Showing all newswire headlines

Once upon a time, there was an open source project called Subversion, and it needed a new date parser. One day, a coder came along and wrote one. But he insisted on tagging the source code with his John Hancock. And that was against the rules. Subversion's founders said that name tags would undermine collaboration. When the founders asked the coder to remove his name, he refused, threatening to leave the project and take his date parser with him. It was a good date parser - just want the project needed - but the founders stood their ground.

Q. I’m planning on reformatting and erasing the hard drive in my old computer before I give it to a friend, but I can’t find the original Windows discs that came with it. I don’t want to pass along a machine with no operating system on it, so what can I do? A. It is a good idea to wipe your data and reformat the hard drive before someone else starts using the computer. You still have a couple of options even if you can’t find the Windows system software discs to reinstall the operating system.

Free software lovers can rejoice at this month's release of gNewSense 2.0 (pronounced "guh-new-sense"), the latest version of the popular distribution based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Code-named DeltaH, this operating system includes only software where users have the right to run, study, adapt, redistribute, and improve all of the software and code. To that end, gNewSense is supported and sponsored by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The strict freedom-ware requirement excludes a great deal of software, including proprietary drivers for wireless and video cards, leaving most users with a less functional -- albeit less tainted -- derivative of Ubuntu 8.04.

Seven years ago this week I published my first online commentary piece. The topic was the predicted death of the Linux desktop brought on by the demise of Eazel, the original developer of GNOME’s Nautilus file manager. A lot has happened since that time, but not precisely how I would have predicted it would. Let’s review.

Profiling an application lets you see what functions are taking up most of the CPU time so you can concentrate your optimization efforts on making the those pieces of code run faster. With sysprof, you can profile all the applications that are running on your machine, including a multithreaded or multiprocessed application or a complex server application that has multiple parts. sysprof collects information about how much time is spent in each library and function as the applications execute.

As a follow-up to Michael Stutz's excellent article, this article provides 10 more good habits to adopt that will improve your UNIX command-line efficiency. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, and discover exactly why these 10 UNIX habits are worth picking up!

South Africa was the first, but not the last. Now Brazil has sent a letter protesting the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard also, and Andy Updegrove says he has heard there will be more:

Firebird 2.1 will be included by default in the next Ubuntu release named Intrepid Ibex that will be released in 30 October.

A decision on whether to press ahead with a re-usable architecture from Google to simplify the development of applications spanning multiple social networks is due in the next few days. Members of Google's OpenSocial project are next week expected to vote on a proposal for a new template language that'll be used to build tags for use with OpenSocial. OpenSocial defines common APIs for applications across multiple sites using JavaScript and XML.

As you may have noticed, debian experimental got firebird2.0 (2.0.4) and firebird2.1 (2.1.0). I would really appreciate if you give these some testing.

Like many Linux Journal readers, I have been upgrading my Gibbons to Herons recently. And like many readers, I imagine, I have been finding a few little challenges along the way. That was no surprise, since it's pretty much par for the course when carrying out a major upgrade. But something else did surprise me, although in retrospect I see that it shouldn't have.

This guide describes how to easily configure your Fedora 9 installation. Learn how to upgrade from Fedora 7/8, add extra repositories, configure audio and video playback, install everyday needed applications and increase your system's performance and usability! Plus you can learn how to access your Windows Partitions and Shared folders, install Compiz-Fusion, SUN's JAVA, KDE and much more.

WebVZ is one of the simplest and most powerful web management tools for OpenVZ. This tutorial shows how to install it on a Debian Etch system.

In April we had looked at the ECS A780GM-A v1.0 motherboard, which boasted AMD's new Radeon HD 3200 graphics. For being an integrated graphics solution, we were certainly pleased with the performance, as it had performed about the same as the discrete Radeon HD 2400PRO. With the success of the AMD 780G Chipset, we have decided to look at another one of these motherboards. This time around we are looking at the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort, which as the name implies it offers a DisplayPort connection for the integrated graphics.

Everybody who owns a computer will someday need to dispose of a disk drive. Before you do, it is a good idea to cleanse the drive, so no one can read your sensitive information. Deleting files and reformatting is not sufficient; determined effort can still reveal data from a drive even after it appears to be gone. To do a more thorough job, I suggest using wipe.

Quick tutorial on using the dlpiping command to troubleshoot VCS errors at the LLT protocol layer.

Novell Thursday reported net income of $5.8 million for its fiscal 2008 second quarter pulling earnings up from a loss of $2.8 million in the same quarter last year. The company said it showed healthy growth in its core business units around the Linux operating system, identity/access management software and systems management tools.

What a geek and "average joe" would do with a Wii on the first day, after a month, and after a year.

Among its list of top ten tech problems are open source software and the popular music player iTunes, according to BDNA's survey of its customers.

Once you have the proper Ubuntu repository added to get Childsplay (is it Universe?), in order to get sound for GCompris, Childsplay and Tuxpaint, make sure to add the proper packages. For some reason, the sound packages aren't added as dependencies.