Showing all newswire headlines

Fedora Linux has always pushed forward with an intense release schedule, and is usually the first major distribution to package new technologies and advances. Fedora 10 promises to be even a larger milestone than most, both for its development community and users; Bruce Byfield goes behind the scenes and uncovers some of the legal, development, and community issues that the Fedora team have to deal with.

For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken. Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens. This will require many to adopt a new mindset, viewing open source more as a means than an end in itself.

[Now Open Source is "broken" because it needs more value? Cohen was once the CEO of the OSDL and now he has this to say? Interesting. - Scott]

Large collections of MP3 files can be hard to manage. Organizing your music into directories helps some, but when you want to play just those tracks in a certain genre or from a certain year, no amount of directory organization will help -- but Zina, a powerful Web application, can. Zina is easiest to set up if you already have a home Web server. You must understand how to set up CGI applications on your Web server. If you're using Apache, you can read a nice tutorial for basic CGI setups. You must also have PHP in your Apache setup, as that is the language that Zina is written in.

Linux distributor Good OS and BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies each have plans to make netbooks speedier devices, the vendors said at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on Monday. For Good OS, the browser is the operating system -- or at least, all you're going to see of it. While other companies have developed quick-start software that allows you to check mail or play music seconds after turning on your computer, Good OS has created "a wrapper that enables you to perform all your major rich client applications from within the browser," said Good OS founder and CEO David Liu.

Openmoko Inc, maker of the world's first totally open mobile phone, today announced that faberNovel, Inc has joined the worldwide distribution network for the FreeRunner open source mobile phone. Since launching the FreeRunner in July of this year, Openmoko has built out a network of more than 20 distributors covering North America, Europe and Asia. Paris, France based faberNovel,a design and innovation firm dedicated to engineering, strategic development and experimentation, will distribute the Openmoko phone in the US through faberNovel, Inc, their San-Francisco office.

You might just be thinking that we need another browser like Medieval Europe needed the Bubonic plague, but I’m always a great fan of the different and new, of people doing their own thing. Even Firefox had to start somewhere. H3v is a relative newcomer to the browser pack and it definitely falls into the “lean, mean” category. I think it deserves a little more exposure.

Fedora 10 was officially released on Tuesday November 25, 2008. Since its release I have installed and used it on a number of machines and been running it as my full-time desktop. One of the main complaints about Fedora 9 when it was released was their decision to drop the KDE 3.x desktop and go exclusively with the KDE 4.0.x desktop. Being a KDE user I can concur with the assessment that the version of KDE that shipped on the Fedora 9 install media was not very usable. As a result, I switched to GNOME for a few months until KDE updated to the 4.1.x series. How is KDE 4 in Fedora 10? Much, much better.

MySQL 5.1 is now out, but not everyone is happy about this oft-delayed open source database release. I've been hearing about MySQL 5.1 since at least 2006 and over the last two years there have been a few dates I've been told when it would be released. "One would have thought that MySQL AB (now the MySQL department at Sun) should have learned something from our too early release of MySQL 5.0 but unfortunately this is not the case," Widenius stated.

MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius warns in his blog against putting the current version 5.1 of the popular database package into production. He's critical of the release policy and fears that the product's quality may suffer.

This week's DWW feature story looks at the global economic crisis and its impact on Linux distributions and businesses. It turns out that the release of Fedora 10 isn't the only good news for Red Hat as a major Wall Street analyst sees a bright future for the company

The iPhone DevTeam has managed to get a Linux image to boot up on an iPhone, at least to console level, though they've resolutely failed to explain why one would want to do such a thing. It's hard to imagine there are many iPhone users out there who love the hardware but are unhappy with the OS and interface, but that's never stopped the Linux crowd before. They won't be happy until the little penguin has been replicated everywhere, and today it's the turn of the iPhone to feel the touch of rebel code.

From the Problem Statement: "Chromium can't be everything to all people. People use web browsers in a variety of environments and for a wide variety of jobs. Personal tastes and needs vary widely from one user to the next. The feature needs of one person often conflict directly with those of another. Further, one of the design goals of Chromium is to have a minimal light-weight user interface, which itself conflicts with adding lots of features."

[I found this and thought it would be of interest. - Scott]

In this interview we talk with Adam. In specific, we talk about: What’s new in the latest Mandriva release. Relating directly to the users instead of the developer community. Differences between user priorities and developer priorities. Deciding what should be included in the distribution. What will become of the “year of the Linux desktop” idea? The future of open versus closed development.

Hi All, Here's the 14th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series and today it comes from "Pablo Chamorro". You want to analyse your OpenLDAP logfile? There are various ways to do this yourself by hand, but the have community already done the work for you and written the: OpenLDAP Logfile analysis utility.

We previously had looked at the ATI Radeon HD 4550 and Radeon HD 4670, but if you are looking for a graphics card that's positioned between the two and costs less, there is the Radeon HD 4650. The Radeon HD 4650 is clocked the same as the Radeon HD 4550, but is based upon the RV730PRO GPU and is able to provide a bit more processing power than the lesser RV710 solution. Sapphire though manufactures a Radeon HD 4650 graphics card that operates well beyond the reference core and memory frequencies for the RV730PRO and sells it at a very affordable price. In this article we are seeing how well the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC graphics card can perform under Linux.

Despite the fact that it's been around since 1991, Linux remains a work in progress. It's not perfect, nor does anyone pretend it is. The places where it needs the most immediate improvement are also a matter of debate: what's crucially important to some is only marginally important to others. Still, there's no question that there are key areas where Linux is lacking -- not just missing individual features, but things that are actively dysfunctional and which need immediate attention. I'm going to run down several major areas where Linux, as an operating system and as a platform, needs work.

[Broken? How is having a choice make it broken? Linux can always be improved upon that I will not argue, but it doesn't need "fixing". Windows on the other hand.. - Scott]

David Boies, founding partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and the DOJ's special trial counsel in the Microsoft case. - Berkman Center Channel.

Looks like the Times Online’s report about Microsoft offering $20 billion to buy Yahoo was bogus, with key figures in both the Microsoft and Yahoo camps saying there’s no truth to the story. The thing is, the denials could be yet more misinformation...

The number of Firefox extensions continues to grow. For example, when I last wrote about tab extensions just over a year ago, about 110 existed. Now, despite the need to rewrite many extensions to make them compatible with Firefox 3.0, the number is over 190, and the choice is greater than ever. Basic functionality, coloring options, positioning of the tab bar, automatic opening of tabs at startup -- whatever your need, you can probably find it on the Firefox add-ons site.

This tutorial shows how to install Cherokee from source with PHP and MySQL support on an Ubuntu 8.10 server machine. The reason for compiling from source instead of using apt to install binary packages is that there are older versions in the repositories than the ones available on Cherokee's homepage. The main goal is to install the webserver so I didn't bother compiling everything else. That way you won't spend to much time on doing things I didn't want to describe.