Showing all newswire headlines

When Germany's third largest city gives Microsoft the brush-off, it excites comment in the USA. Munich got itself into the American newspapers a few years ago when the city council decided to initiate project LiMux, aimed at gradually banishing Microsoft programs from the town hall computers. While talk about the software revolution has now died down, the changeover is being enthusiastically pursued. Other local authorities have now followed suit. Microsoft, however, won't leave the field without a fight. "We are able to learn", said Andreas Hartl, Director Platform Strategy of Microsoft Deutschland.

After having gone to the community for looking at names, Red Hat has announced that the release of Fedora 12 will be codenamed Constantine. This name had the most votes and was approved by Red Hat's Legal department of being free of any potential issues...

We are proud to announce a new version - 0.95 - of our live DVD at Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin.

The Drupal content management system is one of the most popular engines for dynamic websites — indeed, it powers the site you're visiting right now. All this powering doesn't happen by itself, though, and the developer community that does the dirty work behind the scenes is in need of a bit of Linux labor. The Testing and Quality Assurance team at Drupal are "the plumbers who keep the community plumbing from leaking." While they once spent their time reviewing patches one-by-one to assure stability, they now employ a testing bot to automatically apply patches to test installations, freeing up tester time to tackle greater things.

Calculate Directory Server is a Gentoo-based LDAP server providing a centralised storage of application settings, user accounts and access privileges. A new version of the product was announced yesterday. Some of the main changes include: "Support for Italian and Polish languages; support for the proxy service with user authorization in LDAP; support for Samba group settings in the LDAP server; support for setting of some Jabber service hosts; isolinux has been used for booting; when booting from CD user can now select a keyboard layout; support from loading the CD into memory; improved hardware compatibility when booting from a USB DVD...."

The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename "lenny"). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to- date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

FreedomHEC (Freedom Hardware Engineer's Conference) Taipei was held June 10 and 11 in, unsurprisingly, Taipei, Taiwan. The event, sponsored by the governmental Institute for Information Industry, followed the huge Computex conference in the hope of attracting hardware developers who are interested in supporting Linux. Your editor, who had the honor of being invited to speak at FreedomHEC Taipei, would assert that the goal was achieved; over 200 developers showed up for two days of technical talk about the Linux kernel and the best ways to contribute to it.

absolute Paul Sherman has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Absolute Linux 13.0, a lightweight modification of Slackware Linux for the desktop: "Absolute Linux 13.0 RC1 released. Pre-release that includes fixes for slapt-get and wicd, addition of a control panel, centralizing control and eliminating the sometimes confusing utilities menus. Big updates to Midori and Inkscape on repositories (under /CD2). New theme, new log on, Qt 4 up and running, several new applications along with Qt 4-based K3b. Overall a more cohesive look and simpler navigation. Wanted a release candidate so that 13.0 will not necessitate updates -- also wanted to have feedback on whether Midori is functional enough to become the default browser. (It uses about 1/3 the memory of Firefox in my tests.)"

OpenVZ project leader Kir Kolyshkin clarified at LinuxTag 2009 that the software also lends itself to Linux resource management. The facts are clear, Koyshkin said at the outset: every computer has but finite resources such as CPU time, memory, hard disk size and I/O, and network I/O. Administrators are interested in protecting these resources from DoS attacks so that they can continue providing QoS or simple processing.

Determining which software we use can be a very social experience, often we’ll ask our friends what they recommend, so why not take this social aspect to the (currently) most popular social networking site?

molinux MoLinux 5.0, a Spanish, Ubuntu-based distribution developed by the regional government of Castilla la Mancha in Spain, has been released. Code-named "Dorotea", in reference to a pretty girl in Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha, MoLinux 5.0 is distributed as an installable live DVD. New features: improved hardware support and boot speed; optional ext4 file system support; connectivity improvements with the latest version of NetworkManager; newest versions of most of the included applications. New software: GNOME Control Centre for configuring the system; CompizConfig, a utility for setting up 3D desktop effects; Tucan, a download manager; Gru, a tool for restoring the bootloader in case it has been accidentally overwritten or damaged....

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD today. Bordeaux 1.8 has had many changes on the back end, our build process has been totally rewritten, packaging has been totally rewritten. This release adds Microsoft Office 97, Adobe Photoshop 6 & 7 and Image Ready 3.0 and 7.0 support. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.

LUK, Linux Unified Kernel, is it the future of the Linux desktop? It promises us the ability to run Windows drivers natively on Linux, but why are so many in the community against it?

Google has openly questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure, while taking some wonderfully sly shots at the company's new search engine. The undeniable highlight of Thursday's cloud-happy Structure 09 conference was Vijay Gill, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture. As he described how Google's famously distributed infrastructure shames the Redmond competition, he would occasionally point his audience to relevant online materials using a deadpan line that put Microsoft's incurable Mountain View envy is sharp relief. "If you Bing for it," he would say, "you can find it."

Almost two years after its initial announcement, the Linux Solution Group (LiSoG) has now presented specificationsPDF for its OSDtBench (Open Source based Desktop Benchmark) desktop benchmark suite and demonstrated a prototype at LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin. According to LiSoG, public bodies in particular are placing increasing emphasis on benchmark results for comparing the performance of different computers.

In his keynote at the LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich spoke about the future of user interfaces on mobile devices. In the process he presented QML, the newest development from his employer Qt Software.

In order to avoid this common mistake I often have my shell scripts prompt me for a yes or no answer before they proceed. The function described here is for doing that: asking a question and validating the answer.

Android developers can now slip native code into apps written for Android-based devices using Google's new native development kit (NDK). The Android 1.5 NDK, which was announced Thursday on the Android developers blog, doesn't actually allow developers to run completely native code on devices. Instead, it supports adding native code into apps written to run in Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) instances.

The middle of June, Yahoo! introduced a small change to its user login protocol that practically barred access from all Linux clients. IM services Pidgin and Kopete were hit and responded quickly. To protect its users from phishing scams, Yahoo! changed its login authentication protocol, as they announced June 16. The new protocol expected a specific authentication method version on the client end and refused access if it didn't match. IM services Pidgin and Kopete were recently affected by this.

htop - Undoubtedly the most famous of the top-like tools. It implements some extra options to the "top" command, like colors, ability to scroll horizontally and vertically, and a better interaction with the processes listed. nethogs - network information, but instead of displaying the traffic by protocol, nethogs shows the bandwidth usage by process. Very interesting.