Showing all newswire headlines

I wrote a blog entry recently in which I expressed my displeasure with the situation around the use of Mono for FOSS development. Since then an interesting and unexpected development has occurred.

The slow loris is an exotic animal of southeast Asia that is best known for its slow, deliberate movements. This characterizes the technique used by a new Denial of Service (DoS) tool that has been named after the animal. Slowloris was released to the public by security researcher "RSnake" on June 17. Unlike previously utilized DoS methods, slowloris works silently. Still, it results in a quick and complete halt of the victim's Apache web server.

Glendale Adventist Medical Center has successfully installed SUSE Linux-based thin clients in 65 rooms, using technology from IBM, NoMachine, and Novell, say the companies. Meanwhile, Midland Memorial Hospital is touting cost savings from deploying Red Hat Linux-based OpenVista electronic health record software, says Forbes.

KDE e.V.'s Annual General Meeting was held today during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The KDE e.V. is the association that provides representation, support and governance to the KDE community. After former board member Klaas Freitag and KDE e.V. president Aaron Seigo stepped down and vice president Adriaan de Groot's term ended, three open positions had to be filled.

It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
[ Good news! Not that Google is making an OS - who cares? - but there's finally something else in the blogosphere than Mono - hkwint ]

Ubuntu 9.04 (and Kubuntu) comes with VLC 0.9.9 included in the repositories. However, VLC 1.0.0 was released today and it ships with several new features and many improvements. For readers who don't know what VLC means, it is a powerful, cross-platform and open-source video player, built using Qt 4 toolkit. It supports many video formats and comes with advanced video features and functions. To install the latest release of VLC (currently 1.0.0) in either Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu distributions, just follow the steps below:

Two vendors of Linux distributions have announced major cloud computing initiatives over the last week. First, Canonical launched an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services group, and then Red Hat announced its Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program, say reports in eWEEK and ChannelInsider, respectively.

Mozilla Labs have announced the Open Web Tools Directory, a site which attempts to index all the available web development tools. Rather than a traditional "master/detail database", the Labs developers decided to create a "fun to use" directory which uses the canvas component to display icons or logos for all the tools.

Novell kicked out its SUSE Linux 11 release at the end of March, so it's now time to ask how it's doing. The answer: better than SUSE Linux 10. But still not enough to close the substantial installed base and revenue gap that exists between number one Red Hat Enterprise Linux and number two SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in the data center. Even after years of Microsoft peddling SLES to Windows shops.

IT consultant: Small- to medium-sized businesses don’t care that its open source, they just want it to work. So do it, and make it work.

This is a full tutorial that explains how to use Gnome Do to control Rhythmbox, Banshee, Exaile and XMMS2. It includes: how to install Gnome Do, how to make Rhythmbox use multiple sources for the library, what keyboard shortcuts to use to control the music player behavior.

Harness the power of distributed computing using everyday Unix command-line tools and a clever little bash script.

[This is pretty cool. - Sander]

Summer releases of the latest smart phones from Apple, Blackberry, Google and Palm have excited geeks all over the world. The big question on the mind of Linux users has to be "Can I sync my Linux machine and my cool new phone?" Paul Ferrill finds the answers for the new Palm Pre.

Apparently the move from Yahoo! to Google has been good to Souders (as you might expect). Now working for Google on web performance, he's written a sequel to his January 2008 book, High Performance Web Sites (Souders was working for Yahoo! at the time) which I previously reviewed. According to the Product Description, "Souders' previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side". Sounds pretty dramatic, especially for a technical book. I don't know if I was "shocked" when I read Souders' prior book, but I was impressed. How does his follow up effort measure up?

Most computer users don't want an inflexible little Internet machine that runs only a Web browser, especially not for three or four hundred dollars or more. Something like that should come free in a box of cereal. Most want all the functionality of a full-sized notebook, only smaller, lighter, and with significantly longer battery life.

Can a project originating from San Francisco State University bridge the digital divide and bring true open source development to the iPhone platform? It looks promising, but the climb is steep and the gap is wide

Do you have a linux server without a keyboard or monitor? Need to administer the server on-site but don't want to lug over a monitor and keyboard (or kvm)? Then setup the server to output the console to a serial port and use screen/minicom (Hyperterminal or putty in Windows) to console into the server over a serial cable.

Linux Journal's Shawn Powers shows us how to deal with odd filenames on the commandline in this video.

This could have significant implications for Mono, an open source implementation of .NET that is developed by Novell. Mono is being adopted by a growing number of developers and has been used to build some popular desktop Linux applications, including the Banshee music player, the Tomboy note application, the F-Spot image manager, and the GNOME-Do launcher. Several of those applications are included by default in widely-used Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.

Lots of tears being shed over the shuttering of CompuServe, the venerable online service, last week but frankly I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.