Showing all newswire headlines

One might think that the ext3 filesystem, by virtue of being standard on almost all installed Linux systems for some years now, would be reasonably well tuned for performance. Recent events have shown, though, that some performance problems remain in ext3, especially in places where the fsync() system call is used. It's impressive what can happen when attention is drawn to a problem; the 2.6.30 kernel will contain fixes which seemingly eliminate many of the latencies experienced by ext3 users. This article will look at the changes that were made, including a surprising change to the default journaling mode made just before the 2.6.30-rc1 release.

The next Portland State Aerospace Society rocket, scheduled for first launch this summer, will have new hardware, including a switch from CAN to USB.

The VAR Guy is hanging out today at SMB Nation, a conference for small business VARs — most of whom work with Microsoft. Still, open source companies like Untangle and xTuple have quietly found a home at the conference.

War is Hell. Unless you're not all there ;)

Fedora 11 Xen hypervisor package contains pv_ops dom0 kernel support, ie. it is able to boot bzImage format dom0 kernels, and pv_ops sysfs memory ballooning support is included as well. These features/patches are backported from Xen 3.4 development/unstable version to Fedora’s Xen 3.3.1. Xen-3.3.1-11.fc11.src.rpm may be rebuilt on F10 with the most recent updates installed. Obtained set of RPMS allow to install Xen 3.3.1 Hypervisor on F10,having same features as on F11, what was, actually, already done by Michael Young and Pasi Kärkkäinen.

The Open Invention Network, an industry organization that protects Linux by acquiring and licensing open-source patents, is taking Microsoft to task over three patents related to its now-settled lawsuit against in car GPS device maker TomTom. Microsoft sued TomTom in February for allegedly infringing on eight of its patents, three of which pertained to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. At the time, Microsoft officials said the suit wasn't the start of a patent enforcement campaign against Linux, but didn't rule out further lawsuits.

Herrie is a small music player for console, based upon the ncurses interface. It features a simple interface with two panels, a playlist and a file browser. Herrie can play Ogg Vorbis and MP3 and also has AudioScrobbler (Last.fm) support.

Before building anything you have to have a design, a plan, because if you don't know where you're going you won't get there. What drives the plan? The needs of the user. Oh I know, this is anathema to the "scratch your own itch" philosophy. But that particular philosphy has been misrepresented and distorted into something self-centered, a "If you don't like it then don't use it" attitude, when in fact it isn't:

"7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."

Looks like Google could be deep water, along with the Open Handset Alliance and some 40 or so companies, over an apparent trademark infringement.

Once I filled up a few screens complaining about how LogMeIn failed me in OpenBSD, I was too far along to report how I feel about Ubuntu 8.04 after not booting into it for almost a month, during which time I used a nearly identical Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4, lately using the Xfce desktop environment.

Plenty of people jumped on the bandwagon when Ubuntu 9.04 debuted on April 23. But independent software vendors (ISVs) were mostly absent from the launch party. Fast forward to Ubuntu 9.10’s anticipated launch in October 2009, and Canonical hopes to deliver a far more impressive ISV story. Here’s the scoop.

Hitslink.com just releasted their april market share stats and linux passed 1% for the first time ever. Shown is a plot of the linux market share for the past several years based on hitslinks’ stats.

Financial troubles are an ever more common reality as the economic climate continues to venture through the monsoon season, and not-for-profit organizations are no exception. Such appears to be the case for the GNOME Foundation, the forces behind the venerable GNOME desktop, as the organization's 2009 budget is finalized and thoughts — and worries — turn to 2010.

I booted the Toshiba 1100-S101 with Ubuntu 8.04 for the first time in 25 days, according to the Update Manager. Or at least it was 25 days since I updated the install. Either way, I've been running a nearly carbon copy of this laptop with OpenBSD 4.4, lately with the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, and I'd gotten quite used to it. But last night, here I am, 10 p.m., working at home, and I discover that LogMeIn — the service that makes it easy to control an XP box from (allegedly) any other box in any other OS with a Web browser — just doesn't like OpenBSD.

Linux comes with bales of great utilities that show you exactly what is happening on your system. The popular lsof command not only lists open files and who is using them, it also reveals who is connected to your computer, and on which TCP/IP ports.

Built based on your suggestions, LinuxLeak.com has launched version 3. Still gathering information from over 160 of the best Open Source sites and updating every 30 minutes, we now present news stories in a more traditional format.

Zend Framework 1.8 expands the PHP framework to work with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Zend Framework has also added new rapid application development (RAD) features to accelerate PHP development. A new module in Zend Framework for RAD called Zend_application further expedites PHP development. Matt Weier O'Phinney, Zend Framework's project lead. explained to InternetNews.com that Zend_application is around bootstrapping apps

The discovery that Windows 7 will use desktop virtualization so you can run Windows-XP-compatible applications caused almost as much excitement as the news the Windows 7 Release Candidate would ship this week and next. The planned Windows XP Mode will, theoretically, let you keep on running your existing applications on a brand-new Windows 7 machine, even if the applications themselves don't yet run natively on Windows 7.

gtk-desktop-info is a python tool to display various pieces of information directly on the desktop, using plugins for html rendering, with html templates and css style sheets for formatting.

Gnome Do is probably the most popular launcher for Linux, but if you are looking for something less flashy and more streamlined, try Launchy. This unobtrusive tool can help you to quickly launch applications and open URLs, directories, and documents using keyboard shortcuts.