Showing all newswire headlines

Earlier this week we had published ATI benchmarks of the open-source Mesa stack and X.Org in the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 7.04. While the open-source graphics drivers have matured a lot over the past eighteen months and many new features have been added, the ATI performance with an R430 GPU really hadn't improved in the newer releases. To see if the open-source Intel situation is any different, we have carried out similar tests with an Intel 945G Chipset across the past four Ubuntu releases.

Canonical Ltd., commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, says it’s porting Ubuntu to the ARM RISC processor architecture. Ubuntu on ARM will target netbooks and other emerging device categories requiring a “rich, always-connected, mobile computing experience, without compromising battery life.”

Linux kernel developer Ted T'so shared his know-how in a number of tutorials at the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego. One theme was getting first help for system crashes, and in the process, he took the opportunity to present SystemTap.

There is something rather curious about software companies operating in the open source world. Although they may be competitors in a particular sector, the open source licence they employ means that they are also partners: they can generally use the code of other companies if they wish. The stronger those companies become, the more code they produce, and the more code there is available to everyone – including their nominal rivals. This makes the commercial ecosystem that evolves around free software strangely collegiate: everyone has a vested interest in growing the code base, because it is a commons that all can and do draw on.

The IEEE 802.11n standard gives users a choice between 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz spectrum, but how do you know which one is best for your network needs? Jim Geier outlines the key factors to consider when deciding which spectrum to deploy.

Tuesday November 18, Ingres will announce its new open source database platform. The announcement is the first big database focused announcement in nearly two years from Ingres. Did you even know that Ingres was still around?

Openbravo, the open source ERP and POS specialist, is updating customers and partners on the company's strategy to offer native MySQL support. Here's the scoop.

If you work with lots of files at a time, work with large files frequently, need a simple way to zip and unzip file archives, or just need a good file and archiving management tool when on-the-go, check out PeaZip.

Microsoft can't effectively attack the hundreds of community distributions. It can't even target the prime ones like Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo, which are parents to hundreds of other distributions. There is nothing to attack, except with silly trash-talk, empty patent threats, and a lot of deceptive "MS hearts OSS" posturing that fools no one. So Red Hat represents a concrete target. Never mind that killing off Red Hat will not kill off Linux; when a bully wants to mash someone the mashing is all that matters. We expect irrational, destructive behavior from Redmond.

Lenovo has introduced a special 60-day money back guarantee on its ThinkServers, which run Novell SUSE Linux or Windows and target small businesses. But the guarantee is only available from one specific Lenovo distributor. Here's the scoop.

Just upgraded your system with a shiny new hard disk and want to make it your new book disk? Cloning Ubuntu to another hard disk is easy. In fact, Ubuntu provides tools to clone the entire hard disk -- including the Windows partition, if there's one on there. This is the kind of fundamental task that Linux excels at, in fact. This article is excerpted from the newly published book Ubuntu Kung Fu and published with the express permission of the publisher, the Pragmatic Programmers, LLC.

Though I'm not as guilty of chronically changing content management/blogging software as I am of switching up Linux distributions, I've used more than a few in my day. I began using WordPress in its 1.x days, and moved through Drupal, Mambo, and Joomla in a quest to see what really worked best for my situation.

The sour economy is causing industries and individuals alike to tighten their belts in just about all areas of spending, including software. Downloading free and low-cost open source software is often an attractive alternative to proprietary commercial products. The potential for enterprises and other users switching from high-priced software to open source alternatives poses a new opportunity.

SystemImager lets you create images of your Linux installations. To do so, you need an image server (should have enough disk space to store your images) and a so-called golden client (i.e., the system of which you want to make an image). This means that you have to install some software on your image server and on your golden client in order to run SystemImager. This tutorial shows how to install a SystemImager server and a SystemImager client, both using Ubuntu 8.10, and how to create/update/restore/delete images.

As of November 11 Intrepid Xen 3.3 Hypervisor may be back ported to Hardy Dom0 via repositories. Following bellow is a brief instruction for installation from scratch Ubuntu Hardy Dom0 with 2.6.24-21-xen kernel running with Xen 3.3 hypervisor

My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in his aptly titled Cyber Cynic column on Computer World is always good for a reality check for all things technology, especially Microsoft. This week Vaughan-Nichols takes a look under the hood of the highly-vaunted Windows 7, and he finds nothing more than warmed over Vista stew, the same OS we didn't like much the first time Microsoft served it.

Over time, people tend to accumulate a large number of messages in various email accounts, most of which they never bother with again. The problem is particularly acute for administrator accounts that receive routine notifications of events that are viewed, if at all, no more than once. The archivemail tool lets you easily archive these old messages and thereby free up some disk space and improve your mail client's performance.

Many people think you can tell a lot about a person's subconscious thought by measuring various bodily functions including heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension (think polygraph machines). Whether you believe that biofeedback technology is cutting edge, interesting to ponder, or just a lot of hooey, there are a few biofeedback apps for Linux users who want to explore the concept.

The Debian Installer team is proud to announce the first release candidate of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Lenny.

Advanced Micro Devices is releasing a computer chip that could give it a much-needed boost against bigger rival Intel. On Nov. 13, AMD unveiled a processor, code-named Shanghai, for use in servers, the powerful computers that run corporate networks. Unlike other recent chips from AMD, Shanghai is being released on time, and it will be more versatile than a comparable chip due to be released from Intel in the coming days. AMD says Shanghai will perform 35% better than its previous generation of server chips while decreasing power requirements by 35%, a combination that should help customers reduce operational costs while boosting efficiency.