Showing all newswire headlines

For those of us who have traveled outside of the world of Microsoft Windows and into UNIX-like operating systems, we should already be somewhat familiar with the X Window System. Some of us even understand its full potential and use it in ways that most have never dreamed of.

VL-Hot, developed for Vector Linux provides an alternative that doesn't require continuous hardware polling. Instead VL-Hot uses udev triggers to pop up the required icons. The Vector Linux developers have VL-Hot working with lightweight window managers like JWM and IceWM provided that the PCMan File Manager is installed. I'm quite surprised that other distributions which aim to be lightweight haven't incorporated VL-Hot.

I know for a fact that either Novell or Red Hat, or perhaps both, will be announcing next week that they'll be shifting their server virtualization offerings from Xen to XenServer. What I don't know is what, if anything, either one of them may be doing beyond that to further their virtualization partnerships with Microsoft. One or the other, however, is going to make a major move. This has been building for some time. Novell, of course, has long had a partnership with Microsoft

I recently joked that we might want to rename OSNews to CourtNews, and with each passing day that silly joke seems to become less silly. This week, it became clear that Psion Teklogix, the company behind various small computing devices back in the '90s, has started an all-out legal offensive to prohibit other companies from using the term "netbook".

The OpenSUSE project, a group that develops a Linux distribution that then feeds into Novell's SUSE Linux, has been hit recently by the layoffs at Novell. Some Novell developers, who were also contributors to the OpenSUSE project, were laid off by the company. This has caused some other contriburors to apparently ask the OpenSUSE board about the future of the project.

Being worked on as part of Mandriva's next Linux distribution update is a technology they are referring to as Speedboot. Speedboot will be officially introduced with Mandriva Linux 2009.1, and compared to the normal boot process, it begins initializing some processes early on while it postpones other tasks until after the graphical display manager has shown. In essence, the user is logging into their Linux desktop even before the system is fully booted. We have some timed results of Mandriva's Speedboot along with videos showing the differences.

Enough with the reading already. These books have pictures. After an exhausting week that isn't over until Sunday Night/Monday Morning, I always like to unwind with some funnies. I found this one over at gocomics.com. It's from a little strip called Adam@home and may be a lot funnier than I think it is ;) I have yet to finish all of them. Lots and lots of words to fuss through ;)

After buying my Asus EEE PC 1000HA, I initially installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. After learning more about (#!) CrunchBang Linux and seeing that they had released an optimized version for the EEE PC called CrunchEEE. I’ve been using CrunchEEE on my EEE PC for the last week and decided to do a review.

Sun Microsystems has announced that in 2009, there will only be a minor release, instead of a major jump from version 6.5 to 7.0, for its open source NetBeans Java development environment. The developers are following their guidelines to release versions that focus on smaller changes and on API compatibility, as intermediate versions.

The Distribution List is a list of users that you can use to send mail to at one time. Instead of having to use CC: or BC: you can have a permanent list to send to. Zimbra offers a graphical interface to accomplish this task. This is a great way to send company mail to one user and it is distributed to the entire staff.

ASUS is considering to install the Linux-based Google Android OS on future Eee PCs.

A new packet capture repository has been launched called pcapr that is sponsored and run by Mu Dynamics. pcapr appears to be a good alternative to OpenPacket and it supports protocol tagging, searching, and packet viewing in the web browser.

Steve Ballmer's deal with the Catalonian government is seen as a leverage against their existing Open Source strategy.

Lucene open source software has provided the building blocks for enterprise search technology for a few years. Now, it has a commercial backer. Lucid Imagination hopes that putting itself out there as the business face of Lucene will convince more enterprises to build software upon it -- especially when budgets tighten and open source becomes a more attractive option.

If Google were to use Qt, things would be much simpler and Chrome would have a unified interface under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. But Google isn't satisfied with Qt. Release of the native Linux version of the Google Chrome browser is still planned for June 2009. Unfortunately, more problems than first anticipated keep cropping up. According to recent OSnews, they mainly have to do with the graphical interface.

Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, just got a promotion to corporate vice president, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Gutierrez, who has taken an increasingly active role in Microsoft's intellectual-property strategy since moving back from Paris a few years ago, where he had served as Microsoft's associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa (and where I first met him for hot chocolate and coffee), is well-known to the open-source crowd for his involvement in Microsoft's accusations in 2007 that Linux violates 235 of Microsoft's patents.

Version 3.0 of the ACCESS Linux Platform has been unveiled at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. The new version offers a richer user interface and compliance with LiMo.

When Red Hat and Microsoft announced a virtualization partnership on Feb. 16, both companies directed most of their messaging to customers. Now, Red Hat is back — promoting the Microsoft relationship to channel partners, and taking a thinly veiled shot at Novell. Here's how.

Perhaps pre-alpha was a bit too early for Mozilla to release its Fennec mobile browser for Windows Mobile. Early adopters who downloaded the application after it was announced Feb. 10 found it essentially doesn't work. "The bad news is the browser is basically useless for many people," Mark Finkle, a Fennec developer, wrote in a blog post describing the problem.

Earlier this month we published an article looking at the Linux versus OpenSolaris performance when using the new AMD Shanghai Opteron CPUs. Ubuntu Linux was faster than OpenSolaris 2008.11 in nearly all of the tests, but as mentioned in that article, OpenSolaris is still dependent upon GCC 3.4 where as Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions are now shipping with the newer and much-improved GCC 4 series. Following that article being published, Sun Microsystems had requested some compiler tests since they were confident the results would be different had their Sun Studio compiler been used. Well, in this article we now have some OpenSolaris benchmarks from the same AMD setup using GCC 3.4, GCC 4.0, and Sun Studio 12.