Showing all newswire headlines

The LiMo Foundation is making steady progress on its goal to make Linux a popular mobile operating system. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, several key LiMo vendors including Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic announced as promised the first set of LiMo-compliant handsets while LG, Aplix and Purple Labs showed off prototypes and reference handsets. A total of 18 LiMo models were launched at the event, including six from Motorola, four from Panasonic and NEC and one from Samsung. These included Motorola’s much anticipated RAZR V8 and V8 Luxury Edition and Samsung’s SGH-i800.

Alien Arena 2007 is a free/open-source first-person shooter game based on source code released by id Software. Started by COR Entertainment in 2004, the game combines a 1950s-era sci-fi atmosphere with gameplay similar to the Quake, Doom, and Unreal Tournament series. Alien Arena is primarily an online multiplayer action game, although single player campaigns are also available against bots. I finally had the chance to set-up and play Alien Arena last weekend.

ndia's premier event on Linux and Open Source -- Open Source India Week 2008 (OSIW) -- has just got under way, with the stage set and the big shots of the open source world in at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. The CTO Summit -- the first and one-of-its-kind session -- kick-started with the keynote of one of the open source powerhouses, Brian Behlendorf. He is the man behind Apache Web servers that run more than 60 per cent of the world's website.

Newly appointed Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is aiming to bring Red Hat, an open-source vendor with just below $500 million in revenue as of last year, into the billion-dollar range in the next three years. If you recall, Jim Whitehurst left his position as COO of Delta Airlines, replacing Matt Szulik who stepped down after nine years for family health reasons on January 1. Matt Szulik is now the chairman of Red Hat’s board of directors.

Computer companies want more control over the products they sell you, and they're resorting to increasingly draconian security measures to get that control. The reasons are economic. With enough lock-in, a company can protect its market share even as it reduces customer service, raises prices, refuses to innovate and otherwise abuses its customer base. It should be no surprise that this sounds like pretty much every experience you've had with IT companies: Once the industry discovered lock-in, everyone started figuring out how to get as much of it as they can.

Mobile Linux flagbearer Trolltech appears to be carrying on at a nice clip in the wake of its acquisition by Nokia, and for its Qtopia Phone Edition platform, things just got a little sweeter. The company is using MWC as its stage to announce version 4.3, which is actually a good deal more revolutionary than its one-tenth increment would lead on.

“The Burton Group has denigrated the work and the members of the OASIS Open Document Format Technical Committee (of which I am Co-Chair) with published statements that have been shown to be false. The Burton Group owes us an apology and an immediate retraction. Waiting until after February, after the DIS 29500 process concludes, to make corrections is unacceptable. Since your stated purpose in making this report public was to "advance the debate" in the current OOXML ISO process, withholding factual corrections until after that process concludes would imply that you and the Burton Group see no problems with knowingly persisting in influencing an ISO ballot with false information published under the Burton Group name.”

[Them's fighting words! - Sander]

So you just set up a Linux-compatible webcam. You've tested it with Kopete, and you can send images on MSN and Yahoo! Now what? Here are some fun things you can try.

Fluxbuntu's aim is to be a "lightweight, productive, agile, and efficient" operating system; this review takes a look at Fluxbuntu and whether it lives up to the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience on a tight resources budget. The review discusses included applications, the user interface and ease-of-use, as well as some limitations.

Sun Microsystems has gone very granola by buying desktop virtualization software player innotek. (The small 'i' stands for big innovation or something like that.) Innotek pushes software called VirtualBox (less than 20MB) that lets developers run multiple operating systems and display them side-by-side on their screen. So, you can hop back and forth, testing your code across Windows, Linux, Mac and OpenSolaris. Beyond the development angle, VirtualBox handles basis PC and server virtualization tasks.

Linux comes with many serial text and gui based serial communication programs. My favorite is minicom - friendly menu driven serial communication program. If you are addicted to DOS / Windows TELIX (a telecommunications program originally written for DOS and was released in 1986), minicom is for you under Linux / UNIX. Let us see how to configure minicom for my Soekris net4801 Single Board Computer / embedded Linux device.

Those of you who - like me - are more interested in topics like Free and Open Source, and everything that’s related, will find some good pointers here. All of these great sites provide RSS feeds, so if you’re using modern browsers like Iceweasel or Firefox, you can “live-bookmark” them to see the headlines even without visiting the pages.

Earlier this week, I took a close look at the latest release of Fedora. Overall, Fedora 8 is a really solid distro. But there were specific areas that a lot of other reviews completely missed. In this piece, we will examine these more intimately to get a better understanding of Red Hat's new release.

After reading this post from the Ubuntu forums, I have to admit that running random code can be dangerous, even on a secure OS like your favorite Linux distribution. But does this mean that using shell scripts should totally be forgotten about? I tend to think not.

This is something that had to come out eventually - has Xandros picked up where the SCO Group left off? Well, let me put it this way. The single most effective way to defeat something that's offered for free it to find a way to make it better, then make a fortune doing it. In the past, Linspire and Xandros, among others, have tried this via various Wal-Mart sold Linux PCs and generally failed miserably at it. Then out of nowhere, comes another - Everex Linux PC - this time using common sense with Google branding power and make a fantastic go at it. Rather than convincing people that Windows-based PC hardware can be "tweaked to work,"

This is a question that has struck a lot of new Linux users. Should they use closed source software when the open source alternatives are lacking? Today, I will talk about some of the applications I use and the advantages that each of them present.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a useful tool for examining the state of devices on a network. The open source world offers a number of consoles designed to manage the information from these devices and produce reports. However, there are circumstances in which access to the devices at a more customizable level is more beneficial. Given that the programming involved is minimal, it is worth considering custom applications for SNMP reporting.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has started deploying Linux-based Opengear console servers to remotely monitor and manage its international locations, including Australian Embassies, Consulates, High Commissions and territories. DFAT has already installed 16 Opengear CM4116 console managers to eight international sites with over 200 scheduled for installation over the next three years.

During a visit to a major university last week, The VAR Guy listened as an integrator slammed Asterisk as a “toy.” The open source VoIP platform, he asserted, lacked a service and support network for big enterprise and university deployments. Apparently, the folks at Digium (located a few hundred miles away…) somehow overheard the conversation. The Asterisk market leader has launched a new warranty program that could give skeptical partners and customers more faith in open source-based IP telephony. Here are the details.

When you have shelled out for a swanky mouse like the Logitech VX Nano, you want to make the most out of your investment, which means making its programmable buttons work. However, many Linux distributions recognize most mice as generic pointing devices, so none of the fancy extra buttons work right out of the box. The btnx utility can help you to turn your mouse into the versatile tool it is meant to be.