Showing all newswire headlines

Say what you will about retail's looming giant, but Wal-Mart's got stones. It's doing what no other mass-market retailer dares to do: offering low-cost PCs with Linux instead of Windows. The company, which has sold Linspire-powered Linux PCs in the past, has gotten back in the Linux-box game with an Everex system that includes the PC itself, along with mouse and keyboard (but no monitor) for $198, as I read in a report from DesktopLinux.com.

The Linux world has been all atwitter since Acacia Technologies Group filed a lawsuit against Red Hat and Novell alleging that their versions of Linux infringe on three patents. Just how big is the risk to Linux from patent lawsuits? One indication may come from a look at current US patent publications related to or mentioning Linux. Computer programs, though often protected by copyright or trade secrets, cannot be directly patented unless they are used for something tangible, such as signal processing or hardware control. For example, an operating system could be patented as a business method or a method to control computer hardware. Even though Linux is open source, freeware, companies could hold patents that could be infringed by people using Linux in certain applications.

Avangate is happy to announce its participation at European Software Conference ESWC - Germany 2007 and greets the European ISV community.

The Xandros Linux-powered "ultra-mobile PC" (UMPC) has finally arrived. One of the most eagerly awaited laptops in some time, the tiny Asus Eee PC 4G, is now available. When the news first broke that Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asus was coming out with a less than two pounds mini-laptop for under $200 that would be running Linux, both gadget and Linux desktop fans were thrilled. Now that it's here, the Eee PC 4G's price has doubled, but early reviewers are still finding this Xandros-Linux powered laptop to be worth the price.

The Ubuntu operating system has been charged with crimes against hard drives. A number of users have complained this week about the OS (7.04/7.10) forcing drives to spin up and down at an unnatural rate due to some very aggressive power management features. According to Ubuntu wizards, however, this is a firmware/BIOS issue and not the OS's fault. A couple of user forums have started fill up with people commenting about their systems going through an unusual number of load cycles while under battery power. This excessive throttling of the hard drive could lead to quicker than expected hardware failures.

The Hardy Heron Roadmap has over 130 new ideas that have been proposed thus far. I’ve examined each one of these ideas in detail, threw out the ones that weren’t interesting to me, wrote an explanation for each. Of course, the juiciest items have already made headlines, such as the new theme that is being planned… “I for one, welcome our new hopefully non-brown themed overlords!”

Looks like Europe is collectively ready to bring Microsoft's monopoly down so that other OS options will have a chance to flourish. Well, at least one group of like-minded people have managed to begin clearing the playing field some.

Myah OS creator Jeremiah Cheatham has issued the first preliminary release of Myah OS 3.0. The gaming- and multimedia-oriented live CD Linux offering is built with an "efficient" Xfce 4.4.1 desktop, and bundles Internet, office, graphics, development tools, and numerous other applications.

The Essential Blender from No Starch Press is both a reference and instructional guide to Blender, the open source 3-D modeling, rendering, and animation tool. It walks readers through Blender's capabilities by alternating hands-on tutorials with broader, topical chapters that discuss the key concepts and how Blender implements them. Despite a few flaws, it's a good resource for those struggling with the software.

After the descriptions in the previous sections it is clear that there are many, many opportunities for programmers to influence a program's performance, positively or negatively. And this is for memory-related operations only. We will proceed in covering the opportunities from the ground up, starting with the lowest levels of physical RAM access and L1 caches, up to and including OS functionality which influences memory handling.

There is security, and then there is Security. HP, with its new multi-level security services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now offering Common Criteria certified level security for this Linux on its server and desktops. Common Criteria is an ISO security framework standard. It is frequently required in government computing contracts. It is also, historically, difficult for open-source software to obtain, as described briefly in "Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Software Assurance" (PDF link) by David A. Wheeler, an author and software developer.

Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions.JACK: The 1-minute Profileread more

AMD announced today that it has released new Linux drivers for its line of video cards. The new Linux Catalyst 7.10 drivers release includes several updates and new features.

Making periodic backups is a common task. Synbak can help to simplify it. Synbak brings together several different backup methods and provides a powerful reports system that provides details about all the work it does. Synbak can use rsync over Secure Shell (SSH), Server Message Block (SMB), or Common Internet File System (CIFS) and either create tar archives or burn CDs and DVDs (quaintly called laserdiscs in a throwback to old times). It can also access and back up MySQL and Oracle databases and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. Finally, it can send you an email message with the backup details and create an HTML plus RSS Web page with the same information.

Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon has asked Steve Ballmer what it feels like to look at himself in the mirror. In an open letter to the Microsoft head honcho, posted to the web late last night, Bancilhon claims that the Nigerian government has somehow decided to install Windows on 17,000 brand new PCs already equipped with Mandriva Linux. And he questions whether Ballmer and company used dirty tricks to make it happen.

This guide shows how to set up an Ubuntu Studio 7.10 desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system with focus on multimedia creation - the real-time (RT) kernel is installed by default. It provides all you need for daily work and entertainment, incl. codecs, Flash, Adobe Reader, VMware, Skype, TrueType fonts, Cedega, and many more.

Guardian Digital reinforces their dedication to web security with completely redesigned and updated version of their popular Web and Content Filtering solution, SurfSecure.

Everyone knows they should make regular backups of their data. But hardly anyone is as diligent with backups as they should be. So in this two-part series we're going to learn some nice simple methods for making regular backups on single PCs or small networks. Part 1 covers external backup media, and bendingudev to your will so that your backup devices will have persistent names.

With much anticipation by the OpenSolaris community, last night Sun had released their first developer preview for the binary desktop distribution that we have known over the past couple of months as Project Indiana. Ian Murdock and company are optimistic for this project that will address some of the existing Solaris adoption barriers when it comes to the installation, package management, and familiarization along with revitalizing the user experience. How does this first milestone of Project Indiana, which in fact will be named OpenSolaris, rank when it comes to meeting their objectives? In this review, we have a lot of information and screenshots on this long-awaited OpenSolaris binary distribution.

As we all know, Linux distributions are freely available over the Internet. However, prohibitive bandwidth costs, thanks mainly to Telkom's stranglehold, mean that downloading distros of several hundred megabytes or even several gigabytes can be prohibitive. It is much easier and cheaper to just get a CD burned, either at cost or for a small premium.