Showing all newswire headlines

Yes, it's apparently another netbook today on OSNews. Netbooks were supposed to become the major foot in the door, but as soon as Microsoft got off its fat bum and started offering Windows XP to netbook OEMs, the popularity among OEMs of Linux has dwindled; when the netbook surge started, Linux was the operating system of choice among OEMs, but now, the Windows version comes first, and the Linux version later - if at all. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin basically tells OEMs: "Yer doing it wrong".

Where Fedora is, so do they stand: shortly after openSUSE announced its own trademark guidelines, Fedora is coming up with its own variation.

This year NVIDIA has been following the "release early, release often" mantra with it seeming like two weeks can't even go by without seeing a new Linux driver -- whether it's a beta driver, an official driver update, or one of their legacy drivers picking up a few fixes (at times they have even released four drivers at once). On the opposite spectrum, AMD continues with monthly Catalyst driver updates on both Linux and windows. Rather than a continual stream of new public driver releases, AMD maintains a private beta program for their Catalyst Linux driver. This private program is made up of AMD developers, hardware vendors, users of different Linux distributions, other Linux vendors, and end-users. Phoronix has been apart of this program for years, but those testing this driver are under a strict Non-Disclosure Agreement with AMD regarding pre-releases of their Linux software. Today, however, AMD has decided to declassify some information pertaining to its Linux Graphics Driver Beta Program.

The SoC is an effort that first started in 2005 as an effort to get student involved in open source code development. Google provides a stipend to the student and to the mentoring organization that helps the student. The SoC started off in 2005 with an allocation for 200 students and a budget of $1 million, which ultimately grew to 410 students that same year. In 2008 it grew to a staggering 1,125 students which totaled an open source cash infusion of at least $5.6 million dollars. 2009 is a recession year -- even for Google, so initially (at least), Google is capping the number of students for the SoC at 1,000.

Linux sound software has been the foundation of my music studio since the late 1990s, but as we all know, that software won't produce so much as a peep without the right hardware. Setting up a stable Linux system for audio production can be problematic enough, and the wrong decision about your hardware can render your otherwise powerful system mute and tuneless. This article briefly describes some of the audio production hardware I've acquired and employed here at Studio Dave during the last ten years. I hope that my readers find this information helpful when making their own decisions about their audio hardware purchases.

The French Gendarmerie's gradual migration to a complete open source desktop and web applications has saved millions of euro, says Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard. "This year the IT budget will be reduced by 70 percent. This will not affect our IT systems." Guimard this Thursday in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands gave a presentation on the move from a Microsoft-based to an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based desktop. The Lieutenant-Colonel was one of the keynote speakers at an annual conference organised by NOiV, the Dutch national resource centre on open source and open standards. Most of these savings are on proprietary software licences. Up until 2004 the Gendarmerie acquired 12.000 to 15.000 licences annually. In 2005 it bought just 27. "Since July 2007 we have bought two hundred Microsoft licences. If one of us wants a new PC, it comes with Ubuntu. This encourages our users to migrate." Guimard estimates Gendarmerie since 2004 has saved 50 million euro on licences for standard office applications, hardware and maintenance.

Wolfram Alpha can promise all it likes, but ultimately it has to deliver. Which is where things get a little sticky, because at the moment Wolfram Alpha remains firmly behind closed doors and not open to public scrutiny. There is no demo, there is no public beta of the alpha.

I'm a Thinkpad fan from way back, though anymore I think it's a misplaced loyalty because Lenovo treats Linux like the perv uncle and keeps it hidden away, and plasters "We recommend Windows!" all over the place. It took some detective work to find the S-series IdeaPad netbooks on Lenovo.com, and forget finding one with Linux. I about Googled my fingers off and found a number of reviews and announcements that claimed it had either SUSE Linux or Linpus Linux options, but I never found them. In fact I am getting very tired of vendors who claim to love the penguin and Free/Open Source software, and then make it impossible to actually purchase any OEM Linux computers. That is why I stick with independent vendors like ZaReason. They tell the truth.

Vyatta has been offering an open source alternative to proprietary networking gear since 2006, and with the new release is aiming to expand its share. The new Vyatta release comes as the big networking vendors Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Juniper roll out new silicon to provide greater high-end capacity and network performance. Vyatta, however, isn't necessarily after the high-end of the market. "The ultra high end of the market will always be silicon switching," Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy and marketing at Vyatta told InternetNews.com. "The question is how far can go with software."

More than 100 people showed up for Saturday's Rewired State, held at the Guardian's Kings Cross offices (and to meetings in Brighton and Manchester), to prove that they could do a better job than the government of making government information usable by the public.

It appears that the Android OS has two distinct purposes, one for the mobile phone and one for the netbook. If Google moves Android to a netbook, it begins the move from being a pure cloud vendor to the desktop. And Microsoft and Apple should be worried.

Unlike virt-manager, virt-install is a command line tool that allows you to create KVM guests on a headless server. You may ask yourself: "But I can use vmbuilder to do this, why do I need virt-install?" The difference between virt-install and vmbuilder is that vmbuilder is for creating Ubuntu-based guests, whereas virt-install lets you install all kinds of operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and distributions in a guest, just like virt-manager. This article shows how you can use it on an Ubuntu 8.10 KVM server.

Free software is great. Almost everyone using a computer will agree. If it's Firefox, AVG, GIMP, Cinelerra, or GNU/Linux as the entire operating system itself. People agree it's great. With these four programs being among the best, and most used. How much would you pay for these programs if they weren't free? Here is our personal answer to that question.

At first glance, the Openbravo World Conference is a small open source event with modest goals. But take a closer look, and you’ll see the open source IT channel’s continued emergence. In fact, even IBM and Oracle are joining Openbravo’s party. Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

The headline act, if you will, was announced this morning for the third annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, and it promises to be an interesting show: the Foundation's Jim Zemlin, Microsoft's Sam Ramji, and Sun's Ian Murdock, each giving their respective futures on the future of the operating system they represent - and, I expect, the others' as well.

Originally from Cape Town, Stevan Lockhart now lives in the north west of Scotland in a house that is off the electricity grid. Using a wind generator, some solar panels and free and open source software he and his wife both run their businesses off just 20W of power. Here Stevan explains the software and hardware decisions that made this lifestyle possible.

Version 9.3 of the proprietary Linux graphics drivers from AMD, known as Catalyst or "fglrx", will be the last to support the R300, R400 and R500 series GPUs, used for example on Radeon models 9500 to X1950. In distinction to the Windows drivers, which are also losing support for older graphic chips, AMD plans no further maintenance for a legacy series of the Linux drivers. So AMD staff are advising Linux users who have such Radeon GPUs to change over to the open source drivers "radeon" or "radeonhd".

I recently downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 5, “Jaunty Jackalope,” to see for myself what’s in the works for the next release of Ubuntu, set to come out in stable form on April 23. Here are some observations, with screenshots, from my post on WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

If you work with open source software, you have less to worry about in the current economic downturn, according to John Todd of Digium — the company behind the Asterisk telephony platform. Todd presented his ideas at SCALE in Los Angeles, arguing that many of the same factors that put jobs and revenue at risk in the proprietary software industry actually benefit open source projects and, by extension, provide job security for developers, implementers, and consultants who work with open source.

Tom Wickline pointed out that it has been 8 months since I had put out a road map. So I thought I'd take some time to review what we've accomplished in these past 8 months, and what we hope to accomplish through the rest of the year.