Showing all newswire headlines

If you have ever tried to implement one of the hotspot HowTos on this and other sites, it might have dawned on you that this is not an easy feat to accomplish. Amazingly most solutions also leave out the most important part – how to get paid by the punters using the hotspot. Some will offer prepaid solution or access tickets that need to be printed, but this will require staff being involved on the premises. And in particular, once you want to offer a professional service and not just a toy concept it gets tricky – and expensive. Just imagine all the servers you need to provide redundant and load balanced freeradius, mysql and web servers. It is generally not worth the effort and expense for just one hotspot – unless of course you are willing to accept outages, unhappy customers etc.

LXer Feature: 23-Mar-2008

In this week's roundup we have an early look at KDE 4.1, the Supreme Court rejects Microsoft's Novell appeal - 12 years later! 25 Simple Games for Linux, CodeWeavers to release CrossOver Games, A Wine 1.0 release in our lifetime and reviews of Spicebird and Clonezilla. To wrap things up we have two FUD articles, an old argument about Linux viruses and Apple fixes some Open Source Vulnerabilities.

A guide with screenshots and code samples to show you how to install and run most of the DirectX 9.0c March 2008 redistributable on Linux using Wine.

During my article on Amiga emulation on the Linux platform I had deliberately neglected to mention AmiKit as there appeared to be only MS Windows based executable installers and zip archives on the AmiKit web site. After the article went live, Mike kindly informed us there was indeed a Linux friendly archive of AmiKit. I emailed the AmiKit author, Jan Zahurancik, requesting a link to it as there was no link to be found on the AmiKit web site, only MS centric archives. He duly replied with 3 links, which Jan has requested I do not show here as they were not and are not public versions, to AmiKit in zip and lzx format as well as a link to a PDF file showing how to get AmiKit working on the Linux platform.

Here’s the scenario, a friend of mine just bought a new laptop. When he was buying it, he indicated that he did not want windows on it (which should make it cheaper). The response from the vendor: “We can’t do that, it comes with Windows”. When he became a bit more aggressive, they indicated they could give him one without Windows (Vista SP1), but it would cost an extra $70!

In many African countries, few people have access to computers and the Internet. Experts say this is hindering development and preventing students from being able to compete for jobs. At a conference in Dakar this week, software experts, government officials and students came together to look at how open-source software, which is free for anyone to use, could make technology available to more people. Kari Barber has this report from Dakar.

Last Thursday PKN (Polish Normalization Committee) had a meeting on which it was supposed to come up with the decision concerning Polish recommendation for ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML) proposed standard. The common stance has not been acheived.

Last November we had looked at Mythbuntu 7.10 and found it to be an excellent MythTV distribution. With its LiveCD MythTV front-end capabilities and intuitive Mythbuntu Control Center, this distribution is far more than just a re-branded edition of Ubuntu with a couple MythTV packages. Being released in tandem with Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" next month will be Mythbuntu 8.04 and today we are taking an early look at this spring refresh using the recently released beta.

This posting is targeting cloning Mercurial Repository for Xen 3.2 on Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop (64-bit) and creating 64-bit Xen 3.2 Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Dom0. To verify Dom0 functionality Solaris (Nevada Build 84) has been installed and tested as DomU. Looks like same procedure at Ubuntu 7.10 Server (amd64) differs from described above.

After nearly 2 years of non-stop development, FreeSWITCH has evolved from an idea and an empty directory into a fully operational soft-switch capable of withstanding the loads 8-10 times as large as anything else they were able to deploy in the past with other software according to the reports from our early adopters.

A while back, we bought a Sun Ultra 5 workstation with a winning bid of about $20.00 or so. It has a 360 MHz SPARC processor, 128 Meg of RAM, and an eight gigabyte harddrive. Most computers from Ebay are sold without operating systems, and this machine was no exception. Installing an operating system on Sun equipment isn't hard, once you know how to do it.

At first blush, Microsoft hounds might want to pounce on Apple's release of over 80 vulnerability fixes this week. But before anyone bears that red M tattooed on their chest, you should take another look at Apple's updates.

[How's this for a loaded article title? Interesting how updates became vulnerabilities - Scott]

Efforts to increase the adoption of open-source software are being derailed by the efforts of a "loud minority" within the community who have made personal attacks on individuals who have expressed doubts about the software, according to one of the open-source movement's main advocates.

Consolidation in the business intelligence market has pushed Business Objects into the arms of SAP and Cognos into IBM's fold,but there are other options. Pentaho is gaining traction with its open source alternative, a BI suite that includes reporting and analysis tools, data mining, and dashboards. Service subscriptions tripled last quarter.

There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.

One big hole for open source lies in security. It’s not a real hole. It’s a meta-hole. But we still view it as a hole, so it’s a hole. That hole opened up again in Australia this week, where a “loud minority” got personal when Australian Taxation Office chief information officer Bill Gibson expressed concerns about open source security.

In this article I am going to explain how to configure and use DOSBox, the best MS DOS emulator for Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux systems.

Apple updated its Safari Web browser for Mac and Windows on Tuesday and offered the new version for download from its Web site. The company also began pushing the browser to Windows users -- whether it was previously installed or not -- via the Apple Software Update, a practice Mozilla CEO John Lilly said is just "wrong."

WHAT a refreshing change, a Linux distribution with a well-chosen, meaningful name. But just having a good name isn't enough, is it? Nor is saying you're going to do something, then not following through. Here's a precis of what the Foresight Linux team have to say about their operating system on their website (http://www.foresightlinux.org/)

"Allocations of larger pages are not reliable in Linux. If larger pages have to be allocated then one faces various choices of allowing graceful fallback or using vmalloc with a performance penalty due to the use of a page table," began Christoph Lameter, describing the third version of his virtual compound page support patchset. He continued,"a virtual compound allocation means that there will be first of all an attempt to satisfy the request with physically contiguous memory. If that is not possible then a virtually contiguous memory will be created."