Showing all newswire headlines

Ubuntu Podcast #22 covers the Florida Linux Show, Jaunty Alpha 6 released, Ubuntu Case badges, Ubuntu Forums Beginners Team and Ubuntu Classroom Team offering sessions on securing Ubuntu, John Dvorak plugs Ubuntu, and interview with David Thomas of the New Mexico LoCo, discussing New Mexico Linux Fest and Endorphin Power Company.

Thanks to the installation script by Ignacio Valdes and the patch by Kevin Toppenburg for his GUI Configuration tool, I was able to install WorldVista on a Moka5 virtual machine based on PCLinuxOS-2007. I did this for my own interest, and I know there are other demos and virtual appliances available for VISTA, but Moka5 makes it very easy to install and run a pre-configured WorldVista server, so I thought I'd share it, in case anyone else is interested. I also have some links to a pre-configured version of the CPRSChart and GUIConfig front ends that should be able to connect to the server if run on the same machine hosting the Moka5/PCLinuxOS-2007 virtual machine.

Earlier this week Google had published their list of 2009 Summer of Code projects and FFmpeg was among them. Last week we published an interview with the FFmpeg developers where we learned more about their v0.5 release and other topics like OpenCL, Blu-ray, and multi-threading. Since running that interview, where it was found that Blu-ray wasn't actively being worked on due in part to a lack of hardware, a number of readers have stepped up and offered Blu-ray drives and media to help developers, which may result in Blu-ray support coming sooner rather than later.

For fun a few interesting screenshots of e17 rigs that readers might like. Note that the resolution is by todays standard primitive but on purpose: it shows the power and configurability of e. So enjoy this little side tripe and if well received perhaps more will come with other environments or just plain window managers.

It would be an understatement to say that Microsoft's patent suit against Dutch GPS vendor company TomTom has been closely watched. Why? Because Microsoft alleges that several of the patents at issue are infringed by TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel. In this first month of the dispute, the most urgent question has been this: will TomTom fight or fold?

Users of the Linux operating system have been enjoying multiple desktop capabilities for many years already, and they are about to experience the next step of the multiple desktop paradigm evolution. So why are multiple desktops useful and how much do they really help?

If IBM actually were to buy Sun Microsystems Inc., the world's largest maker of Unix servers would take over the No. 2 vendor. Unix servers may not be getting as much attention as Sun's Java and MySQL technologies are in merger-speculation land, but it is the Unix market that could put the prospective deal on the radar of regulators. An acquisition of Sun would give IBM nearly two-thirds of the worldwide Unix server market, according to research firm IDC. IBM sold $6.4 billion worth of Unix servers last year, for a 37.2% market share, while Sun's sales amounted to $4.8 billion, for a 28.1% share, IDC said. Trailing behind in third place was Hewlett-Packard Co., with $4.6 billion in sales and a 26.5% market share; after HP, the rest of the vendors counted by IDC had single-digit shares at best.

I was pointed recently to Zappos as a near-perfect example of a company that brings the principles of open source to business. Its site is inventive and fancy (as you'd expect a clothing retailer to be), but not a triumph of design over utility. What's more, it's fast. I can check Web site responsiveness with some confidence, because our little apartment near Boston has 20Mb/s symmetrical service from Verizon FiOS (that's fiber, and pretty cheap, considering), and the speeds I get at the office I share at Harvard are more than twice that.

Data and personal content exists in many different silos across the Internet, amd getting them all into a single interface and sharing them is no easy task. One potential solution to the problem is set to be demonstrated next week by open source software vendor Open-Xchange with an approach that uses semantic microformats as a mechanism for sharing and publishing data in a collaborative manner.

The Netfilter development team's Patrick McHardy has released an alpha version of nftables, a new firewall implementation for the Linux kernel, with a user space tool for controlling the firewall. nftables introduces a fundamental distinction between the user space defined rules and network objects in the kernel: the kernel component works with generic data such as IP addresses, ports and protocols and provides some generic operations for comparing the values of a packet with constants or for discarding a packet.

Sun Microsystems has began the deployment of South Africa's largest supercomputer, a 27Teraflop system that runs a suite of open source software. The system is the second phase of a multi-million rand project that was awarded to Sun last year and will be housed at the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) in Cape Town.

A bunch of Microsoft Windows users were asked just why don't they use Linux. What's wrong with Linux? What needs to change to entice them? And I'll tell you! The results are a list of gripes and grievances and make an insightful collection of matters that really need to be fixed or better explained.

Ubuntu 9.04 will be released towards the end of next month and it is picking up the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.26, and other improvements like install-time support for the EXT4 file-system and some subtle improvements. When it comes to the X.Org side it is shipping with X Server 1.6 and the stabilized version of Mesa 7.3. Specifically in regards to the ATI Linux graphics, it will be shipping with an updated xf86-video-ati driver by default and Catalyst 9.4 will be an option for the user. With Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 6 having been released last week, we have run a few benchmarks comparing the open-source ATI performance in Ubuntu 8.10 and Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 6.

The Directors of The HeliOS Project are proud to announce that they are now an Associate Project of Software in the Public Interest.

Since version 4.8, OpenSSH supports chrooting, so no patches are needed anymore. This tutorial describes how to give users chrooted SSH access. With this setup, you can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of. I will also show how to use chrooted SFTP.

Cisco's Unified Computing announcement makes it clear that data center players must offer converged solutions. A likely quick response will be M&A and deep partnerships. Red Hat is key in the virtualization space.

As a freelancer, you don’t have to fork over expensive commercial software: there are plenty high-quality open source applications and utilities that can help you to run your daily business smoothly.

The most recent changes to Xen Unstable now allow to load Solaris Nevada and opensolaris 2008.11 PV DomUs with ZFS image via pygrub. Actually, Xen Unstable Dom0 with Suse’s 2.6.27 xen-ified kernel or standard 2.6.18 kernel will behave the same way.Moreover, install xen-ified kernel seems to be a preferable option due to 2.6.29-rc7 is under heavy development in meantime. My choice of pvops kernel for Dom0 is targeting test purposes first of all.

IPv6 support under YaST is not upto date. You need to manually edit the configuration files. This is NOT recommended as YaST may get confused later on. This tutorial covers both command line and persistence IPv6 networking configuration option under Suse Enterprise Linux version 10.x.

Interesting but, hopefully, old Linux fun animation :)