Showing all newswire headlines

Nearly a year ago we reported on two new games coming to Linux: Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor. These games were developed by Frozenbyte, a relatively unheard of Finnish game studio, and both are third person shooters with a sci-fi setting. These two games were supposed to be released for Linux (they are already available for Windows platforms) by last Spring, but that never came to fruition. In August we were then told that things were held up due to publisher negotiations, but that beta testing would hopefully start in a week or two. Well, we never ended up seeing any beta or any other word from Frozenbyte or IGIOS (the company originally hired to port these two titles to Linux).

If these don't get your spirits up, you may be dead inside ;)

Version 6.0 of Knoppix is a complete rebuild from scratch and is based on Debian/lenny (draft). It incorporates a new boot procedure with highly parallelised hardware detection and configuration, using LXDE as the default desktop and includes the newly released OpenOffice 3.0.1. Also included in the release is Firefox 3.0.5. Due to space limitations on the CD some applications previously included have now been removed, however these removals are not listed in the change-log.

In this podcast, Fonality CEO Chris Lyman describes competition with Digium, his views on contributing to Asterisk, and the IP PBX market for partners. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy's site.

I was going ask you for your take on what will be this year’s marketing trend to boost sales. We have seen things like green computing and virtualization and the ever popular security (pick your favorite subtopic – USB data slurping, laptop encryption, firewalls etc), or whether Linux is for smart people but I was talking with a couple of friends, both technical and end user and ended up shaking my head.

Linux has a multitude of handy specialized commands and fast ways to do things. Juliet Kemp shows us how to read compressed files without unpacking them first.

Take a look at this letter from a Microsoft Corporate VP to the company's partners, and you'll see the biggest problem facing Microsoft isn't rivals nor open source. Instead, Microsoft's own marketing and branding has created too many product names and variants for partners to master. Here's the complete Microsoft letter, posted on The VAR Guy.

AMD has just released its first official Catalyst driver update for the new year. AMD had delivered several key improvements to their proprietary Linux driver stack last year as we shared in our AMD Linux 2008 Year in Review, but what's there to get excited about in Catalyst 9.1? Well, first and foremost there is improved Composite support during video playback, Hybrid CrossFire support, and a number of fixes. Oh, and there's also OpenGL 3.0 support!

Wi-Fi networks make an excellent breeding ground for worms and other malware, according to a newly published university study. According to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, four researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington conducted a series of simulated malware attacks on Wi-Fi networks in seven U.S. cities that produced an epidemic spreading to thousands of Wi-Fi routers in less than 24 hours. A simulated attack in New York infected more than 18,000 wireless routers in a two-week time span.

[The FOSS angle? Don't trust closed routers. Grab a copy of Carla's cookbook and build an open, Linux-based access point. -- Sander]

Maybe there a FOSS application that is roughly equivalent to your crucial app, but it needs more developers and documentation writers. So don't sit there crying-- give them some help. That's the beauty of FOSS: if it doesn't exist or needs some help, just roll up your sleeves and pitch in. You'll get there a lot quicker than waiting for the robber barons of tech to have a change of heart.

Microsoft is really going for it, they are trying to mimic the success of Linux and other operating systems which are popular on servers. They are trying to shape new windows based operating systems build for the purpose of running on embedded devices. They are trying to build windows for low end hardware and in the process they are destroying there own business model. It's obvious what is happening here:

The root cause for port mentioned above to run 64-bit Solaris 10U6 HVM on SMP box with several vcpus. Install openssl,x11,gettext,python-devel packages required by Xen and bcc&libc6-dev-i386 via Synaptic Manager.The last two packages are needed to compile “hvmloader” and related binaries.

Does Linux have a destiny or is it at a standstill? Those of you who follow the state of Linux may realize that Linux is now at the precipice or "jumping off place" as an operating system. Linux, to others, is viewed as being at the crossroads for success. What's the difference, for Linux, in teetering at the precipice and standing at the crossroads?

Akkana Peck spent an eventful week trying to see and absorb all of LinuxConf 2009. Executive summary: you want to see real innovation and a desire to get more people involved, as opposed to finding more innovative ways to exploit them, check out Linux.

Every asset in the constraint declaration is restricted to a certain role, and every role ties back to a user or an entity. In this article we will discuss the ways in which authentication and authorization is facilitated in JBoss portal. We will also discuss other aspects related to authentication and user management such as single sign-on.

The government program "Holland Open in Connection" (Nederland Open in Verbinding) and The OpenDoc Society are collaborating on an online document factory to compare office suite applications. The free webservice Officeshots.org will start at the end of next month. Users will be able to compare online the output quality of office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The collaboration was announced during a well visited ODF congress in Maarssen, The Netherlands. The project is financially supported by a one-time funding by the Dutch NLNet Foundation.

[Disclaimer: Your editor is one of the core developers on the Officeshots project -- Sander]

Dvd2Xvid is free opensource simple easy to use utility to convert DVDs into Xvid video formats. dvd2xvid is a simple GUI for MEncoder aimed at converting DVDs to xvid formats.

Which is the best Linux OS? This is of course an unanswerable question, still many people ask themselves this question. Of course they do! They definitely have to. There's nothing as difficult as a world full of choice, especially if you don't happen to have a lot of knowledge about the subject. And when it comes to Linux it will well make a difference you'll carry with you for the rest of your life as a Linux user.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

The past couple days I've been interested in the fastest gtk-engine-theme available to load on my Ubuntu box. I just simply didn't want fast but as elegant as I could get.