Showing all newswire headlines

In a weblog on CNet, Don Reisinger asks Is Linus Torvalds even speaking for Linux anymore? The question reminds me of a famous retort by Charles Babbage. I’m sure you can find it, and it’s immaterial. What Mr. Reisinger said is more important..

Back in the day, Microsoft was the new kid on the block when it came to mobile devices like PDAs, munching up Palm's market share and tweaking the interest of application providers already familiar with Windows and Microsoft's applications. Today, the descendants of Microsoft's Windows CE, Windows Mobile and Smartphone, are the ones getting left behind as Apple's iPhone proves one of the main catalysts for action in the mobile sector.

The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that EU regulators have announced a third investigation into Microsoft's conduct on the desktop. This time around, the EU is going to investigate the long string of complaints about what happened during last year's attempt by Microsoft to achieve adoption for OOXML.

Try as they might, Microsoft just can't seem to put in all the features and applications their users yearn for. Ironically, this is what drives the average Linux user: choice.

Look under /pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.pdf and /pub/OpenBSD/doc/obsd-faq.txt on your nearest FTP mirror. The thing's 227 pages long in PDF form. The 998-page FreeBSD Handbook, compressed in its various forms (including PDF, Postscript, text and RTF), can be found under /pub/FreeBSD/doc/handbook from your local FTP mirror. It's especially nice to be told to RTMF when the manual in question is as good as these two. And these are free books.

GnuCash is a personal finance and accounting application created to keep you crazy organized. It can do simple things like recording expenses and take care of register transactions, but it can also handle tracking bank accounts, income, and a slew of financial instruments and derivatives.

The VAR Guy is skipping Disneyland this weekend and keeping a close eye on the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), which runs February 8-10 at the Westin Los Angeles. Here are five trends and themes The VAR Guy will be tracking at the event.

Creating a light, attractive desktop environment on a new low-end laptop using Openbox in Ubuntu is simple and offers you most of the features you need for everyday computing without much of the load that comes with GNOME or KDE.

Why a desktop installation of OpenBSD? It's a legitimate question. According to Distrowatch, among the three main BSD projects (they don't like to be called "distros"), FreeBSD is way out in front -- and is the base for PC-BSD and DesktopBSD -- followed by OpenBSD and NetBSD.

It is the time of the yearto gather and spend some time on our favourite IDE. Continuing the tradition to meet in cities famous for alcohol-based beverages and oversized servings of meat, Munich was the obvious pick. Pretending to be a civilised crowd, we managed to convince the boss of the Trolltech's Munich office to generously provide us with a room, a 4MBit SDSL line and lots of coffee. Read on for the agenda and how any interested KDevelop helpers can join.

Setting up a virtual File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server with a database back end offers many benefits. By using a database, you can store a large number of users centrally, so it's easy to manage. It offers more security than traditional Unix OS authentication methods, because virtual users can access only the FTP server's resources, not the OS's. You can use the many Web tools that are available to easily install, configure, and manage the database back end.

The Linux operating system, along with Microsoft Windows Vista and Mac OS X, will be pitted against one another in an “ethical” hacking contest. The CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference will be hosting the competition to see which operating system is the most secure. Is this really a contest that matters even remotely?

In the first part of this series, I introduced you to the concepts behind IRC. The second installment is somewhat more practical in nature and focuses on the default IRC client used by most distributions running the GNOME desktop. This is Peter Železný's XChat.

New developers, new Stable Grimoire and work progressing on new Source Mage ISO.

This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. This makes four different virtualization programs that run on Linux: the free, open source Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the newly-available, commercial Parallels. This review takes a look at all four, and compares cost, installation, ease of use, and performance.

I was surprised that ZDNET has publishes an article about "Torvalds: Retirement won't see death of Linux". Don't they know what open source is all about? The great benefit of open source is that it doesn't depend on one supplier whether it is a person, a group or a company. therefore if this supplier retires anyone who have an interest in the project can take it and keep it alive. Open source have only four simple rules, is it so hard to remember? Therefore open source project need not die! However, it still can, like in the case of ...

As a Linux user, I've found it difficult to subsidize my computer habit. Oddly, more people were willing pay to see me rock out on a set of strings than finger-tap like Eddie Van Halen on my keyboard. Go figure.

Tucked in with the many security updates (and the restoration of one’s ability to paste text from a web page into a Word document!), a very interesting modification to the Office 2003 software waits quietly for installation with Service Pack 3. Unbeknownst to the user installing this “Pack 3,” their Office software is about to be imbued with a runaway power: the cutoff of access to your old documents. The vendor-neutral quality makes ODF a superior format for document retention.

Amarok project founder Mark Kretschmann was interviewed for "Not the Gentoo Linux Newsletter". He talks about Amarok and what makes this project special, its community, beer, more beer and other things of importance to him. Amarok headquarters is also pleased to announce Amarok 2 Technology Preview 1 for Windows, complete with an easy to use installer!

In the doublespeak of telecommunications politics "no compelling case" to regulate ADSL means it might be imminent and "it is unlikely there is a need to regulate" means "no way will there be regulation". Welcome to the brave new world of ALP telecoms regulation, or Telstra spin-doctoring. Take your pick!