Showing all newswire headlines

In the UK, it's a public holiday, and The H's editor in chief has been watching a movie and wondering if the Star Trek universe is a useful model for the future of open source... A hostile species finds its source of power destroyed. In an attempt to find détente, it reaches out to the alliance which has defended the freedom of many of other species against the hostile species' own aggressive acts for decades. This is the opening of Star Trek VI, The Undiscovered Country, but it could also easily be the recent history of Microsoft, open source and Linux.

In February, the Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (Bundesamt für Bauten und Logistik, or BBL) sealed a deal with Microsoft for an estimated 35-million-dollars worth of licenses. Red Hat, along with 17 other Open Source enterprises, has filed an official complaint.

Microsoft is poised to release its latest search offering Bing to the world and hopes to prop it up with an $80 million ad campaign. I don't see ads substantially changing consumer behavior and it's ultimately throwing good money after bad.

LXer Feature: 25-May-2009

Wine, you can't live with or without it, it seems, the Berkeley Linux Users Group put up a great review of Mephisto Backup v1.5, Juliet Kemp shows one way to protect your root password, and it looks like Sugar is ultimately going to win because no one is buying XO's with XP on them apparently. Google Chrome 2.0 was released this past week, its amazing to me that Chrome already has twice the browser market share than Opera but then we all know about market share statistics don't we?

Intel on Tuesday gave the first preview of its next-generation Atom chip, with a more integrated design intended to improve performance and energy efficiency. The company also launched the beta of version 2.0 of the Linux-based Moblin netbook platform, with a new interface. The upcoming Atom chip, code-named 'Pineview', incorporates the memory controller and graphics chip onto a the same silicon as the processor, a more efficient design that should lower costs for system builders, lower energy consumption and improve performance, Intel said.

A widespread project to equip Spanish primary students with laptops was under attack by the free software community for being an undercover operation from Microsoft to take over the educational system in the country. Now the government is considering a kind of dual booting system.

During the Ubuntu Developer Summit (May 25-29, Barcelona), Canonical’s Netbook team is set to show Google Android applications running on Ubuntu, according to sources that will attend the conference. Why is Canonical so intrigued by Google’s mobile operating system?

Hacker groups have reported that man-in-the-middle attacks can be used to strip away the benefits of SSL security when transacting online. However, says the inventor of SSL, these are a browser problem and, moreso, they're not so black and white.

The team behind the Puppy Linux project has released the first maintenance release of Puppy Linux 4.2, version 4.2.1. Puppy Linux provides a very small, yet complete Linux desktop, with a lot of useful applications, many supported hardware devices and a pleasant user interface.

This one is strictly for the hardcore fan - for the very first time, it says here, you have the chance to purchase a giant poster showing the history and development of Unix. That's right - this 40 foot poster includes over 1,000 versions of 150 different types of Unix. Backed with fractal art by Alan Tenant, the poster is based on Eric Levenez's diagram of the heavy duty operating system.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 2 on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

In his recent blog post, Maddog gives some insight in his very personal computer history of the last forty years: "when I was moving toward graduation, I had a professor seriously tell me "Jon, you will never be able to make a living writing software." I am still trying to find out if he was correct."

Welcome to this year's 21st issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Three weeks ago Mandriva Linux 2009.1 was released. This distribution has a well-earned reputation for being both user-friendly and flexible and this week we take what turns out to be a somewhat surprising first look at the latest Mandriva release. In the news section, Slackware Linux finally opens a 64-bit branch of its development tree, Moblin 2.0 impresses the reviewers with a refreshing user interface design, Ubuntu reveals a change in video architecture for the upcoming version 9.10, Debian changes its archive signing key, and Fedora considers mailing list moderation in response to some unruly behaviour of its users. Also in this issue, a round-up of news from vendors preparing Linux-based solutions for mobile devices and an interesting new way of installing Arch Linux - via an unofficial live CD. Finally, if you have a package that you think DistroWatch should track, don't miss your chance to suggest it - this week only! All this and more in this week's issue, enjoy the read!

Finally, a Holiday ASCII art post that isn't a day late!

There is no doubt the web is a powerful tool. And when this emerging social element is added it only creates more connectivity, virality and overall engagement with those who use it. This modern web is all about people, this is why we call it a "social web." Without people connecting, collaborating and engaging with one another the modern web wouldn't exist.

Mid-April, the four founders of The Pirate Bay were found guilty of being accessories to breaching copyright law; they aided in breaching copyright of 33 files. As a result, they were sentenced to one year in jail and a 2.75 million EUR fine. However, it was quickly revealed that the judge in the case was heavily biased, and ever since then there's been a search for a judge who is actually not involved with any pro-copyright groups or with the lawyers working for the entertainment industry in this case. Turns out that's actually kind of hard.

Kpackagekit is the default package manager on Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)..These are some first impressions and troubleshoots..

A well tagged MP3 collection makes everything from organization to playback easier. Keep reading for a closer look at your fellow readers' favorite tools for cleaning up their MP3 tags in this week's Hive Five. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite tools for tagging your MP3 files. We've rounded up the top six rather than five—thanks to a particularly close call among the top candidates—and we're back to share and help you pick a program to get your MP3s in order.

[The third player listed there is a Linux version of. - Scott]

The Offline Update script collection, published by The H's sister publication in Germany, c't, and Torsten Wittrock, has been updated to version 6.0. Offline Update helps manage delivering the latest security updates to Windows PCs without lengthy downloads. The latest version, 6.0, contains updates for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and their 64 bit versions where available. The scripts can also be used to freshen up Microsoft Office 2000, 2003, XP and 2007.

The US Army has opted to form a strategic alliance with Vista by migrating all of its Windows-based computers.. The systems change, which will include upgrading from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007, has been ordered so as to “bolster Internet security” and standardise information systems.