Showing all newswire headlines

Debian Lenny’s release is getting closer and closer and many people will want to upgrade their Etch servers to Lenny, maybe even before Lenny is declared stable (at RC1 at this time). Even people that don’t want to upgrade to lenny might find some useful information in this post ;-) ...

You probably know that reading from RAM is a lot of faster than reading files from the hard drive, and reduces your disk I/O. This article shows how you can store files and directories in memory instead of on the hard drive with the help of tmpfs (a file system for creating memory devices). This is ideal for file caches and other temporary data (such as PHP's session files if you are using session.save_handler = files) because the data is lost when you power down or reboot the system.

Good news is that China is increasingly shying away from Microsoft and adopting Linux in its Internet cafés. However, can we trust the Red Flag Linux they're using?

The Internet giant announced an open source project to dramatically boost the power of Web applications. Native Client lets Web apps run with PC power. Rumors have abounded over the years about a Google operating system, perhaps based on the Ubuntu version of Linux widely used within the company, but this week the company revealed an open source project that provides a different answer to the same problem: Native Client.

Open Invention Network (OIN), a collaborative enterprise that enables open source innovation and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux, today unveiled the Linux Defenders program, which is designed to make prior art more readily accessible to patent and trademark office examiners, and increase the quality of granted patents and reduce the number of poor quality patents.

The Pulitzer Prize Board is finally recognizing the obvious: if newsprint's highest journalism award wants to stay relevant it had better welcome the Web. The Pulitzer board announced Monday that it will consider entries from online-only publications in addition to print outlets for the 14 journalism categories that once were prestigious but now few care about.

[Not FOSS related but of interest to online only publications like LXer. - Scott]

On Saturday 29th of November 2008 LinuxDay was held for the 10th time already in Dornbirn, Austria. Organised by the LUG Vorarlberg in cooperation with HTL Dornbirn, the well-received event is a platform for open source projects to answer questions and show off their latest and greatest versions to a broad public, but also for the students at the HTL Dornbirn to show what they achieved and created by using software libre. KDE was there to show off KDE 4.

Are you an Ubuntu developer/Launchpad member who had fate conspire against you, keeping you from the the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week at the clandestine Google Crittenden Campus in Mountain View?

Imagine that I proposed to you the following argument. I have (let's pretend) added up all the fuel consumed in the process of getting WidgetCo's widgets from the factory to consumers. There's all the gas burned by the trucks that bring the widgets from the factory to the retail store. And then there's the gas each consumer burns driving to and from the store for widgets. And having added up the costs of all this carbon, I discover that WidgetCo is paying only a tiny fraction of the total cost of the fuel consumed in the process of getting widgets from the factory to the homes of customers. Now suppose I claim that this is evidence of some form of outrageous unfairness—WidgetCo is somehow forcing you to subsidize their shipping costs! (The widgets, by the way, are free.)

At least someone out there cares that you can't find your page ;) For this post, I spent a bunch of time goofing around with Telnetting to port 80 to try and force the binary modes (-8, -L), and some combination of those and the "no-escape" clause (...I mean, flag ;) and encountered terrible frustration.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and value investment firm, Southeastern Asset Management, Inc., today announced that they have entered into an agreement to add two new independent members to Sun's Board of Directors. Southeastern is Sun's largest shareholder and currently holds approximately 162 million shares, or 22 percent, of Sun's common stock. Under the terms of the agreement, Sun will add two new independent directors to its Board. The appointments, to be approved by both companies, will occur as soon as reasonably practicable.

LXer Feature: 09-Dec-2008

A point by point response to an article on Hackingalert.com entitled "What Are The Issues With Open Source Linux?" that hit our newswire yesterday.

Install SugarCRM community edition in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Server. SugarCRM is a complete CRM system for businesses of all sizes. Core CRM functionality includes sales force automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project management, calendaring, and more. It supports MySQL and MS SQL Server.

“Ka-chunk... ka-chunk... ka-chunk... tick... tick... tick... Ka-chunk... ka-chunk...” That's just not a sound you ever want to hear coming from a hard drive. It's the sound of a hard drive trying to move it's read/write heads into a position that they don't seem to want to go to or its trying to read a sector that just isn't there anymore. Of course, modern hard drives have come a long way and are amazingly reliable, but if you work with computers long enough, you're bound to have one fail on you.

I was moaning recently about the appalling sloppiness when it comes to viruses et al.: they are practically all for Windows, and yet nobody mentions this fact. Here are two more egregious examples.

[All USB drives for the entire U.S. Armed Services has been banned in trying to stop the agent.btz virus? Wow! - Scott]

The goals of the Obama administration are in tune with — but in some technical respects, ahead of — the technological times. Unless certain standards-related dependencies are promptly addressed, the timely achievement of the president-elect's innovation and technology policy will be jeopardized. Unfortunately, the government does not have the historical competency to address these dependencies. What, then, is the new administration to do?

Last week, Net Applications reported Microsoft's operating system share had fallen below the 90 percent mark on the 40,000 or so websites where it gathers its traffic statistics. InternetNews is reporting that Net Applications made another interesting, if puzzling, discovery.

Pentaho, the open source business intelligence company, is gearing up to recruit more channel partners and solutions providers, The VAR Guy has learned. Here's the scoop.

Want to build your own Linux distro? Here's how to do it quickly and easily. If you've always wanted to create your own Linux distribution (distro), like I have, now you can by using a tool that was originally developed to create Virtual Appliances. SUSE Studio (still currently in alpha) is a web-based tool that helps you create Linux Virtual Appliances and complete bootable distros on CD/DVDs or USB drives.

Since the dawn of the distribution, there have been ways to remaster, re-spin, and otherwise rework a Linux flavor into something slightly different -- something that could be replicated and installed across multiple machines. These remastering tools are usually distribution specific (I first tried my hand with this several years back with Knoppix and the Debian live-magic live image creator) and vary in how forgiving (and permissive) they are when new users get too enthusiastic in choosing packages to add and remove.