Showing all newswire headlines

For the past month or so I have been reading of the potential acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. I have seen this dubbed as the Blue Sun. After a month of negotations it now looks like this may be a reality. What does the future hold if and when this pushes through? What are we to expect?

Novell's SUSE Linux Desktop 11 promises support, seamless interoperability with Windows networks, an attractive price tag, and a lot of value. Paul Ferrill takes a close look to see if it lives up to its promises.

Last year, Verizon Wireless said the Linux-based LiMo platform would be its preferred phone OS. However, CEO Lowell McAdam recently downplayed that possibility. LiMo will still be a long-term contender for Verizon phones, but it will not be favored over other platforms. Verizon's goal, he said, is to whittle down the number of OSes it supports from eight or nine to three or four.

Tune-in to Frugal Friday's new one-hour format. 30 minutes of news and commentary followed by a 30 minute interview.

Google entered the mobile telephony market with high hopes – now, however, its Director of Mobile Platforms, Andy Rubin, concedes that the company has had a bumpy start. Speaking from Google headquarters in Mountain View, Rubin said the first version of the Android operating system, whose development was spearheaded by Google, was initially a "version 0.8" rather than a full "version 1.0,". The Taiwanese vendor HTC released the G1 smartphone with Android software in the UK in November 2008. The phone is currently available exclusively from T-Mobile. Rubin says that, following several updates, the operating system has become "very solid".

Here's some recent updates for those of you too busy to hit F5 on Freshmeat every 10 seconds. Ardour 2.8 is now available featuring track and bus templates, distributable VST support and AudioUnit state saving -- stuff which has to be cool if you're into digital audio. Gnumeric 1.9.5 brings everyone's favourite non-OOo spreadsheet closer to 2.0 with bugfixes en masse, while HardInfo 0.5 displays a shedload more details about your system, and remains the essential fact-gathering tool when you need to get Linux help. Some more updates after the break.

So the new Sugar on a Stick v0.84 is out and I gave it a try on the XO, installing the suggested Windows XP version.

With its open source operating system, the OpenMoko Project was once the pride of the community. Now, however, development of the new model will cease.

According to Canonical head honcho Mark Shuttleworth, Windows 7 presents the ideal opportunity for Linux to gain significant inroads into the desktop market. He said so in an interview with InternetNews. While I certainly do hope so, an eerie sense of deja vu creeps up on me: isn't this like the 923298th opportunity where Linux is supposed to make inroads into the desktop market?

The other day a friend came to me with a problem, he had been surfing the internet for information about the conficker worm virus. As he misspelled the name as configer virus he didn't find a lot of real information on this virus. What he did find was a lot of links to site which were indicated by google as harmful to your computer. You know the kind where google says near the link: This site can harm your computer.

Although there has been plenty of blogosphere gossip regarding the monetisation of Twitter, the hugely popular social networking in 140 characters service, not a great deal of sense has been spoken. Until now. It would appear that an acquisition of Twitter by no less than Google is on the cards. Now that is an exit strategy guaranteed to get the dollar signs flashing. How many dollars? “Well north of the $250 million valuation” that Twitter saw in recent funding according to TechCrunch which broke the story.

Now I full well realize that much of the open source software is better than proprietary software, and I know that it can be much cheaper to rely on open source solutions than to enter into a license agreement for proprietary software. But where is that going to lead us? Once mighty Sun Microsystems is hanging on for dear life, and is that who you want to be relying on to provide service for your customized open source solutions? What if Sun simply disappears?

I love finding new music, Last.fm can be useful for that but like a lot of web services it doesn’t give much away about how it works internally. Now there are plans afoot to create a completely free (as in freedom) alternative called Libre.fm. I got more information from project instigator Matt Lee (FSF)

Since free software and other free culture products are formed by an organic, incrementalist process, they tend to be highly organic in their design as well. Free software is not so much built as it is grown. Thus, when considering a new project, you must think not about how to break it down into implementable chunks that can be assembled into a working product, but rather about how the project can organically grow—moving from working product to working product as it does so—becoming progressively more useful as it is developed. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Autoresponse is an autoresponder for the Postfix MTA. It allows you to create autoresponder messages for email accounts from the shell and also by emailing the autoresponder text to a certain email address.

I never liked the terms "upload" and "download". I think "inload" and "outload" might be better, just because they don't carry implications of subordination or unequal required effort. As it happens most of our home connections are asymmetrical: much higher coming in than going out.Om Malik reports how poorly his "high speed" connection works for backup over the Net: approximately 90Kbps on the outbound, even though the inbound is around 9Mbps — the claimed speed for Covad's ADSLs+ connection was "up to 15Mbps". I'm not sure why his connection is so slow. Is all ADSL sucky as well as asymmetrical? I dunno. I've never had ADSL.

According to a report in the New York Times today, Intel's Moblin project is to move under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation. The Moblin project is designed to provide an open source Linux based operating system that supports Intel's Atom processors and that can be used on a variety of hardware from netbooks to in-car systems. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation says the move is "a departure for Intel" noting that Intel "has the resources and the internal staff to create innovative technology on their own". Zemlin believes Intel sees Moblin as a strategic platform and wants to open up the project by placing it in neutral hands.

Microsoft has published its .NET architectural pattern under an OSI-approved open-source license to a mixed reception. The company's ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), released at Mix 09 just last month, has been published under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).

This is an overview of 5 most popular applications for ripping DVDs in Linux: dvd::rip, K9Copy, AcidRip, thoggen and HandBrake.

As GCC nears its 4.4 release, there are a number of criteria that need to be met before it can be released. Those requirements—regressions requiring squashing—have been met, but things are still stalled. A number of issues were raised with the changes to the runtime library exemption that have caused the release, and a branch that will allow new development into the GCC tree, to be delayed until that is resolved. In the meantime, however, GCC development is hardly standing still, there are numerous interesting ideas floating around for new features.