Showing all newswire headlines

Bright and golden California summers have given way to a vivid fall landscape also bright and golden - but with a chance of rain. It's Thanksgiving in the state, and tots are already awaiting the arrival of Saint Nick, who's annual roll-out could mean a shiny iPhone if they've been good, or maybe a Zune duct-taped to a RAZR phone if they've been extremely naughty. With the holiday spirit in mind, we return to the Computer History Museum in Googleton Mountain View for a very special edition of This Old Box.

[I had never seen that one before..how far we have come.. - Scott]

The financial crisis enveloping the world will probably hit sponsorship funds for the forthcoming Australian national Linux conference, but registrations for the event, which begins on January 19, 2009, have been strong, says the man who holds the purse string.

Install Xen Server package and booting openSUSE 11.1 RC1 Dom0 went pretty smoothy, however attempt to start vm-install either via YAST command center or from command line just brought up frozen blank window.

An interesting take on Linux usability testing for the mainstream :) This Saturday's over-sized slice of, possibly funny, Linux humour comes to use via ITKnowledgeExchange. It's actually a review of an original article entitled "Linux: The Girlfriend Test" from TechRadar.com.

The commercial unified communication solution Unison is now available in a free, "sponsor-supported" version whose revenue comes from embedded advertising.

Earlier this year we shared that Valve's Source Engine is coming to Linux after receiving some information that pointed in this direction. In addition, a year ago Valve Software was publicly looking for a senior software engineer to port Windows-based games to Linux platform. There have long been rumors and hopes among Linux users that Steam games would become natively available for Linux, but we have additional confirmation that Valve Software has ported their Steam game client to Linux. In Valve's most recent title, Left 4 Dead, there are shared Linux libraries shipping alongside this Windows game client.

With everyone thinking about what they are thankful for, here are some things not to be thankful for.

Fedora 10 is out and there's lots of buzz about it. Had the Fedora Team finally gotten it right?

Qt Software, formerly Trolltech, reminds us in a YouTube video about their Pimp My Widgets contest. Deadline is December 31, 2008.

There are fast computers, and then there are Linux fast computers. Every six months, the Top 500 organization announces "its ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications." In other words, supercomputers. And, as has been the case for years now, the fastest of the fast are Linux computers.

LinuxPlanet Classics: originally published, January 10, 2008

It's a common belief that Samba shares cannot be accessed across subnets. But actually Samba can cross subnets. It's easy for Linux hosts, and a bit less easy for Windows clients. But fear not, for we shall guide you through safely past the traps and pitfalls. In this series we'll set up a Samba server that serves two subnets, which is is a common scenario even on home networks: one wired and one wireless. Then we'll hook up a third subnet just to show how it's done. Once you know how to do that you can easily expand to as many subnets as you want. In Part 1, we'll start out with a simple anonymous file and printer server.

Students at the correspondence-based University of South Africa (Unisa) will be required to sign up for a Microsoft-provided email address before they are able to receive correspondence from the university. The required email address is part of the first phase to build the MyLife portal to foster a “sense of belonging” among students, the university says. Phase two of the project will see the university encouraging students to use other “Microsoft live services such as social networking facilities … online file storage, and Office Live workspace”.

In 2004 Eric Raymond wrote an open letter to Sun Microsystems' then chief executive officer Scott McNealy demanding Sun open up their core Java intellectual property and allow anyone do whatever they damn well please with it. That other pillar of open source, and creator of the GNU Project Richard Stallman, meanwhile, became one of Java's loudest opponents - sternly advising people not to install the closed-source evil that was Java, and giving Java as a dire example of corporate lock-in. Two years later Sun silenced the the baying crowd with OpenJDK - an open-source project based on Sun's closed-JDK codebase.

We all use personal computers and we all take them for granted in our everyday lives. It’s easy to forget that PCs have only been around for a couple of decades, and initially were nowhere near the powerhouses we have on our desks today. For example, did you know that the first “portable” computer weighed 25 kg (55 lb) and cost close to $20,000, that the first laser printer was big enough to fill up most of a room, or that you basically had to build the first Apple computer yourself? This article takes a look at the time when the computer equipment we now take for granted was invented and what it looked like back then.

[Not really FOSS related but nostalgia kicked in and I just couldn't stop myself from posting it. - Scott]

Hi All, Here's my 13th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You have a question, but you're sure someone has been there before":

In this tutorial, I'm going to be teaching what mod rewrite is and few examples of its uses. Mod rewrite is a powerful tool and one of the simplest ways to make your website more SEO friendly.

When users want the latest in free and open source software (FOSS), they are likely to think first of sites like freshmeat, or perhaps Softpedia or GnomeFiles. However, as the FOSS community has divided into specialized communities, sites for new releases have proliferated, to the point where it is difficult to keep track of them all. Since 2007, openDesktop.org has provided a portal for many of these specialized sites. Under the slogan "Let's build the desktop of the future," openDesktop.org provides a quick overview of new software that is independent of desktop or distribution.

Fonts are like candies: you can never get enough of them. So if you are getting tired of the fonts that come with your system, here is a hand-picked collection of a few open source fonts that deserve a closer look.

Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.

With Fedora 10 finally entering the world earlier this week, we have performed benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10. In our testing we used both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of each distribution and then ran a series of automated tests through the Phoronix Test Suite.