Showing all newswire headlines

Google's Chrome OS isn't the first operating system to challenge Microsoft Windows' commanding lead. But it's got an advantage that other rivals such as Linux lacked: the Web. Any new operating system must attract the developers who produce the applications to make it useful. The trouble Windows challengers have had is matching the wide spectrum of software available for Windows already.

If you looked at DistroWatch for a typical day five or six years ago you'd see a lot of familiar Linux distributions with announcements. You also would likely see some names that would be unfamiliar if you are relatively new to Linux. Currently the DistroWatch database contains 278 discontinued distributions and 36 more that are listed as dormant. Of these 314 distributions and countless others that never were listed on DistroWatch at all there are many which are probably best forgotten. There are others which were promising but for one reason or another were abandoned. A smaller number were truly exceptional but still failed to survive. This week I decided to wax nostalgic and look at five that seemed special to me at one time or another. Obviously this list is based on my personal experience. If you've been around Linux for a long time you might have a list of your own.

iTWire reported on HP's Mini 110 range in late May. Now the company has revealed Australian pricing and specifications. The 1.09kg Mini 110 will be sold in Australia in two versions, but initially it's a case of "any colour you like as long as it is black." The Linux based model comes with a 16G solid state drive in place of a hard disk, and sells for $499. The alternative is Windows XP and a 160G hard disk for $699.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on an Ubuntu 9.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an impending meeting with Microsoft to discuss some of its actions during the standardisation process of OOXML at the ISO. I asked Linux Journal readers for some help in preparing for this, and you responded with a generosity entirely in keeping with the spirit of free software. The many helpful comments to that post give some indication of the scale of the response, but that overlooks the extraordinary emails I received from others, packed with useful information, which clearly represented many hours' work. To everyone, I'd like to express my thanks. The bad news is that the meeting is not going to take place after all. read more

Now Mepis doesn't present Network Manager on first boot. Warren has devised a pretty cool Network connection utility in Mepis so I followed the bread crumbs to the menu link and opened it. I configured the settings with a couple clicks and then started Network Manager. We were in like Flynn...pulling a fluctuating 61-73 percent signal strength for the next three hours. I couldn't buy a wireless signal from the Windows machine.

A ten year old boy tries out Fedora Linux 11 Game spin, and likes it a lot, but not for the reasons you would expect.

Wildfire Games has decided to switch their development model for their real-time strategy title, 0 A.D., from closed-source to open-source. This 3D real-time strategy game is now having its code licensed under the GNU GPLv2 and the game content is going under the Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike license.

This top 10 list will get your blood a-pumping. Something for everyone in this one.

Last week I made a review of the excellent media player for Linux and Windows Smplayer. This week the developer behind this great Mplayer front-end granted me an email interview.

Every two weeks Nuno Pinheiro and the KDE Oxygen Icons team will be publishing a new usability survey online to get feedback from users on the look and feel of icons. In particular, the Oxygen team is looking for feedback from individuals that have had no exposure to KDE, so if you're at home or at work, poke your friends and family and have them complete the survey, or simply take the survey yourself. The current survey is on icons for the KDE 4 port of K3b which is currently underway. So if you have a moment, grab someone and complete the K3b Icons Survey now.

A while back I wrote about using Apache as a dynamic reverse proxy. Anyone who has done even minimal research into web servers knows that Apache is the swiss army knife. It trys to be everything for everyone, and like a swiss army knife may not be as good as a more refined too at least as far as efficiency is concerned. (read the full article on transparent dynamic reverse proxy with nginx at cmdln.org)

First stable version of a new Linux distro, Kongoni version 1.12.2, launched on July 12th 2009

Is a nice collection of icons for Ubuntu and Gnome

This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices in a round-robin fashion and thus written concurrently) across four single storage servers (running Debian Lenny) 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.

During this time I had already grown extremely comfortable with GNU/Linux. Especially when it came to the text editor tools. I have always been a fan of vim (vi improved); but when I would hop from one platform to the other, I always found myself getting stuck with the way Solaris and now, OpenSolaris default their environment.

Remember Dapper Drake? All the fuss around it, being a LTS (long-term support) release, the three-month delay in order to make things stable, all the forum discussions regarding the 3-month delay in order to polish it well.

During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Frank Karlitschek announced the open-pc initiative. The aim of this ambitious project is to cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community. Read on for more information about this initiative from the team.

I, like most Linux advocates, have demonstrated the power of Linux to people who had no idea such power existed in technology, much less in free technology. When I help them set it up, they get frustrated and quit. These are the problems faced by many a Linux demonstrator.

Computer monitoring systems are used to gather data for the purpose of real-time incident notification, performance analysis, and system health verification. Without such a tool, a system administrator would have to login to each machine to collect information on a regular basis. This kind of repetitive task can be automated using a system monitoring tool.