Showing all newswire headlines

Since the dawn of time -- or, at least, the dawn of personal computers -- the holy wars over desktop operating systems have raged, with each faction proclaiming the unrivaled superiority of its chosen OS and the vile loathsomeness of all others.

Today Novell makes a play for Linux users new and old with the release of its openSUSE 11 distribution. Version 11 introduces an installer, improved package management and updated key open source packages. The new distribution is Novell's attempt to put its best stuff out on the field as it ramps up the competition against Red Hat's Fedora and Ubuntu Linux in the growing Linux community.

Linux specialist Red Hat has announced it is developing an embedded hypervisor product that it claims will complement, rather than compete with, its existing virtualisation strategy. Launched on the first day of the company's annual user conference in Boston, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks. Although Mint is a great desktop, a few problems keep it from perfection. Mint is available in two editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs, and a light edition, which doesn't. Since I was unable to find a 64-bit version of Elyssa, I downloaded and installed the 32-bit main edition on my test machine, with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor, 2GB of memory, two Nvidia GeForce 8600GT video cards on a Scalable Link Interface (SLI), and a 160GB SATA hard drive.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use. Apart from any technical or funding issues, a major reason that ZFS support has not been integrated into the Linux kernel is that Sun has released it under its Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the GPL used by the kernel. There are also patent issues with ZFS. However, the source code for ZFS is available, and running ZFS through FUSE does not violate any licenses, because you are not linking CDDL and GPL code together. You're on your own as far as patents go.

Less than a year ago we shared with you the revolutionary steps AMD was taking to deliver significant improvements to their once infamous proprietary Linux display driver and at the same time the work they were doing to foster the growth of an open-source driver for their latest graphics card families. These steps have certainly paid off for both AMD and the Linux community at large. AMD's proprietary driver is now on par with NVIDIA's Linux driver and there are two open-source ATI drivers picking up new features and improvements on an almost daily basis. AMD also continues to publish new programming guides and register information on a routine basis for their latest and greatest hardware. This has been truly phenomenal to see, but AMD has now evolved their Linux support by taking it a large step further. AMD is in the process of pushing new high-end features into their Linux driver -- such as Multi-GPU CrossFire support -- and with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 they have even begun showing off Tux, the Linux mascot, on their product packaging and providing Linux drivers on their product CDs!

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with MySQL authentication (using mod_auth_mysql) on Apache2 on a Debian Etch server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Recently, I did a laptop install for an individual that needed to upload files to his home computer from his laptop. It was important to him to do so. He didn't need a full feature SSH protocol or anything remotely (sorry) close to it. Many of the files are too big to get past his email size limit so he was worried that his Linux Box wouldn't be able to do what his Windows install did. That is where droopy comes in. That fact that it is a Python script endears me immediately but more so, the absolute ease by which it is utilized makes it the perfect little app for almost anyone's use.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project -- which aimed to give underprivileged children around the world a better chance at modern education -- may have been stifled though a combination of disinformation and other coordinated efforts by hardware and software monopolies that wanted to stop it.

Part one of a five part post series on setting up Linux and Unix servers securely.

The office where I am network administrator switched most users to OpenOffice.org (OOo) back at version 1.1, and has followed the upgrade process to the current version 2.3 (a few poor users who have to exchange documents outside the office with high fidelity are still clinging to their MS Office 97). Our receptionist does a lot of general secretarial duties, including lots of letters, envelopes, and labels that involve mail merge. Since this seems to be a sticking point for many people, I am putting everything I have learned from helping her and have gleaned from various sources on the Internet together in this tutorial.

Wine is well-known on Linux forums. Many a new Linux user has sought to run their old Windows applications on their new operating system. Short of having a clear open source alternative that reads and writes to the same file formats â?? for instance, Open Office is a viable solution to opening archived Microsoft Word documents â?? the venerable Wine is regularly touted as the first option. Wine, simply put, facilitates running Microsoft Windows applications within Linux. The programs will display in their own windows just as if they were native Linux applications.

Now that Firefox 3 has been officially released, the Google Gears team wasted no time in pounding out a new version of the API that works with FF3. Coincidentally, this means that Google Gears now works with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which began its life a couple of months ago with the then-non-Gears-supported FF 3 beta.

One of the unsung heroes of the Unix realm is — I kid you not — IBM. Stop laughing, I'm serious. I completely realize that IBM is a (if not the) giant of Unix and Linux on just about any platform it makes, and to assign the label "unsung" probably sounds a bit ridiculous. But, at least in one area, I don't think it is given nearly as much credit as it deserves.

Android developer advocate, Dan Morrill had a prototype unit to show delegates when he presented on the Android platform and the software developers kit. iTWire was not able to get a look at it, but Morrill said his presentation was very similar to one given at the Google IO developer event in the US at the end of May, a video of which is available online. Morrill confirmed that the first Android handset would hit the market before the end of 2008, but declined to say who would manufacture it or to name any manufacturers that had commited to make Android handsets.

I had no idea that the Debian-derived apt and Synaptic are viable choices for package management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free RHEL-like CentOS. Not that I have anything against RPM and Yum, but it's nice to have choices.

Andrew Morton is well-known in the kernel community for doing a wide variety of different tasks: maintaining the -mm tree for patches that may be on their way to the mainline, reviewing lots of patches, giving presentations about working with the community, and, in general, handling lots of important and visible kernel development chores. Things are changing in the way he does things, though, so we asked him a few questions by email. He responded at length about the -mm tree and how that is changing with the advent of linux-next, kernel quality, and what folks can do to help make the kernel better.

I have recently read an eye-opening email from Ian Lynch about what happened in the UK with BECTA. I have received his permission to republish here his thoughts. I think his email speaks volumes about what happened.

As expected, the US has the greatest number of computers in the list, in fact slightly more than half. Of the rest, most (37%) are in Europe with a small number of systems in Japan (22), China (12) and India (6). Of much more interest, as I alluded to in a recent article is the penetration of Linux into this arena. Depending upon how you count the numbers provided by TOP500, between 85% and 89% of the Supercomputers are running some version of Linux. Of those that identify the distro, SuSE outnumbers Red Hat 10 to 1. No others are identified.

Free and open source software (FOSS) is only beginning to find a foothold in computer science departments in North America. FOSS tools may be used in teaching or be the subject of research or special committees, but few departments include courses that introduce students to the FOSS community. As a result, when North Carolina State University created a FOSS graduate course in the 2008 spring semester, it turned to Red Hat to find an instructor with a suitable background of FOSS involvement and university teaching experience. Community manager Greg DeKoenigsberg recommended performance tools engineer Will Cohen, who now looks back at the experience with an eye to how what he and his students learned might help other instructors.