Showing all newswire headlines

Last week was so ugly the economic conditions had me up on YouTube looking for things to put a smile on my face, and I found two -- one that has the"Pimp My Ride" folks pimping an IT shop with an Xbox -- not some marketing group's best moment -- and an HP ad spoof that has Steve Jobs selling HP computers.

Over the last decade, vector graphics have gone from being a revolutionary format to a standard method of rendering computer images -- so much so that they are standard in the KDE 4 desktops. This popularity is based on the fact that, because they represent images as mathematical equations -- usually in SVG format -- vector graphics open faster, render better on screen, and can be resized more readily than raster graphics, in which an image is created pixel by pixel. Free software includes a number of options for working with vector graphics, including several simple ones: OpenOffice.org's Draw, KOffice's Karbon14, and Inkscape, which is currently the premier vector graphic editor in free software.

Not only will you not have to open the window, now you don't even have to open the browser window to find out the weather ;) Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is probably not the last follow up to the growing stable of scripts we've written to mine the knowledge on tap online. Today's info is grabbed from WeatherBug.com. If you missed any of the others scripts we've jammed out, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to spew out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, do encylopedia lookups, access the online Thesaurus, translate between different languages and, of course, the use the online dictionary.

A mail transport agent (MTA) provides the "plumbing" for your email system by taking mail from a client application such as Evolution or Mozilla Thunderbird and routing it to the correct location on the right machine. There are plenty of good MTAs, such as Postfix, Sendmail, and qmail, but these popular mail servers require a large amount of configuration, and may be overkill for users who merely want to set up an MTA to test a Web development project or need to move mail around locally. Smail is a better alternative for these scenarios because it generally requires no configuration, and its memory footprint is less than the more fully featured MTAs.

Legal news wire service Courthouse News reported recently that Reuters was suing the Commonwealth of Virginia because George Mason University was "handing out its proprietary software." Nothing is ever that simple, is it? George Mason University's Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users collect and manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter's EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero's newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format.

California's secretary of state, Debra Bowen, believes that open-source software should be used in elections involving electronic voting machines, to protect against error and fraud. Speaking in Cambridge, MA, [on Thursday] during a panel discussion at the EmTech organized by Technology Review, Bowen noted that individual counties are currently responsible for purchasing voting machines. Often the choice is left up to an IT professional who may lack detailed knowledge of cryptography and computer security. But the biggest concern, according to Bowen, is a lack of access to the machines' underlying code. "Many times, a person has no legal right to review the software, even if they could," she said.

A new version of MEPIS Linux, one of my favorite KDE-based distributions, is nearing final release. Roughly a year after the arrival of version 7.0, distribution founder and maintainer Warren Woodford has released MEPIS 8.0 beta 2, based on a Debian Lenny core.

The GNU Project celebrated its 25th birthday on September 27, 2008. With its GCC compiler and bash shell, GNU was ever at the forefront of today's Linux distribution. To kick off the celebration, British humorist Stephen Fry appears in a video in defense of free software.

"With everyone calling out Windows' imminent doom from the rooftops, it's easy (though incorrect) to believe that the OS doesn't have much longer to live as a platform."
...further down...
"One thing I truly love about Linux is its incredibly well-designed package managers, such as Yum and Synaptic..."

You don't have to blindly trust that your email encryption is working- tcpdump lets you see it with your own eyes. Carla Schroder shows how easy it is to wiretap computer networks, and how to read everything that travels over your wires.

I started this installation fully expecting this to be my last use of Ubuntu. Having fought with the 7.10 version I hardened myself to expect similar flaws that would make my further use of this distribution impossible. Hence, I did not prepare myself as I had the last time. Nonetheless, while there were some disconcerting, intermittent failures I am, for the present, decided to use this version of the Linux desktop. Indeed, this article was written on that desktop.

Microsoft is to include the popular open source jQuery library in its Visual Studio development suite. jQuery is an open source Ajax framework for developing rich web applications. At the same time Nokia has also said it would use jQuery for its mobile web development. The move will add to the momentum around jQuery as Microsoft and Nokia join the likes of Google and Amazon as well as thousands of other websites using the framework.

Last week marked the release of GNOME 2.24. Those who already use GNOME will appreciate the new additions, but there's nothing compelling enough in the new version to convince fans of other desktop environments to make a switch. Although the upcoming releases of several Linux distributions will be including GNOME 2.24 as the default desktop, you can download and compile it yourself or by using Garnome now if you want to check it out sooner. The release notes make mention of a live CD being available, yet it's nowhere to be found on the GNOME BitTorrent page or by Googling.

I wasn't at the Linux Plumber Conference in Portland, OR, but everyone who pays close attention to Linux knows that Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel developer and Novell engineer, blasted Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, for contributing "In the past 3 years, from the 2.6.15 kernel to 2.6.27-rc6, Canonical has had 100 patches in the Linux kernel." That, as Kroah-Hartman pointed out, means Canonical "did 00.10068% of all of the kernel development for the past 3 years." In other words: almost nothing.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 comes in a dozens of editions, and each edition has its own patches, performance improvements, features, bug fixes, and new bugs. Which edition is the fastest to start and to open a document? Ask these 3000 measurements.

Well, Android made its first showing last week in the form of the new G1, and as is so often the case when a brand-new product arrives, there were at least two noticeable effects. The first was a general quickening of the market's commercial pulses, as consumers began to salivate over the iPhone contender and new latest thing.

This guide explains how you can turn your touchpad on or off on a Kubuntu laptop by using a shortcut key.

At first sight, the Read It Later (RIL) extension looks redundant -- after all, you can use Firefox's own bookmarking functionality to save Web pages for later reading. But dig deeper, and you'll discover that it offers enough nifty features to make it a must-have tool for most users. When installed, RIL adds three elements to Firefox's interface: an icon in the Address bar, a button in the main toolbar, and a Click to Save button in the bottom right corner of the Status bar. Adding URL of the currently opened Web page to your reading list is as easy as clicking on the Read Later icon in the address bar.

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have Microsoft all over the place with articles on the advertising campaign and how Stanford and Harvard are teaching MS business tactics. Also, lists of cool desktops you may have not seen, alternative operating systems and the Linux Foundation says we should all support IBM. Sorry for the lateness in posting, had to fix my own darn links..

VMware Inc. released an OpenSource version of their VMware-Tools, called open-vm-tools. While they’re quite easy to install on Gentoo (emerge open-vm-tools), it’s not that easy having them installed on a Debian Etch (4.0) if you want to go the proper way. Here's how to do it.