Showing all newswire headlines

Power and space saving computers are in, and Shuttle has a winner with the XS29F. This little gem really skimps on the power consumption to the tune of around 20-25 watts on average. That's less than half of that 60-watt light bulb shining down on you right now. For the Do It Yourselfer (DIYer) on a budget this box makes a lot of sense. The size is right, too, as the unit measures a skimpy three inches tall and a little over seven inches wide. Two doors on the front reveal the DVD drive, two USB ports and the typical audio in / out jacks. A power brick similar to one you would use with a notebook computer helps offload some of the electronics and heat generation outside of the box.

Take a Fedora Live CD for a spin and tell me how you like it. Ok, so we all know that I've been giving Fedora a bit of a black eye lately with my BaitNSwitch and Is Fedora Still Relevant posts so I've decided to give them some positive press and enter their Spins Zone. Spins are live Fedora CD images designed with a specific purpose or function in mind.

MediaMosa, a video management and distribution platform, which has been developed in the Netherlands to deliver video content to the Dutch educational sector, is now open source. In their announcement of the release, the developers, SURFnet, a provider of IT services to education and Stichting Kennisnet, the public IT support organisation of the Dutch educational sector, said they hoped that open sourcing the application would allow other developers worldwide to work with the software.

A collective "aargh" resonated throughout the Linux blogosphere in response to Nvidia's dissing of Android in favor of Windows CE for running smartbooks. It really should come as no surprise, suggests blogger Gerhard Mack: "[Nvidia] is a company that got dragged kicking and screaming into the open source world, and they really don't want to be here."

As I described in an earlier article, the first two years of the OLPC deployment in Uruguay "have been characterized by implementation and incubation. The laptops have been deployed to schools, manuals have been created, tech savvy volunteer groups have been formed, wireless internet connections have been established, teachers have slowly learned how to implement the laptops into their curricula and classrooms, and, as Rezwan has covered previously, a community of open source programmers has developed educational applications for the laptops."

The OSCON (Open Source Convention) conference will present over 200 sessions between July 20-24 in San Jose, Calif., covering a variety of desktop and embedded Linux topics. Meanwhile, SourceForge.net has opened voting for its 2009 Community Choice Awards, with winners to be announced at OSCON.

The Eclipse Foundation has hit its planned date of June 24 of releasing Galileo, its newest annual collection of development platform projects.

Only one week after the first beta was released, VirtualBox developer Frank Mehnert has announced the availability of the second beta of version 3.0 of the open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. In addition to numerous bug fixes for the previous release, the second beta includes several performance improvements and fixes for SMP guests. Several OpenGL and Direct3D related issues and a high CPU usage issue on certain idle Windows guests, have also been addressed.

Communtu wants to give new installers and Windows converts an easier time with Ubuntu. They will present a webpage with a list of suggested programs to install as a metapackage, including multimedia and proprietary software, and then install it.

Red Hat CEO Whitehurst noted that Red Hat has yet to lose a major customer to Oracle and that all of its top 25 deals each quarter for the last five quarters have renewed. According to Whitehurst, the only major Red Hat customer that has not renewed due to Oracle's Linux in the last couple of years was Oracle itself. "I think with the addition of Solaris, I think it would be an even harder sell of something that's already proven pretty unsuccessful for them," Whitehurst said. "I wouldn't want to be the sales guy compensated on selling Oracle Unbreakable Linux."

Back in March we reviewed the System76 Serval Professional Notebook and found it to be an excellent contender at the time. This notebook, which shipped with Ubuntu 8.10, had packed an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor with a GeForce 9800M GTS graphics card and other great hardware, but since then System76 has rolled out notebooks with newer and better hardware. One of the new notebooks to recently leave the System76 facilities is the Bonobo Professional, which packs an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 processor and an impressive NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M discrete graphics processor. In this article today we are seeing how this high-end notebook performs with Ubuntu 9.04.

When Red Hat announced first quarter results on June 24, The VAR Guy spotted a rather interesting detail: Red Hat’s quarterly open source revenues are nearly four times larger than its closest Linux rival, Novell. And, Red Hat’s open source revenues seem to be growing faster than Novell's. Here’s the math, and the potential implications.

Udev removed the udevinfo symlink from versions higher than 123 and xens build-system could not detect if udev is in place and has the required version. In particular, Ubuntu 9.04 server has udev version 141 and appears to be affected by this issue. Straight forward Xen 3.4.1 build brings up Xen Host with hotplug scripts rejecting to work. The recent patch suggested by Marc resolves this problem.

Moovida is what used to be called elisa,it is an open source cross-platform media center solution designed to be simple for people not particularly familiar with computers. By bringing together all your movies, TV shows, tunes and photos in one simple innovative interface. More than that, Moovida brings you the best of internet video, music and images to play on your HDTV, laptop or PC.

Berlin's art colleges are completely switching over to Linux. Most of the productivity software on the workstations has already been swapped for free alternative products as part of a project that started over eighteen months ago.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Debian Lenny) to one large storage server (distributed storage) 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.

The Boxee developers have announced the launch of a new public alpha for Windows of their cross-platform open media center with social networking and community features. Boxee is a fork of the XBMC Media Center that includes several customised additions, including Web 2.0 services integration with Twitter, Tumblr and Digg, as well as major audio, video and photo portal integration (such as YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, Shoutcast, Flickr and Picasa).

There has been a lot of talk about the success or failure of the Linux netbooks recently, to the point that it is now a very controversial topic. I think that it is time to go back to the facts and perform an objective analysis of the Linux netbook market. You will see that Linux netbooks have been neither a complete success nor a complete failure.

The popular open-source Sugar Learning Platform, a Linux based OS that was developed for the OLPC project, is now available to run from a 1GB USB flash drive. Sugar Labs has announced that the rather splendidly monikered Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry is immediately available, and can be used to reboot any PC or netbook directly into Sugar.

Software installation of Linux certainly has it's problems that must be solved, but it is not entirely broken. In fact, it is an excellent system, at least in theory.