Showing all newswire headlines

Have you ever feel frustrated when Mozilla releases a new build for their software (especially Firefox) and you are still stuck at the previous older version, simply because Ubuntu did not (and do not intend to) add the newer version of software packages to the repository? The truth of fact is, Ubuntu does not update its repositories for newer version of software packages, with the exception of security fixes, until the next release of Ubuntu. For example, the default version of Firefox for Ubuntu Jaunty is Firefox 3.0 and it won’t be upgraded to Firefox 3.5 at least until Ubuntu 9.10. In most cases, especially when it comes to browsers and various Web application, it is always better to upgrade to the newest version due to the new features and security improvement. This is where Ubuntuzilla comes into play.

Trains, planes, and automobiles: Juliet Kemp has been romaing the planet for months, while supporting remote servers and writing Linux howtos for LinuxPlanet and Serverwatch. It's a tough life: "...lying in my tent with a cup of tea and a stack of chocolate biscuits, watching TV series downloads on the laptop."

Another issue which become increasingly apparent was the education factor. Although I loved the tech behind it, OLPC was always clear in that "It's an education project, not a laptop project", which I agree is essential. And yet, it became clear that the primary objective of Negroponte and friends was simply to get this laptop into kids' hands. And I vehemently disagree with that. The XO cannot exist on its own. Without proper guidance from teachers well-versed in the applying and troubleshooting the technologies involved the project would fail, or become something else entirely. To allow such a situation would be contrary to any responsible educational goal. A technology is only as good as its user's wisdom.

According to a newspaper report, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia plans to equip future high-performance phones with the Maemo operating system. The report (German language link) in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), says the company is expected to launch its first Maemo smartphone within the next few weeks. Symbian, Nokia's OS of choice to date, is said to be far too cumbersome to compete with modern operating systems, according to the report from Nokia sources. A Nokia spokesperson declined to comment on "speculation".

A Texas court has banned sales of Microsoft Word and copies of Microsoft Office containing word until a final decision is reached in a copyright infringement trial. Microsoft has 60 days to cease sales.

[At first I thought it was on The Onion. Also note that it says "copyright" but means "patents". -J.]

This tutorial shows how you can prevent unlimited login attempts and hence brute force attacks against your SquirrelMail web login by using fail2ban.

The openSUSE project, which creates the Linux development distro that ultimately ends up being Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise in desktop, server, and other variants, is mothballing an old development release. The project icing just as it has taken another step toward meeting its goal of delivering a new release this fall.

So, my HDD went bust. I have been using GoboLinux since its launch, and there has yet to be a new release since 014.01. Try as I might, I couldn't switch distributions. So, I installed. This isn't an easy task. The install CD is so old that you will have to do a lot of updating to install anything new. So where to start?

This is the third article in the Bash tips series, you can find the other two here and here. 1. Use cd - to go to the previous working directory

When Windows 7 comes to market, the Starter Edition will be conceived especially for notebooks. As they did for Windows XP, Microsoft has come up with a list of technical limitations.

The most beautiful part of being a linux user is the choice you have, whatever issue it is. Like any other Linux distro, Ubuntu is infinitely customisable with any number of themes and applications. This include login window themes or gdm themes also. Here is select set of login window themes that i think are really worth a look.

Microsoft and Nokia have announced an alliance to bring the software giant's services to smartphones made by the world's biggest mobile phone firm. The deal means that the latest versions of Microsoft's range of products, such as Word and Excel, will be made available on Nokia handsets.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on How To Run Multiple X Sessions Without Virtualization, which demonstrated how you can run multiple desktop environments at the same time on the same computer, and switch between them at the push of a button. I admit, this was somewhat of a warmup for the real show – how to run multiple Linux distributions at the same time without having to deal with the drawbacks of virtualization software. Today, we’re going to be using chroot to treat certain parts of your Linux filesystem as (almost) completely isolated systems. This can let you do all kinds of interesting things, like run a full Gentoo system from inside your Ubuntu system with little to no performance loss.

Have you considered embracing Linux in any of your articles? If you have, but have not acted on such thoughts, why is that? Is it the Linux learning curve? The "lack of benchmarks"? Simply the lack of resources on the part of your editors and product evaluators? After speaking with several editors from fellow publications, these seem to be most of the excuses at hand. However, at Phoronix Media, we have the solutions to these problems -- and they are free and easy to adopt. I would invite you to think how using Linux to complement your Windows testing in hardware reviews could benefit your publication by providing more thorough reviews to fulfill the needs of more readers, wooing more hardware companies with having another feature to offer, and generate additional page views from having more content.

The KDE Community released the 4.3 version of its popular Linux/UNIX desktop environment, representing more than 63,000 code changes by 700 contributors, 10,000 bug-fixes, and 2,000 new features. KDE 4.3 adds numerous improvements to the Plasma Desktop Shell and Application Development Framework, among many other enhancements.

To convert video files to a resolution that is adequate for a PocketPC’s screen, use mencoder. mencoder input.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=200:abitrate=48 -vop scale=320:240 -oac copy -o output.avi This will transform a typical 700MB AVI file into a ~200MB size file with a 320×240 pixel resolution.

When using a GNU/Linux operating system, from time to time you may come across a situation where network connectivity was interrupted due to the IP conflict. An IP conflict event occurs when two or more hosts on the same network are configured with identical IP addresses. At the present, there appears to be no code in the Linux kernel to take care of this situation by means of appropriate Gratuitous ARP response . Very often a network administrator is left in the complete ignorance by the Linux kernel and needs to troubleshoot IP conflict the hard way. Fortunately, there is a simple daemon called IPwatchD which main purpose is to catch and evaluate packets on the network and this way is able to prevent an IP conflict occurrence. This is done by help of libpcap library. IPwatchD daemon is written in C language and can run in passive or active modes.

This tutorial will show how to compile and install the latest VLC from source in Debian Lenny in several steps. The current version at the time of writing is VLC 1.0.1, so the tutorial should work successfully for it.

Since my first Moblin 2.0 article a month ago, the development team has not been resting. There have been a half dozen serious updates (over 200MB each time), and the OS has moved away from being riddled with periodic “Fatal Error” messages to just a few now and then. But beyond that, the entire OS has become far more usable as new features are enabled.

As Windows 7’s October 22 arrival approaches, The VAR Guy is hearing more and more buzz about virtualized Windows and Linux desktops — including an imminent announcement from Red Hat. Looking ahead, our resident blogger thinks the virtualized desktop market is ripe for channel partners.