Showing all newswire headlines

Here's a great little article on how to work with the Free Software Community: "...With that intent in mind, let’s explore seven principles that will make your life easier when engaging free software types.

Lacking of good GUI tool, it is often a headache for newbies to setup the FTP service to transfer files among windows/linux/mac machines. Here we introduce a new powerful GUI server/client tool for you to easily solve this problem. You can use it on Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X, the same approach.

Every year, Linux enthusiasts in India's capital, New Delhi, hold a conference to help spread word of free and open source software (FOSS). This year they called their conference Freed.in, and had more talks and attendees than they've had in the past. While the event was a wonderful opportunity for the FOSS community to interact in person, discuss issues, and brainstorm solutions, attendees were overwhelmed by the number of talks jammed into a two-day schedule.

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running.

Back in the late 1990s,when the KDE and GNOME desktops were getting started, KDE had the reputation of being the most suitable choice for new GNU/Linux users, especially those migrating from Windows. Whether this generality is still true is debatable (personally, I could never see much difference between the two desktops), but KDE remains one of GNU/Linux's most popular graphical interfaces, as well as one of the most easy to learn.

A "significant portion" of development teams continue to use Linux as their primary embedded OS, a recent VDC survey finds. Additionally, the results suggest the trend will persist, "as the majority of current Linux users surveyed plan to use Linux again as their primary operating system on future [embedded] projects."

This HOWTO will describe how to install uTorrent on your Debian Linux desktop using wine and how to get a more suitable tray icon using alltray.

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into ODT (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents. Using odtwriter, you can generate ODF files on machines that don't have ODF-compatible word processors installed, such as those running lightweight Linux distros, or simply compose documents in a text editor and leave the task of properly formatting them to odtwriter.

This Saturday and Sunday, the Dutch international Open Source event T-Dose will be held for the second time in Eindhoven (40 km from both the German and Belgian border (GoogleMaps). This year, the event is held at the Fontys 'High School' (so not the university this year!) and there are three tracks and several workshops. Topics cover a wide range from KDE(4), debugging and exploiting software, embedded systems and virtualization. This year is the second time I will attend, and I can really advise you to be there if you're interested in open source software, even if you're not a developer (neither am I). Also, Sander Marechal, our other Dutch editor (list) will be there, and we plan to cover the event in one or more articles on LXer.

If you plan to go there, please let us know in a message below. We hope to see you there!

[ Sorry for being late to announce, my planning is bad - hkwint ]

Ubuntu's leader has thoughts on Microsoft CEO's latest claims that Linux and open source violate Microsoft's intellectual property.

As you may, "open format" bills were introduced in multiple legislatures in the US earlier this year in states such as California, Connecticut, Oregon, New York and Texas. All of those efforts failed to accomplish their original objectives, with every piece of legislation being defeated, except for the ones introduced in Minnesota and New York, where greatly weakened bills passed that called for the "study" of open formats.

This HowTo describes the implementation of Nginx with php5 support (through FastCGI). The fast-cgi process will be initiated via spawn-fcgi. Nginx is a great replacement of Apache with very low memory footprint and contrary to Lighttpd, does not suffer from memory leak over time. You can then use all the memory left to unleash the power of mysql for instance by increasing the default query cache.

Ubuntu-based Linspire 6.0 includes CNR service, proprietary software and Microsoft technology. It also bundles in Microsoft patent covenants following a deal with the software giant last year.

This guide describes how to compile and install the latest compiz-fusion from git on Fedora 7. compiz-fusion is the cool cube desktop you see all over the Internet from Linux users. Fedora 7 has packages only for beryl which is considered obsolete. compiz-fusion is the merge of beryl and compiz!

After reading an InformationWeek article about Steve Ballmer suggesting, yet again, that GNU/Linux users - or at least the Red Hat users - owe Microsoft money for violating patents he, yet again, refuses to disclose. But Ballmer is missing something - or maybe I am.

Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0.

The Linux 2.6.23 kernel has been released today and we have some preliminary benchmarks of the 2.6.23 kernel as we compare it to the past Linux 2.6.22 kernel. We will have more on the Linux 2.6.23 kernel once we have tested it more extensively, but the benchmarks we have ran so far include Quake 4, LAME encoding, Gzip compression, and RAMspeed. If you missed it, among the features for the Linux 2.6.23 kernel include the CFS process scheduler (Completely Fair Scheduler), a variety of virtualization improvements, on-demand read-ahead, and XFS and EXT4 file-system improvements are among the interesting changes.

Over this past week end I have posted four Adobe Photoshop on Linux with Wine articles, versions 6 through CS2 are covered.

Cinelerra, one of the only serious video editing and compositing tools available for Linux, can cause frustration for users trying to install it on Ubuntu Studio. Fortunately, after several attempts, I found a way to install it easily.

Short patent timeline:

16 May, 1991: "If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today." - Bill Gates, Challenges and Strategy Memo

Aug, 2004: OSDL releases a study saying Linux may infringe 283 patents; Ballmer leaves away the word "may"

May, 2007: Brad Smith claims Linux potentially infringes 235 patents

Oct, 2007: Ballmer claims

Linux potentially infringes 153 patents

Conclusion: Number of Microsoft patents filed at USPTO grows, but number of MS patents Linux potentially infringes on is declining.