allows all of the test results to be viewed from a central source.

The open source industry needs profitable champions to demonstrate success, and attract funding and participation in open source, according to Red Hat CEO. In an interview with ZDNet Asia Wednesday, Jim Whitehurst said revenue models of open source proponents such as Red Hat itself and Google, have brought success to the respective companies and allowed them to contribute back to the open source community. Google relies on ad-based revenue, while Red Hat's revenue runs on a subscription model.

The Dutch government program "Netherlands in Open Connection" and OpenDoc Society have announced the public availability of a beta version of Officeshots.org. Officeshots is an online webservice that makes it possible to compare the output quality of various office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The project is financially supported by a grant from the Netherlands based not-for-profit investor NLNet Foundation. The announcement took place during the second ODF plugfest, which brought together vendors and open source projects like IBM, Google, KOffice, Microsoft, Novell and OpenOffice.org.

[Disclosure: I'm the lead developer. - Sander]

Many Linux enthusiast are despairing of the low uptake of desktop Linux and its poor availability in high street shops. This is especially frustrating because most of the people using desktop Linux would consider it to be a superior solution to the Windows based machines on offer (and it probably is). I think I have fingered one of the causes for this problem though: desktop Linux needs salesmen!

A good portion of the boot time on current Linux systems is spent on system initialisation and starting dozens of daemons sequentially. The Ubuntu 9.10 development team have started to parallelise and accelerate the boot process through the large scale use of Upstart.

Back in July of 2008 we learned of GNOME 3.0 as plans were laid out during the GUADEC '08 conference to make the GNOME 2.30 release their "3.0" version. A art and user-interface followed months later and then this April the GNOME 3.0 road-map was laid out that put this release, which will overhaul the GNOME desktop in comparison to the usual incremental releases, to come in March of 2010. The March target is just six months after the release of GNOME 2.28 and consistent with their bi-monthly release cycle they have been following for years. However, it looks like GNOME 3.0 may not hit in H1'2010 but rather September of next year.

Many of us are stumbling around, trying to find the best way to get Desktop Linux into the awareness of the average computer user. There are millions of us already and I am fairly certain that even the most generous stats pertaining to Linux Desktop use are wrong. There are more of us than I think many of us imagine.

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers and the accompanying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor products today. There are a slew of press releases and demo videos. They even had a webcast press conference. Oh, and hey, they also released all of the manuals too. What exactly is it? Once you learn, I think you'll be shocked... in more ways than one.

Spring Design, developers of a dual-screen e-book reader called Alex, has filed suit against Barnes & Noble, alleging that B&N's new Nook reader uses Spring's trade secrets and violates the companies' non-disclosure agreement.

For about a month, mouse clicks stopped working for me in Flash and Ubuntu, no matter the browser I use. Digging a bit, multiple solutions came up, so I will share them with you.

Turnkey Linux, Songbird, LogicalDOC, Brain Workshop, Evolutility, and many more-- the Open Source world is full of great applications for everything under the sun. Cynthia Harvey shares a sampling of 49 applications for all occasions.

MIPS Technologies announced two new MIPS32 cores, including one that's optimized for Linux. Both the M14K core and the M14Kc -- a superset that incorporates Android-ready, Linux/Java microcode -- support MIPS' microMIPS instruction set architecture, enabling 1.5 DMIPS/MHz performance and advanced code compression that can reduce code size by 35 percent, says the company.

French Mandriva user Olivier Faurax registered a support case at Skype complaining about a missing Mandriva package. Instead of the package he received a reply of some amazement.

Even if your camera doesn’t support geotagging, you can easily add geographical coordinates to your photos using digiKam.