Showing all newswire headlines

This week I had the pleasure of taking some personal time to play around with Sun Microsystem’s VirtualBox. What else can I say but, “Wow.” I am impressed with this excellent application. I had downloaded (v2.1.4) and configured it for Fedora Linux on my laptop. It was extremely simple. It came as an rpm and the installation took care of everything, including adding the shortcut launchers in my GNOME menu.

One Laptop Per Child is set to dump x86 processors, instead opting to put low-power Arm-based processors in its next-generation XO-2 laptop with the aim of improving battery life. The nonprofit is "almost" committed to putting the Arm-based chip in the next-generation XO-2 laptop, which is due for release in 18 months, said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC. The XO-1 laptop currently ships with Advanced Micro Devices' aging Geode chip, which is based on an x86 design.

[Well, so much for trying to run Windows on your OLPC :-) - Sander]

Linux is cram-full of all kinds of remote administration utilities, and even the oldtimers such as gdm and kdm are still good and useful. Juliet Kemp shows us how to use kdm and gmd to enable remote graphical desktops on KDE and GNome.

Two years after its last major release, the interesting PCLinuxOS project has quietly posted a major new release. The "pclinuxos-2009.1" download features a 2.6.28.8.tex3 kernel, KDE 3.5.10, and a host of other updates. It is currently difficult to get, however, possibly due to high demand.

Last year, I blogged about 35 Distros and how they got their names. Some of the distros out there have fascinating stories, while others are just too mundane. However make sure you read that blog, its a very interesting one (trust me). The natural extension of the “Etymology of a Distro” blog would be delving deeper into Open Source project’s etymologies. Indeed many readers already suggested that. Sadly I got sidetracked and put the whole idea on the back burner. Now I have put it off for way too long, here are 20 Open Source applications and the interesting (and not so interesting) stories behind their names:

I bought a notebook to be flexible, but when at home I use it with external monitor, keyboard and mouse to be comfortable. Now the problem was, that I couldn't tell Ubuntu that I want to just use the external monitor - but only if it's detected at boot time.

A survey completed by Talend shows that many companies are using more open source data integration to compliment their proprietary data integration solutions. The open source data integration specialist surveyed about 1,000 users through its website. Over half of the responses were from the US and another 35 per cent were from Europe.

Today, Pat Volkerding published a massive amount of package updates to the slackware-current tree. The entry in the Slackware ChangeLog.txt measures more than 200 lines, and is probably the largest update to the development tree ever.

One of the things that disappoints me is the lack of understanding of what's at stake with open source among some of the other open communities. For example, some in the world of open science seem to think it's OK to work with Microsoft, provided it furthers their own specific agenda.

Lest any think that this article is a endorsement for proprietary EMR software, and that requiring EMR purchases to be Affero general public licensed is far fetched, or wrong-headed, think again. The eClinical Works software is Linux-based. That's right. It is a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). It has a proprietary layer. Its under-pinnings are all Free/Open Source licensed and created by those 'amateur, hippies' (sarcasm).

Cisco is venturing into new territory--or are they?

A bug report posted in the bug tracker for the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4, the future standard file system for Linux, available as an option when installing Ubuntu 9.04. The report describes a crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded, resulting in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files.

Google's Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008. This was despite a general slowdown in growth for the entire smartphone sector over the same period.

Earlier this week the FFmpeg project reached version 0.5, which was quite significant considering no new FFmpeg release was made available in years. This release contained a plethora of new encoders and decoders, support for VDPAU, a variety of bug-fixes, and many other improvements. What is next for FFmpeg? When will we see proper Blu-ray support? Will there be a 1.0 release in the foreseeable future? To answer these questions plus others, I spoke with three of the main FFmpeg developers about this very popular -- and important -- open-source multimedia project.

San Francisco (CA) - At the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco on April 8-10, 2009, a meeting of the great OS minds will take place. There, sponsored by Intel, will be assembled together the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft representatives. For the first time ever, the three-way group will sit down at a single table to debate and discuss the future not only of their respective operating systems, but also the OS industry in general. What will come from such a meeting? I believe truly that only God knows.

To quote Wikipedia, "Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. It is used as a "back end" system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites". According to the back cover of this book, "Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices..." Cool. A "something for everybody" book. That's one reason why I included a basic definition of Drupal at the beginning of this review. Apparently, you don't have to be particularly familiar with Drupal to find a use for the Byron, Berry, Haug, Eaton, Walker, and Robbins ("whew") book.

“…almost all of the newest hardware coming out has Linux support. The critical mass has been reached. Go download Ubuntu 8.10 and see for yourself what the fuss is about. You won’t regret it” That’s probably just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from me right? Perhaps so but it’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear from veteran computer journalist John C Dvorak. He has never had much love for Linux and he’s been very critical (some would even say derogatory) in the past. So when someone sent me an email saying he’d been writing about Linux again I groaned to myself and thought “another kicking from the mainstream press just what we need”. I was completely wrong though, he seems to love the latest Ubuntu and is even telling the whole world and his mate to go and try it out. This could have a big effect on the uptake as he’s a guy a lot of people listen to and trust for computer advice. If he says Linux is cool people might actually listen. At least the sort of people who would dismiss me out of hand as a liberal hippie douche. He uses two crucial words "critical mass" but is he right?

Firewall Builder GUI has a built-in revision control system that can be used to keep track of changes in the objects and policy rules. If data file has been added to the revision control system, every time it is saved, the system asks the user to enter a comment that describes changes done in the file in this session and stores it along with the data. The program also assigns new revision number to the data file using standard software versioning system whith major and minor version numbers separated by a dot. When you open this data file next time, the program presents a list of revisions alongside with dates and comments, letting you choose which revision you want to use. You can open the latest revision and continue working with the file from the point where you left off last time, or open one of the older revisions to inspect how the configuration looked like in the past and possibly create a branch in the revision control system. Here we take a closer look at the built-in revision control system.

The Mandriva development team today announced a release candidate for its 2009 Spring release, codenamed Pomerol. Release candidate 1 includes KDE 4.2.1, GNOME 2.25.92, Xfce 4.6, X.org server 1.6, OpenOffice.Org 3.0.1 and the brand-new qt 4.5.0. In addition to features such as Speedboot, included in the beta release last month, 2009 Spring RC1 includes the experimental hybrid ISO technology. Hybrid ISO allows users to dump an ISO image to USB storage devices which can be used to boot additional devices such as netbooks.

Linpus - known from their Linpus Linux pre-installed onto Acer Aspire One Netbooks - announced at the CEBIT they've entered into a strategic partnership with Insyde Software - provider of UEFI firmware -, to improve the boot speed & access to the applications of the Linpus Linux version for netbooks.