Showing all newswire headlines

It's nearly a year since KDE released the KDE4 desktop. The initial roll-out was rocky for KDE, and while subsequent releases have brought ever increasing stability and enhancements, some KDE users feel it's not quite ready for daily use.

You theoretically can use the Windows bootloader to dual-boot with OpenBSD 4.4, but since I had already killed it out on my most recent installation and didn't have a Windows XP disc to restore it, I turned to GRUB, the bootloader I always use with Linux. GRUB is one of many applications we associate with GNU/Linux but which is also available as a precompiled package that's quite usable with OpenBSD, though not without its quirks. If I can make it work, you can too.

Install and Configure Cacti Monitoring tool in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Server. Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Mark Shuttleworth made headlines not too long ago when he called for the Linux desktop to surpass Mac OS X in both beauty and functionality. While a lot of folks thought that was breathtaking and audacious, I think he's aiming too low. I think Linux should aspire to equal or better the AmigaOS.

Another chapter in the lengthy legal saga between SCO and Novell is closed, with the release of a final judgment by a Utah court on Thursday. The judgment largely reiterates earlier orders dismissing copyright-infringement, slander and breach-of-contract claims brought by SCO, but it also prevents SCO from being able to dismiss certain claims and then revive those same claims in potential future appeals. One onlooker sees the ruling, handed down in the U.S. District Court for the district of Utah, as another loss for SCO, which can still appeal the decision.

Europeana, Europe's multimedia online library opens to the public today. At http://www.europeana.eu, Internet users around the world can now access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archival documents, paintings and films from national libraries and cultural institutions of the EU's 27 Member States. Europeana opens up new ways of exploring Europe's heritage: anyone interested in literature, art, science, politics, history, architecture, music or cinema will have free and fast access to Europe's greatest collections and masterpieces in a single virtual library through a web portal available in all EU languages.

The term "gaming console" seemed a bit misleading to me at the time -- it is ultimately where parent company Envizions Computer Entertainment would like the EVO to be -- but it is an early adopter system in the truest sense of the phrase.

OpenEMR HQ, a small software startup in NE Oklahoma, announced the release of PhoneReminder for OpenEMR. PhoneReminder is add-in software to the OpenEMR medical records package that allows users to automatically notify patients by phone (voice or text message) of upcoming appointments.

Bugsquad will be revisiting PIM bugs next Sunday, concentrating on KMail and KOrganizer. Recently the number of people hanging out and doing bugs in our IRC channel regulary has increased considerably. As there is almost always someone hanging around (and because some people specifically requested it), we decided we could extend our events. So, if you are one of those people who just can not spare time on Sundays, rejoice for Bugweeks.

OpenSSH is still the primo tool for fast, secure remote administration. Carla Schroder shares some tips to make it even faster and more convenient: fast safe key transfers and management, and accessing remote filesystems in a fast, convenient way.

Nowadays, everyone uses Ubuntu, most people have used Fedora, and many folks have tried openSUSE. SimplyMEPIS ... not so many. That's a shame, because this relatively obscure Debian-based desktop distribution from Morgantown, WV, is an outstanding desktop operating system. With SimplyMEPIS 8 at beta 5 and closing in on release, I tested the distribution and found it to be a keeper. I downloaded SimplyMEPIS from one of its mirror sites and burned the ISO file to a CD, then installed it on a Dell Inspiron 530s, powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 Graphics Media Accelerator.

I mentioned that Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems now have such incredibly low market capitalizations that the independent existence of these open source leaders is threatened. The situation is substantially worse a few days later, with Red Hat's share price more than 20 percent lower than it was when I wrote the original post, starting to look like a penny stock. Some readers have suggested that Red Hat, in particular, is a nebulous entity that represents "nothing in the end." Really?

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Beta 3, the third beta version of the upcoming version 2.0. The KOffice team releases a third beta version today, in line with the monthly releases leading up to the 2.0 final release of the innovative office suite KOffice2.

Hi All, Here's my 8th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to create your own LDAP Schema for your directory server":..

The Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker reported yesterday that Mozilla's revenues were up approximately 12% in 2007 over 2006. She also mentions a few matters that are worrisome. Though eWeek's Joe Wilcox's predictions of Firefox's demise are premature and without a doubt require a sizeable grain of salt, he makes a good point concerning revenues coming from Google versus Google's commitment to the Chrome browser.

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build. To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution has now tallied its user base, and it's a number that on the surface would make it the largest installed base of any Linux distribution, with at least 9.5 million users and possibly as many as 10.5 million. Fedora competitor Ubuntu Linux currently claims to have 8 million users. "The total number of users has always been an incredibly difficult number to measure," Paul Frields, Fedora's project leader, told InternetNews.com. "If you total up all the unique IP's ... on Fedora 7, 8 and 9, it adds up to about 9.5 million boxes right now."

The economy is falling as fast as temperatures in November. Recession seems certain, if it's not already here. The stock market's performance resembles Disney World's Space Mountain roller coaster. And every open source vendor, every Linux project, will be touched in one way or another. Matt Asay of Alfresco, which makes a Linux-based open source content management system, sees different effects on the open source software (OSS) community in the short and long term. "Short term -- the next few weeks -- everyone, whether commercial or proprietary, is going to find life unpleasant," Asay says, adding that the last several months have been the "most unpleasant quarter I've ever been through."

Virtual memory in Linux goes well beyond simply having a swap file or partition; it touches everything from file caching to some network functions. Charlie Schluting is our guide on this excellent tour of Linux virtual memory management.

For two years now Novell and Microsoft have been playing with the idea of interoperability between Linux and Windows. They hope to strengthen their partnership further through their announcement of the Advanced Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and a beta of the Moonlight Firefox rich media plug-in.