Showing all newswire headlines

Not long ago I reviewed Songbird 0.7.0, and in the meantime version 1.0.0 is out. What are the new features Songbird comes with and what improvements over the previous releases features 1.0? Well, to begin with, I was extremely impressed in a pleasant way with this Songbird release, so let me tell you why. Songbird is an audio player and music collection manager built using XUL, the same language used by Firefox. Songbird is available on all the three major platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows.

Ubuntu Podcast Episode #18 covers the big Dell college student story, the famous laptop killing bug, and cultural differences between Debian and Ubuntu. We also interview Jorge Castro, who manages external developer relations for Canonical.

So here we are, entering another year — and no doubt at some point during this year, more than one person will declare it the “year of the Linux desktop”. Of course it won’t happen and those who consider themselves free software opponents will soon let us know. Some things will never change. That said, is there any reason to suspect it might be different this year? Is it possible that the current economic climate is better placed to generate a significant growth in free desktops? Can the cloud of economic gloom have a silver lining for free software?

I haven't written a long, rambling editorial on why I do what I do in quite some time. Guess I lost the juice for it. But I just got rejuiced (perhaps it's my upcoming speaking engagement, for which I'll sound less rambling, I hope), so here's a lovely stream of geeky consciousness on why software freedom and/of choice is a great thing.

Microsoft today laid off 1,400 workers, with another 3,600 on the block within 18 months. We asked Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin what if any role Linux played in Microsoft's misfortunes, how Microsoft will react, and what it could mean for Linux and the open source community.

This router builds on the great lineage it has in its predecessors and shines ahead with being much more than a router, rather a complete headless linux PC. In most routers/modems, if you forget the password to your web-administration gui, the only option left is to reset the router, thereby losing all your settings etc. But not so with this little beast.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, January 22, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 46. In today's newscast, we explore whether Obama means a change to FOSS, look into a Gaza OLPC giveaway, learn that there's more to a job than cool stuff, consider an open betrayal, look to the clouds for FOSS developers, and wonder what makes a company's worth on that old stock market.

The recent news that Identi.ca, called by some an open source twist on Twitter, had received funding got me wondering about how active big names in the open source world are on Twitter itself.

Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to version 5.3 with added support for new Intel Nehalem hardware and including new Java, clustered file system and security tools. Sean Michael Kerner reports on this, and a batch of other new updates.

KDE 3.5.x comes with Konqueror as the default file manager and it is still used in distributions like Debian (the upcoming Lenny release) or older Kubuntu releases, like the LTS 8.04 version. In this article I will show three tips (which I consider popular) for tweaking or working with this older version of Konqueror.

All of this apologetic crud makes me very grumpy. It's like Linux has low self-esteem and is constantly fishing for compliments. "Oh I know I have all these rough edges and you'll probably hate me. But I have Compiz bling if that makes any difference. And I'm free, as in no cost! I won't bore you with nonsense about freedom because what you want to hear is free and easy! If that matters...no, I guess not, you still hate me. It's OK, I understand."

Logitech's Squeezebox Boom streams music from your PC to anywhere the Boom can find your wireless network, and it also accepts wired Ethernet. Anything you can play on your PC will probably play on the Boom. It even supports Linux. Joseph Moran gives us a tour of this small but feature-packed digital audio player.

This is a great time for the Gates Foundation to embrace Linux, bringing the value of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to people who might otherwise not hear its value. For the past 10 years the Gates Foundation has expanded access to technology by delivering Windows computers to public libraries. Wouldn't it be cool for the next 10 years for the Gates Foundation to deliver new Ubuntu systems for public access use at these same libraries?

According to Ahrens, Zimory could not have been built without open source. But a basis in open source also helps to grow use of the public cloud itself, he added. "The Zimory Agent needs to be widely distributed, as many organization that run the open source hypervisors do not have sophisticated management frameworks," Ahrens said. "Therefore, it is key for us that we can distribute our Agent through the open source community."

It would appear that Gary McKinnon has won yet more time before he gets extradited to the US to face the music on charges of hacking into computer systems not only belonging to NASA but also the US Army, Navy and Department of Defence. And all of this right after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

One of the most popular programs for blogs and even content management is Wordpress. What makes Wordpress so popular is the ease of use, flexibility in set up and great support. Wordpress does an excellent job at providing documentation and options for everyday use.

Sun cofounder Scott NcNealy has submitted a paper to the new U.S. administration about the cost savings and security benefits of Open Source software.

Earlier this week we delivered results from a comparison between the Catalyst and X.Org Radeon drivers looking at the R500 2D performance. With a lot of interest having been generated from that, we have now carried out the same set of tests again but this time using an ATI Radeon HD 4850 (RV770) graphics card and the experimental EXA support.

The Houston crew (including the editor of this site) are joining together to host an entire conference devoted to FOSS in Healthcare in Houston, TX Summer of 09 (July 31st - Aug 2nd)

The open-source g-Eclipse project has had it's first major release. It started over two years ago with the support of the European Union initiative; with further development now under the umbrella of the Eclipse foundation and other European projects. Version 1.0 of g-Eclipse has been released with support for grid middleware solutions g-Lite, GRIA and Amazon's Cloud storage platforms, EC2 and S3.