Showing all newswire headlines

Unveiled earlier this month at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference by Chief Whiteboard Operator Ray Ozzie, the Azure Services Platform confused damn near everyone. But after days of collaboration with the top minds in both industry and academia, El Reg is proud to announce that we have finally figured out what Microsoft Azure is.

This has been a big year for patent law in the technology industry. A few weeks ago I wrote about the Supreme Court's Quanta v. LG decision. Now the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over all patent appeals, has handed down a landmark ruling in the case of In Re Bilski. The case dealt with the validity of patents on business methods, and a number of public interest organizations had filed amicus briefs. I offer my take on the decision in a story for Ars Technica. In a nutshell, the Federal Circuit rejected the patent application at issue in the case and signaled a newfound skepticism of "business method" patents.

Have you tried the major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RHEL, and OpenSUSE/SLED? Were they not quite right for your needs? The major distros are not the only game in town. Find out the good, the bad, and the ugly about three of the best-known alternatives to the "big" user distros.

This is potentially a more time consuming backport but with Xen 3.3 being a huge improvement over 3.2 it would definitely help Ubuntu server market share to have Xen 3.3 available in Ubuntu 8.04. Many server operators will want Xen 3.3 but will want to continue running the LTS release rather than upgrade to Intrepid.

Halloween came and went last week, and we have yet to hear from anyone who wore a Tux costume. Sigh -- looks like we'll have to wait another year. Generating much more excitement than the spooky Linuxy possibilities, it seems, was the grand landing of Intrepid Ibex, which caused a veritable flurry of reviews, comparisons and general Ubuntu-related discussion.

Phoronix Media has announced the immediate availability of its Q4'08 update to the Phoronix Test Suite, its extensible open-source platform for conducting automated testing and benchmarking by ISVs, IHVs, ODMs, OEMs, and end-users. Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 (codenamed "Orkdal") adds support for Apple's Mac OS X operating system, new test profiles, support for Cascading Test Profiles, enhanced software/hardware detection, WINE-based tests, and run-time capabilities for Self-Contained Test Profiles. This quarterly update to the Phoronix Test Suite has more than 200 changes since the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 "Malvik" release in September.

In this tutorial, I will guide you through the necessary steps to install an ipw3945 wireless adapter on a CentOS / RHEL based distribution. It is written for CentOS 5.2. However, it might work on other CentOS 5.x based distributions as well.

IP aliasing is the process of adding more than one IP address to a network interface. This is useful for virtual hosting of Web or ftp servers. This tuorial explains how to assign two more IP address to a single network interface under FreeBSD operating system.

If you hail from one of the hot beds of high tech - Silicon Valley, say, or (in my case) the Route 128/495 area of Massachusetts, you've doubtless heard the phrase "serial entrepreneur." What those words describe is someone who has started several companies, and the phrase, when used, is invariably regarded as a compliment. These days, if such a serial entrepreneur has some major successes under her belt, that makes her one of the elite of the high tech nobility - someone with the golden touch, that can turn ideas into huge returns for founders and investors alike. But should this really be a compliment?

Ubuntu fans rejoice, the latest release is upon us in the form of version 8.10, Intrepid Ibex. But can't you just run a software update in Hardy Heron? I'll tell you what's different down to the package level between an upgraded Hardy installation and a fresh Intrepid installation so you can evaluate for yourself.

Ever wondered what takes your Linux box so long to boot up? You can see for certain with the Bootchart package. Bootchart logs the entire startup process and produces a clean, graphical representation of its results suitable for everything from troubleshooting to good old-fashioned bragging rights. Bootchart is a common utility, so check your distribution's package management system first to see if it is available. If not, the Bootchart download page provides links to the official packages for Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE, and Mandriva. You can also download source code in an RPM or tarball from bootchart.org. The package contains installation and uninstallation scripts and compilation instructions.

BOSTON, Mass — November 3, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation announced today that Motorola and Google are joining the GNOME advisory board and sponsoring the GNOME Foundation.

Google introduced the beta version of its open source Chrome browser nearly two months ago, and issued its third update to the beta yesterday. (The update pushes to you automatically if you're running Chrome.) Although there are signs that the very early popularity of this browser has calmed down somewhat, it's still generating a lot of buzz, Google has confirmed that many extensions are coming for it, and I expect to see it in a mobile version very soon. If you're running Chrome, here are seven tips for customizing and getting the most out of it.

It's time to start fixing telecom, even as we're moving past it. If ideas are weather systems, that's the squall I'll bring to the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm in London tomorrow and Wednesday. This is my first time at one (it's the fifth in their series), and I'm looking forward to it. Here's the agenda. I like what they're thinking (here's the Telco 2.0 Manifesto) the way they think it (such as this on "two-sided markets"), and where we might run with it. By "we" I mean the Linux, open source and free software communities. Some of which live inside telcos and cablecos.

A more complicated and feature-rich version of last week's localtv script. For this week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script, we're following up on what turned out to be a fairly popular script from last week that made it so you could get your local tv listings from the command line with bash.

The news that Wikipedia was in the process of switching away from Red Hat and Fedora—and to Ubuntu—has stirred up some Fedora folks. The relatively short, 13 month support cycle for Fedora releases was fingered as a major part of the problem in a gigantic thread on the fedora-devel mailing list. Some would like to see Fedora be supported for longer, so that it could be used in production environments, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fedora has set out to do. The idea of supporting Fedora beyond the standard "two releases plus one month", which should generally yield 13 months, is not new. It was, after all, the idea behind the Fedora Legacy project. Unfortunately, Fedora Legacy ceased operations at the end of 2006, largely due to a lack of interested package maintainers. So, calls for a "long term support" (LTS) version of Fedora are met with a fair amount of skepticism.

News from the weekend: Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project announced the version 4.4 of the free OpenBSD operating system, including a new song.

The New York Times is running an interesting piece from IDG News on how administrators and IT chiefs for higher educational institutions are at odds over whether it makes sense to deploy open source software instead of proprietary products. The flap went on this week at the Educause conference in Florida. Within the argument that's going on, a number of surprising fallacies about open source are apparently cropping up. Here are the details.

LXer Feature: 02-Nov-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a slew of articles about Ubuntu and Canonical, Linus learns to take personally, our own Sander Marechal reports on T-DOSE 2008, PC makers move closer to a post-Windows world and Carla Schroder asks if Linux does enough for small business.

Emulation refers to the duplication of functions of one system using a different system. Specifically, an emulator is software specifically written to emulate aspects of the original console or computer, primarily the CPU, I/O and memory system.