Showing all newswire headlines

Yesterday Nicholas Negroponte, former director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab now head of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project, gave analysts and journalists an update on the OLPC project. Two big changes were announced - the $100 OLPC is now the $175 OLPC, and it will be able to run Windows.

[Like we didn't see this coming. Is there anything Microsoft can't do?, besides make a decent Operating System? - Scott]

The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of the fourth and final test release of Fedora 7.

Airline looks to IBM's Unix-based AIX platform to handle internal finance systems, says "stability issues" a factor.

[Stability Issues, are they kidding? Talk about a talented salesperson.. Oh well, at least its not M$ - Scott]

In the second installment of the Tux500 Audio Blog, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Stephan Gregoire. Stephan is the driver of the #77 Chastain Motorsports entry in this year's Indianapolis 500. He'll also be representing the Linux community in it's biggest marketing effort to date! Come on over, and allow Stephan to introduce himself...

I broke down and read Getting Things Done (GTD) in February (after letting the book sit unopened on the couch for a month). When I finished, I was determined to adopt the popular organizational method. I searched for a solid software tool to track projects and next actions, and found dozens of desktop-oriented applications to choose from. One of the GTD axioms is to collect all of your tasks, projects, and lists in one place; since I regularly use four PCs and laptops and a mobile phone, finding a GTD-aware tool that would run as a Web app was paramount. I settled on Tracks; it is open source, easy to use, and accessible from anywhere.

In just a few short days our choices in desktop operating systems seem to have tripled. Not only has Dell agreed to distribute Linux on certain desktop models, but it's also given XP a new lease on life. Responding to user requests on its Ideastorm site, Dell has agreed to offer consumers the option to get XP and not Vista on select Dimension desktops and Inspiron notebooks -- at least until Microsoft sends XP off to the OS boneyard in January 2008. Even Michael Dell is running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on one of his home notebooks.

Novell openSUSE project has had a recent history of trouble with its update programs. Now, to make updating openSUSE more pleasant, the project is dropping its support for ZENworks and opening up YAST to community development. In an openSUSE development list management note, SUSE Project Manager Andreas Jaeger wrote, "OpenSUSE is focusing on native software management by using YAST and Libzypp, the package management library."

"This is the attitude I think should be demonstrated by the team of the project: it already won. The community already won. We won. Almost 10 thousand dollars is in the bank and we'll use it, one way or another, to promote the biggest collective representative of Free Software, GNU/Linux."

The OS for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is a port of the Linux kernel but with a unique interface called Sugar. In this article, learn about the Sugar human interface, and how to virtualize, use, and develop for Sugar. OLPC is targeted towards children around the world, with the missions to develop a low-cost laptop (USD100) with a novel user interface and applications that allow children to experiment with tools for expression and learning.

I had lunch with a friend today that is making me reconsider some of my previous comments on Oracle's Unbreakable Linux moves. I still think the company went about it in the wrong way, but it makes more sense to me now. What If Oracle's move against Red Hat was not about Red Hat at all? What if it was in response to the Microsoft threat?

Carnegie Mellon University unveiled a new project Thursday designed to help people make robots from parts found at the local hardware store.

Transparently leveraging huge pages on Linux -- which allow memory page table entries to cover larger ranges of contiguous physical memory -- has become much easier with the recent introduction of Version 1 of the libhugetlbfs library on SourceForge. Learn more about the libhugetlbfs libraries and how to use them with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Linspire has published the release schedules for its two Linux distributions -- Linspire and Freespire -- and the overhaul of its CNR (click-and-run) software update system to support multiple Linux distributions, including Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Standard disk setup here used to include a 5GB root partition (this has been upped to 10GB for a while now). I’ve just encountered the first machine with this setup to be running out of space on / - mostly this seems to be down to /usr/share.

Pagestream is a proprietary desktop publishing program for Linux, Windows, Macintosh, and Amiga. First developed for the Atari more than two decades ago, it is produced by a small company, but has attracted a loyal and active group of users. Pagestream's strengths include an easy-to-use interface and a strong awareness of typography, but in the version 5.0.3.4 beta for GNU/Linux, users also have to contend with limited font support and apparently disabled table support.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.21 kernel, "if the goal for 2.6.20 was to be a stable release (and it was), the goal for 2.6.21 is to have just survived the big timer-related changes and some of the other surprises (just as an example: we were apparently unlucky enough to hit what looks like a previously unknown hardware errata in one of the ethernet drivers that got updated etc)."

DistroWatch.com, for years a staple of the Linux information scene for its coverage of distribution development, today posted a new "Top Ten Distributions" page. The list provides a few paragraphs of general information and history for each distro, plus a brief list of fast facts. The site was careful to indicate that its selections are "loosely listed in order of popularity on DistroWatch, which is NOT an indication of their market share or quality."

I can honestly say without reservation that the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative (GMAE) is a novel idea, and I certainly support the hard work that has gone behind bringing GNOME to the mobile world. However, I can't help but feel like the desktop Linux world will likely be left out in the cold as their embedded siblings continue to embrace the Microsoft desktop platform. Will this initiative be enough to get developers to finally offer desktop Linux users the options for keeping their data in sync without hours of command line and config file editing? To date, I remain unaware of any successful, user-friendly instances where embedded Linux has given the time of day with regard to easy “syncability” to desktop Linux. Sure, there are a number of hacks, workarounds and other such solutions, but it’s not a simple solution. It just goes to show just how sad this whole thing really is.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions about how to install the free VMware Server (version 1.0.2) on a Debian Etch system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free). In this article we use Debian Etch (4.0) as the host operating system.

Microsoft's announcement last week that it will sell a $3 software bundle to students in developing countries is a positive move that won’t hurt the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort, according to Michael Evans of the non-profit group’s board.