Showing all newswire headlines

When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from April 2nd - 4th, 2008.

There's no dearth of Web feed readers for Linux that allow you to keep tabs on new postings on a Web site. But what if the Web site or page you're interested in doesn't provide a feed? Specto is a nifty little Python application that lets you monitor changes to static or dynamic pages. You can configure Specto to monitor changes to wiki pages, blog posts, forum threads, your email inbox, and even files and folders on your own system. An unobtrusive pop-up from its system tray icon informs you of all changes, so you don't have to hop around looking for updates.

Tobias König is a Computer Science student and one of the core developers of Akonadi, one of the innovative technologies that will be implemented in KDE4. Akonadi will be a platform independent innovative storage solution for personal data. In this interview, Tobias König shares his impressions about the integration into the KDE desktop environment and Akonadi's development and features.

Four years after Linux gets NSA's help, Sun is finally mature enough to handle NSA's technology. Back in 2004, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) helped the Linux community to build something called SELinux, which brings mandatory access control (MAC) policies to the Linux kernel. Now four years later, Sun is getting the same technology from the NSA to use with its Solaris operating system. Sun's OpenSolaris community will work on integrating the NSA's Flux Advanced Security Kernel (Flask) architecture, which is a form of mandatory access control, for type enforcement

When the next version of Ubuntu Linux ships in April, there’s a reasonable chance that server vendors could start jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon by May or so. Here’s the scoop.

The Philippine government's official weather service, PAGASA, has replaced its SGI supercomputer with a clustered Debian Linux system that can process information vital to protection against typhoons, floods, droughts, tsunamis and other wild weather conditions at a fraction of the cost.

Major game publishers and indie game developers alike seem to ignore Linux customers, or if they do provide a port of a game, it is usually weeks, months, or even years in coming. Is it due to a lack of Linux-using gamers? Why aren't there more of them?

Last month right before FOSDEM 2008, the 3D programming documentation for the R500 GPUs (Radeon X1000) series was released. This documentation consisted of a register reference guide for the R500 GPUs as well as a programming guide covering such areas as the command processor, vertex shaders, and fragment shaders. While the register reference guide for the R600 series is still being worked on, for those with older ATI graphics processors, AMD has went back and created a register reference guide for the R300 series.

I was at the OOXML BRM in Geneva on behalf of my national body. We were trying to improve the Ecma 376 OOXML specification (i.e. what many people think of as the spec for the Microsoft Office 2007 file formats), in preparation for national bodies to make the final decision as to whether it should be accepted by ISO as a standard. I'm not going to blog about the details of it, because that's already been done well by plenty of people already (Antonis Christofides, Tim Bray, Jesper Lund Stocholm, Rob Weir, Yong Yoon Kit, Doug Mahugh, Brian Jones). What I don't think has been covered well is what happens now, and what people can do about it.

One of the great new features in Fedora 8 is the inclusion of the PulseAudio sound server. PulseAudio allows multiple streams of audio to be played at once, eliminating the worry of having your sound card locked up by another running program. There's also a handy volume control applet that will let you set the volume of each audio stream independently. That's right folks, listen to your MP3s, watch (and listen!) to a YouTube video, and voice chat with your IM buddies, all at the same time and with independent control over each program's volume. Setting up PulseAudio is very easy.

Last month the TrueCrypt Foundation released TrueCrypt 5.0, which finally introduces a Linux GUI for the cross-platform encryption application. TrueCrypt 5.0's numerous other enhancements include a Mac OS X port, XTS operation mode, the ability to encrypt a system partition or drive under Windows, and the addition of the SHA-512 hash algorithm.

The next big release of Eclipse could see IBM's overwhelming dominance of the open source tools platform reduced, according to the foundation's chief. Mike Milinkovich hopes e4, as it's being called, will introduce a simple code base that's accessible to a wide pool of developers and reduces reliance on IBMers with an intimate working and historical knowledge of the current, huge 3.x code base.

It happens to everyone sooner or later: a split second after you hit Enter you realize your mistake, but it's too late; you just deleted a valuable file or directory for which no backup exists. Fortunately, you remember that files are never really deleted, at most overwritten by new content. So, you remount the disk read-only as fast as possible. But now? If you Google for "undelete ext3", almost every article you find will be users asking if it's possible and the answer is every time: no. On February 7th, 2008, I accidently deleted my whole home directory: over 3 GB of data, deleted with rm -rf. The only backup that I had was from June 2007. Not being able to undelete was unacceptable. So, I ignored what everyone tried to tell me and started to learn how an ext3 file system really works, and what exactly happens when files are deleted... Three weeks and nearly 5000 lines of code later, I had recovered every file on my disk.

Have you ever left your terminal logged in, only to find when you came back to it that a (supposed) friend had typed "rm -rf ~/*" and was hovering over the keyboard with threats along the lines of "lend me a fiver 'til Thursday, or I hit return"? Undoubtedly the person in question would not have had the nerve to inflict such a trauma upon you, and was doing it in jest. So you've probably never experienced the worst of such disasters....

[Yes, I know this is from 1986. It's still a great read - Sander]

The rising generation of programmers isn't being fed .Net and Windows. It's growing strong on Linux and its associated LAMP stack, as Robert Guth of the Wall Street Journal notes. Microsoft thinks it has an answer to this trend toward Linux. It is very telling how far from reality Microsoft is by its response:

Every six months, the GNOME team prepares a new and revolutionary release of the ever popular GNOME desktop environment. Today, we are proud to introduce you to the latest and greatest features of an 100% FREE and open source desktop. Whether you are on a Solaris machine or the latest Ubuntu distribution, GNOME is there and with every new release it makes your life... Simply Beautiful! Let's have a look at the new features of GNOME 2.22.

The Banshee development community has been working for months on a major refresh for the popular music player. The first Banshee 1.0 alpha was released today, providing users with an early look at Banshee's new features and vastly improved user interface.

From iPods to navigation systems, some of today's hottest gadgets are landing on store shelves with some unwanted extras from the factory -- pre-installed viruses that steal passwords, open doors for hackers and make computers spew spam. Computer users have been warned for years about virus threats from downloading Internet porn and opening suspicious e-mail attachments. Now they run the risk of picking up a digital infection just by plugging a new gizmo into their PCs.

So here it is: video. Today we’re proud to announce the general release of video calls in Skype 2.0 for Linux. As you may already know, the best things in life are often free and now you can make (and receive) free, great quality video calls on Linux.