Showing all newswire headlines

During last year's Give One Get One, the lead OLPC reporter for Laptop Magazine, a beautiful Joanna Stern, asked me about starting a OLPC pilot in Mali. Laughing at the complexity of such an adventure, I told her it would be possible, but surely a voyage of discovery for her and Laptop Magazine.

Animation is one of the less-known features in OpenOffice.org Impress. Its most obvious uses are for transitions for individual objects on a slide (rather than for the entire slide), or for dramatic emphasis and calling attention to objects. But it can also be used for more serious purposes, such as illustrating a procedure that is clearer if you can see it in motion -- for instance, one of the most effective animations I saw showed was on a Society for Creative Anachronism site that explained how the links in chain mail fitted together.

One of the big problems of making a bootable USB is file size. Almost all of the how-to's out there that allow to pass kernel commands during the boot process require the use of syslinux, which uses FAT16/FAT32 formated partitions. This comes with the drawback of limiting your maximum file size to 2 Gigabyte if using FAT32. A DVD release has it's main file, livecd.squashfs it can run up to nearly 4 Gigabyte, twice the maximum allowable size. In other words, Epic Fail.

AIX? Yes, we remember to cover it every once in a while ;) Today we're going to go back to the AIX well (which we haven't visited since our fairly-old post on working with AIX LVM. That post links back to a bunch of other posts in the series, but it "has" been about 3 months since we've touched on the AIX OS, which is grossly disproportionate to the amount of attention Solaris, Linux and Open Source Software get. Perhaps, someday, I'll work on it enough that I'll feel more comfortable digging into its guts. ...figuratively, of course ;)

We've reported a few times on efforts to apply open source concepts to the world of music, where many people perceive the music industry to be in need of change and improvement. For example, we wrote about Radiohead's successful effort to open source a music video and Bojam's effort to get musicians around the world to collaborate in open source fashion. So I was interested in this post from Matt Asay about Severed Fifth, an effort to explore new music distribution approaches, headed up by Jono Bacon, who is Ubuntu's community lead.

Then, a day or so later, it was announced that Windows somehow made it in, despite this national interest in GNU/Linux. What happened? Well, fortunately we have been tracking some rather mysterious moves in NComputing as of late, namely an appointment of a former Windows manager

DarkStat is a simple Packet Sniffing Network Traffic/Bandwidth monitoring utility for Linux and UNIX. DarkStat presents simple webinterface with nice graphs and stats auto-refreshed. Darkstat uses a very low footprint and the memory, CPU usage and is used in pfSense, redWall opensource firewalls.

With the economy in turmoil, a lot of people who are looking to buy PCs are increasingly turning to cheap, low-power mini laptops. And that single move is bolstering what otherwise would be a soft PC industry, according to industry analysts at Gartner. With a strong push from the new slew of mini notebooks hitting the market, worldwide PC shipments reached 80.6 million units in the third quarter this year, marking a 15 percent increase from the third quarter of 2007.

Mozilla on Tuesday released the first beta of the next version of its browser, Firefox 3.1. The beta includes an enhanced Smart Location Bar, a new tab interface and what should be a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed"TraceMonkey." Developers also included improved Web standards in the Gecko layout engine.

Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler has adapted his Enlightenment window manager to low-powered, small-screen devices like mobile phones. The Linux desktop graphics pioneer has released a pared-down widget set, along with ports and video demonstrations of E17 on OpenMoko's NeoFreerunner phone and Palm's Treo650 (booted into Linux, naturally).

Five more things for the 2009 Linux Wishlist and one thing I'd like to remove.

What is this you say? Besides adding Howto's on issues and projects we come across we'd like your help. For your participation you'll recieve some cool Linuxdynasty swag!

LinuxPlanet Classics: I ran across this funny and true rant about dimwitted tech support that thinks MS Windows is the whole world: "Linux is an older version of UNIX that crashes if you try to use it to look at graphics, or as a web server." This was published in September 2000-- has anything really changed?

Today's information systems give organizations and governments the ability to collect and access metaphorical mountains of information. But, this information is completely useless unless we are able to find and understand the relationships and trends hidden in these mountains. For projects involving complex research protocols, high-end statistical analysis tools such as SPSS and SAS are useful, but they come with high price tags and proprietary licenses. PSPP is an open-source clone of SPSS, one of the most commonly used proprietary statistical packages.

Google's first Android phone has finally made its way into long-waiting hands. The T-Mobile G1 device, expected to be in stores within the coming week, is drawing mixed reviews from early users. The closest thing to a sweeping overview might be that it is a powerful device with a few flaws but plenty of positives and potential, some of which isn't yet achieved.

Meet Yakuake, another pop-up terminal program. Contrary to Tilda (which I have covered recently), the Yakuake is the renowned and appreciated one. It supports many features - like tabs - which serve not only as eye candy.

Periodically, Linux media outlets go on list frenzies -- Ten Linux Distros for New Users, Five Great Distributions You've Never Heard Of. These are interesting lists but always seem to feature the same distributions. Some distributions are consistently left off these lists, seemingly regardless of whether they are a better fit than the usual candidates. I always read these lists, and wonder why Zenwalk is rarely mentioned. Perhaps it isn't for brand new users, but it's a great distribution that is overlooked far too often.

The eight-year-old Dillo project has released version 2.0 of its Linux-compatible, ultra-lightweight HTML browser for embedded systems, antiquated PCs, and other low-powered devices. Dillo 2 adds support for anti-aliased text, multiple languages, and tabbed browsing, while improving table rendering and lowering memory usage, says the project.

So the government decided to use free software; in the beginning due to its low cost, but soon they realized that free software is a powerful tool to provide “technological independence” and avoid reliance on global conglomerates and monopolies.

While virtualization market growth remains strong, latest research of license shipments shows that the sector is showing early signs of maturing, according to a new report. As far as vendor market share is concerned, the status quo was pretty much retained for the quarter.