Showing all newswire headlines

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- Friday, June 29, 2007 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today released version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), the world's most popular free software license.

When reading a hint on the website of LinuxFromScratch I discovered the special capabilities of unionfs, specially in combination with chroot. Later I read a HowTo on a wikiwebsite of Gentoo, about entering a chrooted home directory when using a special script as shell. Combining these two brings me to using a chrooted environment, which you enter when logging in as a special user. This environment is an exact copy (mirror) of the system you are working on. Because you are in safe copy of the real system, you can do whatever you like, it will never change the system, everything stays inside the cache (the readwrite branch).

Linux users finally have their own edition of Google Desktop. The beta release was announced Wednesday, and I've been putting the application through the wringer since then to see how well it stacks up on Linux. I found that it's a nice offering, but it slows a system down noticeably.

Following the footsteps of neighboring Tamil Nadu, Kerala will adopt open source software in schools and government agencies.

Not everyone in the world will be waiting for the release of the iPhone today. Many will be waiting for the release of version 3 of the General Public Licence.

Extend parts of the Eclipse IDE to add rich functionality to your plug-in. After completion, you should be able to use the Eclipse IDE plug-in development wizard

Mozilla yesterday released a new version of its Sunbird standalone calendar application, v0.5, an upgrade from the current 0.3.1 edition. The new version includes support for Google Calendar, automatic migration capabilities from other plug-ins, and many performance improvements, the company said.

People new to Linux are often confused by the large number of distributions there are to choose from. The good news is that you can safely ignore most of them. This article helps you cut through the confusion of choosing a Linux Distribution your exploration—and helps you understand just what it is you've chosen.

The newest versions of Lightning and Sunbird, released simultaneously by Mozilla yesterday, include 38 new calendars as well as support for Google Calendar, a viable print function, enhanced support for Outlook displays and numerous other upgrades.

An open source version of Microsoft's potential Adobe Flash challenger, Silverlight, has been developed within two months of being unveiled as a beta.

Mandriva today announces its sponsorship of the 2007 aKademy KDE conference, which is taking place in Glasgow from June 30th to July 7th. As well as sponsoring the conference, Mandriva is arranging to provide special edition Mandriva Flash USB keys to developers attending the conference as a token of appreciation for their work.

Like other OpenOffice.org applications, Calc has several dozen options in how it is formatted and operates. These options are available from Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org Calc. Thanks to OpenOffice.org's habit of sharing code between applications, some of the tabs for these options resemble those found in other OpenOffice.org applications. Others are unique to Calc and the business of spreadsheets. Either way, the more you know about Calc's options, the more you can take control of your work.

Opinion: With Microsoft selling the ammo? Or, is Microsoft fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons?

As Apple launches its iPhone today, a company attempting to build a similar touchscreen-based phone around an open, user-extensible Linux OS has acknowledged significant delays. OpenMoko now hopes to ship its first "mass market" model in October.

AntiX, the Fluxbox-based, 128 MB RAM-friendly version of Mepis is now in its "pre-final" stage, with a final release from its maker anticapitalista expected in early July, according to the developer himself on the Mepis forum.

So far, creating objects and manipulating them in db4o looks pretty easy -- maybe a little too easy, in fact

This is not a joke. This is a real book, "Debian Für Dummies," written in German and coming to Amazon on Sept. 7, 2007. The authors, Jan-Marek Glogowski and Florian Maier, have been posting blog entries to the book's page on Amazon.

Innotek's GPL-licensed Virtualbox software lets you create a virtual operating environment inside your PC's real operating system. I've been using Virtualbox for several months now on a 32-bit laptop running Ubuntu 7.04, and I've been impressed with the software. However, my main PC at home utilizes a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and Virtualbox didn't support 64-bit OSes -- until this month. Now that I've tried it, I'm happy to report it works just as well as its 32-bit sibling.

Given Linspire's recent "intellectual property" deal with Microsoft, by which MS agrees not to sue Linspire or its customers over so-called patent violations in Linux (and leaving the rest of us out to dry), should I continue to use the freelinuxemail.com service sponsored by Linspire?

What's going on with Xen, the open source hypervisor that was supposed to give VMware a run for its money?