Showing all newswire headlines

The comments on the single distro story got me thinking about what I want/need/use. I have been using Linux since before Bill Gates heard of it and my uses, needs and interests have changed over time. Ten or more years ago I was in the "I need to get Linux to do X" mode. That included a web server, an office network and a bunch of desktops—some for geeks but also some for the rest of the office including the shipping clerk and the receptionist.

From the presentation, you might imagine that Adobe's announcement of the Open Screen Project was major news. According to the news release, the project's goal is "to enable a consistent runtime environment" by relaxing some restrictions on the Flash format and releasing some specifications. However, in the free Flash community, the small group of developers dedicated to producing non-proprietary Flash tools, the reaction to the news was polite at best -- and serves as a much-needed reality check to the over-enthusiastic announcement.

Sun and OpenSolaris.org on Monday released the first publicly available version of the OpenSolaris operating system since work on the project began in 2005. The operasting system, which is a single distribution that can be used for desktop, server and HPC deployments, is based on the Solaris kernel and uses Sun's ZFS as the default file system.

Purchase a new PC or motherboard soon, and the chances are good that it will come with two built-in network interfaces -- either two Ethernet jacks or one Ethernet and one Wi-Fi. Tossing in a second adapter is an inexpensive way for the manufacturer to add another bullet point to the product description -- but what exactly are you supposed to do with it? If you are running Linux, you have several alternatives.

One of the items on the Geek Ranch agenda is a weather station. While we don't have one yet, we have learned a bit about weather stations and Linux.First, why don't we have one? Well, there is no electricity at the Geek Ranch site yet for starters. But, more important, there is no Internet connection. So, let's just call this research.

Two months ago we had looked at the Tyan Tempest i5400XT motherboard, which was Tyan's latest product based upon Intel's newest workstation chipset and had support for dual Intel Xeon quad-core processors. We found the Tempest i5400XT to be a real winner and everything had worked terrific with Linux. Today we are looking at another Tyan workstation motherboard but the tides have turned as we look at their latest AMD dual quad-core solution, the Tyan Thunder n3600M. The Thunder n3600M motherboard supports dual AMD "Barcelona" Opteron processors, 16 sticks of DDR2 RAM, and eight SAS ports, among other stunning features.

Ubuntu 8.04 offers several choices for FTP servers. However, VSFTPD is a great choice based on the secure design and enhanced SSL support for making connections.

The relationship between business, vendors and coders has been tested at a Sun Microsystems conference in San Francisco intended to express oneness with open source. Ian Murdock, Sun vice president of developer and community marketing, and Marten Mickos, head of Sun's database group, used CommunityOne to outline Sun's ideals on recent acquisition MySQL, OpenSolaris and NetBeans. At the same time they explained Sun's attempts to monetize them.

After several weeks of delay, the First Issue (2nd Volume) of THE *NIXED REPORT is now available. Of interest to FOSS users is a previously unpublished blog entry from helios.

Your editor is not always known for making life easy for himself. Perhaps one of the most clear examples of masochistic behavior would be a certain preference for running development distributions on mission-critical systems. That said, your editor has stuck with a stable distribution on his laptop through a round of intensive travel earlier this year. But that was too easy, so, shortly before heading off to the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, the laptop got moved to the Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" distribution. Needless to say, there have been some interesting ups and downs (literally) since then.

More people are converting to Linux platform and it seems that they are not regretting the conversion. It was after the church service when there was a tap on my shoulder. "Hey Neil, just letting you know that you converted me" said the voice. I turned around. There before me was Gary (not his real name), a member of our church. Before I had the brainpower to wonder why it was that a Christian in our church had just announced that I had converted him, he continued. "I'm using Linux"

Mercury Computer Systems announced a Linux-based engineering development kit (EDK) for a 7-10 pound computer that targets small ground, naval, and air vehicles. The "ruggedized" PowerBlock 50 (pictured at left) supports multiple processors to provide "well over 100 GFLOPS of processing power," according to Mercury.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

OfflineIMAP allows you to read your email while you are not connected to the Internet. This is great when you are traveling and really need an attachment from a message but cannot connect to the Internet. You can use OfflineIMAP to sync all your email during the night so that it is all instantly available when you wake up. This is a security trade-off -- you gain speed and availability for your email at the expense of having to properly protect the local copy of all the email that is created on your laptop.

Want to run web applications on your desktop without a browser? Adobe’s Integrated Runtime (AIR) does exactly that and now an alpha release for Linux is available. Adobe has already released AIR 1.0 for Windows and Mac but apparently the Linux version has been delayed while Adobe waited for Flash for Linux to be finalised. Air makes it possible to run a range of applications (usually web applications) on Windows, Linux and Mac using the runtime environment.

The programme committee of the Akademy 2008 KDE contributor's conference would like to thank everybody who already has submitted a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008. The conference programme is beggining to gain shape. Due to popular request the program committee would like to solicit additional proposals and has decided to extend the deadline for submission of proposals to Monday, May 12th. Tell the world about your contribution to KDE. Tell the community what cool things you have done with KDE. Submit your proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2008 no later than Monday, May 12th 2008, 23:59 UTC, to akademy-talks-2008@kde.org.

KDE 4 gives you lots of freedom with your desktop icons and it turns out you can do a number of interesting things with that freedom.

Packt Publishing has published a book about administrating Scalix, an open source email and calendaring software package. Author Markus Feilner and the publisher have generously agreed to share a sample chapter on the the Scalix Administration Console (SAC), excerpted from the work, Scalix: Linux Administrator’s Guide.

Recently I had cause to buy a scanner. Being in a reasonably small home I was eager to save on desk-space, and so decided to upgrade my ageing inkjet printer at the same time. Having looked around I eventually went for an HP Photosmart C5180 device. This is my experience of installing it on Debian Lenny .

KDE Italia is attending this year'sOpen Mind Free Software event from May 8 to May 10, 2008. This event is tailored for all people with an emphasis on young students. Giovanni Venturi and Daniele Costarella will give a presentation on KDE 4 as well as provide further information on KDE applications during their workshop. Open Mind is located atVilla Bruno - San Giorgio a Cremano - Napoli - Italy. There will be a KDE Italia booth at the event where you can go for more information on the team as well as KDE. Please stop by and say hello to Giovanni Venturi and the rest of KDE Italia.