Showing all newswire headlines

If the rocky reception of KDE 4 has done anything, it has forced the KDE project to realize it needs to listen to users more closely. One of the first results of this realization is the new Community Working Group (CWG). Announced at Akademy, the recently concluded annual KDE conference, the CWG was described as designed "to act as a central point of contact by being available to communicate user needs and concerns to developers, and developer intentions and plans to users." The CWG is still being organized; to find out more about its plans, we contacted Anne Wilson and Juan Carlos Torres, two of the group's five initial members.

Chrome is in fact a reference to the imminent release of Google’s entry into the browser market. Apparently, the launch was accidentally “leaked” by a Google employee who was a little piggy fingered with the send button on his e-mail client. By the time you read this it may be available for download (probably Windows only in the first instance). I was intrigued by this because there have been “reviews” of Chrome already and the reason for this is the unique way Google has chosen to announce it. If you were launching a new browser, or anything else, would you do it through the medium of a comic? Gary Richmond at Freesoftware Magazine explores the Darwinian implications of Google's launch of their shiny new browser and who the winners and losers will be. You can read the full story at FSM

Wrapping up the OSCON (Open Source Convention) held in Portland, Oregon on July 21-25, show organizer O'Reilly Media has posted photos, videos, and presentations files. Meanwhile, winners of the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards and the SourceForge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards have also been announced.

BasKet Note Pads is a free opensource notepad/scrible pad software for Linux. BasKet can be used as a manual clipboard. This means that you can drop files of all kinds inside. They can be grouped in different tabs. BasKet is very simple to use and easy to differentiate between notes by setting tags, priorities and flags.

Google's Chrome web browser is upon us, with performance already hitting legendary status. Yet, it is presently available only for use on Microsoft Windows systems? What then for us, the Linux user? Here's how to begin poking around and see what the future looks like.

I've been thinking about something for a few days now. It's about the latest Novell-Microsoft deal that was announced on August 20, where Microsoft agreed to buy another $100 million worth of vouchers from Novell. I was wondering: how come two public companies can make a deal that seems to me to be material and yet keep pieces of the deal secret?

But let's not forget that these Linux-come-lately party-crashers are very late to the party, and have been whining and foot-dragging and making excuses for years why they couldn't sell Linux PCs, or even bare PCs with no operating systems. If you wanted to buy Linux preinstalled on a computer, you had to find an independent shop. Which wasn't easy, because if they also sold Windows then they were under the eye of Sauron just like the big vendors, and were punished for selling Linux.

Sun Microsystems Inc. has released a new version of xVM VirtualBox, its platform for desktop virtualization, and is also starting to offer enterprise support for the platform, the company said on Thursday. Version 2.0 comes with improved performance and platform support, adding support for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sun has also developed a new user interface for the Mac platform. Mac users will also get better networking performance, as will users who are running Sun's Solaris OS. It has also improved overall performance on AMD-based systems.

Do you remember poster O'Reilly Charting the Linux Anatomy? The Interactive map of GNU/Linux OS and FOSS is new reincarnation of the poster. It demonstrates anatomy of a GNU/Linux operating system and popular Free Open Source Software. You can zoom and pan the map. It contains more than 150 links to external articles and documentation about software running on Linux.

"The discussion of net neutrality intersects a broad array of issues. I have discussed a number of them in the past and this piece will focus on a couple areas, namely prioritization and discriminatory practices." -- An interesting article on why net neutrality legislation is a bad idea.

U.S. Linux distributor Red Hat has bought the virtual computing solutions vendor Qumranet. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst sees his company now at the same eye level with Microsoft.

HP announced a slew of new products on Wednesday designed to make the deployment of a virtualized solution a greater value for businesses. HP's virtualization push focuses on getting rid of the impediments that reduce a virtual deployment's positive effect on a business.

Out of the many available open source document management packages, Epiware GPL is noteworthy because it includes project management features: if your work has to do with producing written matter, you can not only manage the documents themselves, but the development project as well. Epiware is a Web-based application, so clients need just a Web browser to use it; check out the online demo if you want to get a taste of it. There are (or will be) three versions: Epiware GPL, which we will examine; Epiware Professional Free, a simpler version that allows you to handle a single project; and Epiware Professional Desktop ("coming soon"). Epiware GPL is available under the GPL version 2. Its latest release is 4.8.6, dated May 2008.

I’m a Windows Guy. I work on a Windows network for a living. I’ve been a network engineer for over a decade. It’s not that I’m opposed to Linux or OSX, I’m just more familiar with XP and Vista so I tend to use it for everything. Some of you might be laughing already, but I like Windows. It gets the job done for me and for millions of other people. It’s fairly easy to use, fairly easy to upgrade with new hard ware, there is a plethora of software and I can do all the things I want to do on it. That said I have no loyalty to Microsoft either. I don’t like several things, like Vista. What the f*** was Microsoft thinking when they released it? I’ve wanted to see if I could walk on the Linux side for a while now. I wanted to see if I could really switch over and do all the things I need to do easily. So I decided to give it a try

For some time I have been using the American Power Conversion (APC) uninterruptible power supply (UPS) daemon Apcupsd to interface my desktop computer with my APC Back-UPS ES 550. Available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris 10, Apcupsd reliably warns me when the power goes out and gives me time to get my box properly shut down before data is lost, or does so automatically if I am not there to supervise.

Red Hat is taking aim at every other virtualization vendor - be it Citrix, VMware or Microsoft - with this buy. The argument is simple: The OS is critical and the OS is what Red Hat is all about. "You may not know this but most virtualization solutions today use components developed by Red Hat for their critical functions," Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens said on a conference call. "These competitors are highly dependent on Red Hat for feature development and hardware enablement - no one is better equipped to carry open source leadership forward."

Canonical is taking three small but significant steps to build a partner channel for Ubuntu Linux. The VAR Guy stumbled upon the strategy during a surprise visit to Canonical’s offices near Boston. Here are the details.

No longer will the Free Software Foundation be the target of advertisements for novelty condoms, Ibiza package holidays and extreme sports gear. It's leaving the 16-24 yoof demographic behind. Today the GNU project celebrates its quarter-century. It was on 27 September 1983 that MIT slacker Richard M Stallman made his announcement that he intended to create a complete Unix-like system that would be completely open and hackable, giving anyone the right to modify and distribute the work. The Free Software Foundation is getting its celebration in early.

Google touts its Javascript engine version 8, among other things, as setting new speed records for its Chrome browser. Linux Magazine author Mathias Huber found during a benchmark test that the next Firefox generation can keep up with it.

Someone said, Flash Player 9 doesn't run on 64 bit Linux, but sure it does... and you can install it, just follow the simple steps below.