Showing all newswire headlines

The latest release of Postgres has a slew of built-in features that allow you to improve both performance and systems administration. Learn how you take advantage of them.

How to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop and Server editions and Ubuntu Netbook Remix, continuing Ubuntu’s tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.This tutorial will explain how to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) released on the 23rd March 2009.

As we reported in December, the Nouveau driver is available in Ubuntu 9.04. Unlike Fedora 11 where the Nouveau driver is being enabled by default on NVIDIA hardware, the Nouveau driver will be an after-installation option to Ubuntu users. In this article are the simple steps on how to enabled the Nouveau driver in Ubuntu and what you can expect from this open-source, community-spawned graphics driver.

uSbuntu Live Creator is a free software for Windows that allows you to create a bootable USB stick with Ubuntu 8.10 on it. This software also offers a new option for virtualization to run Ubuntu directly into Windows and without any setup or installation - this is done by using a portable version of VirtualBox. uSbuntu Live Creator not only supports Ubuntu 8.10, but also Kubuntu 8.10 and Xubuntu 8.10.

Based on ncurses, MOC (music on console) is a popular, text-based audio player which can play various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, MP4, WMA and WAV. The release I'm going to talk about in this article is 2.5.0-alpha3, as it comes with Debian Lenny.

Sun Microsystems has released a new version of its OpenSSO Express identity management solution with support for Google Apps Premier. OpenSSO Express is targeted at companies and organisations that rely on Google's software-as-a-service solution (SaaS) as their central communications platform. With it individuals can use a cross-company single sign-on (SSO) to access the web, mail and other applications.

A salesperson walks into your office today and tells you that you have to buy a new, pre-built, expensive desk for every one of your employees. You have to buy a new desk today and replace it every three to five years. Additionally, there are no options for the desk and you may not alter it in any way — one desk is all we make and you have to buy it from us. You see, you don't really own the desk; you're simply purchasing a license to use the desk. Chairs are sold separately and we have the corner on the market for chairs that are 100 percent compatible with the desk. The chairs are also very expensive. Does that sound like a scenario in which you wish to participate? Preposterous, you say? Is it? Now, what if I told you that you do have a choice of desks?

Having some scripting skills opens up a whole new world of creativity and time-saving hacks. In Linux, UNIX, Free/Open/Net/BSD, and other UNIX-type operating systems the command shell and scripting tools are fundamental parts of the operating system. Learning how to write your own simple scripts isn't that hard, especially when you have a great teacher. Here is a handy reference of some of the excellent howtos by Akkana Peck and Juliet Kemp on LinuxPlanet.

According to this press release: "Washington, D.C. —Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV today introduced legislation that will facilitate nationwide adoption of electronic health records, particularly among small, rural providers. The Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009 will build upon the successful use of “open source” electronic health records by the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the “open source exchange model,” which was recently expanded among federal agencies through the Nationwide Health Information Network-Connect initiative..."

Today is the big day you have been waiting for, the day where Ubuntu 9.04 is released. I hope you have successfully downloaded the LiveCD and installed it on your system. For those who have difficulties installing or migrating to Ubuntu, we thought this would be a good time to bring a nice little cheat sheet/installation guide for all MakeTechEasier readers.

There is a lot of untapped server utilization resulting from the inability to live-migrate VMs quickly. A technology I've been developing (MemoryMotion™) greatly accelerates migration time and lets server utilization rates be pushed up from 60 to 90%. This enables far greater ROI and improvements in power consumption.

Great collection of usual, and unusual, Linux logos.

Earlier this week I discussed some of the challenges that OLPC faces with regard to the announcement of the XO-1.5. However I believe that Sugar Labs will also have to deal with some interesting challenges as result of this announcement. For Sugar Labs the XO-1.5 will mainly be yet another device that they'll want to support given that it's likely to be one of the best choices when it comes to low-cost portable hardware for developing countries. However given the pitiful state of Sugar 0.84 on the XO-1 hardware (check mavrothal's forum comments for more information) - which won't be improved until Fedora 12 is released in autumn - I remain skeptical of just how well Sugar will run on the XO-1.5.

It's that time again, ladies and gents & mdash; time for the biannual release of a new Ubuntu version. This time it's the Jaunty Jackalope, officially Ubuntu 9.04, rolling off the line, and bringing with it a fresh new set of features users have been longing for. Prime among the features being touted by the Ubuntu camp are improvements in speed, perhaps rather fitting for a release named for the jackalope. Boot speed is reportedly greatly improved, as low as twenty-five seconds in some cases. Hibernation and suspend/resume have been enhanced, including immediate availability post-hibernation. Those we spoke to noted an impressive improvement in boot speed, significant even for virtual machines, as well as dramatic speed improvements in finding and connecting to wireless networks.

The annual Linux kernel summit may gain the most attention, but the size of the kernel community makes it hard to get deeply into subsystem-specific topics at that event. So, increasingly, kernel developers gather for more focused events where some real work can be done. One of those gatherings is the Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop; the 2009 workshop began on April 6. Here is your editor's summary of the discussions which took place on the first day.

The Internet Systems Consortium has announced that it has received enough support from sponsors to launch the BIND 10 project, to create a replacement name server for BIND 9. BIND 9 began its development in 1998 and is the most widely used DNS server software on the Internet. Among the sponsors are the UK's Nominet and Germany's DENIC.

Linux ordinarily uses Cron to automatically perform routine system maintenance, such as rotating log files and updating spam filtering rules. This works well for servers and other systems that are powered on 24/7. If, however, you want to save power by shutting off the computer when it's not in use, as is common for desktop and laptop systems, Cron can't run. Not running Cron routinely can result in monstrously large log files and other problems. The Anacron utility provides a solution, enabling the computer to run regular maintenance jobs whenever the computer is powered on, even if those times are unpredictable.

The VAR Guy double-checked this rumor and got confirmation: Diskeeper may leap beyond Windows to offer disk defragmentation software on Linux and Mac OS X. What’s motivating the potential Diskeeper moves? Here’s the scoop.

Finally we have a stable, official release of GCC 4.4. This major update to the GNU Compiler Collection brings forth Graphite, which is a framework for providing loop optimizations and eventually will be used to provide automatic parallelization support...

The Ubuntu development team this afternoon announced the final release of Ubuntu 9.04, the latest version of its desktop operating system. This latest release of Ubuntu includes a number of new features including improved graphics, a better notification system and new cloud computing capabilities.