Showing all newswire headlines

MySQL becomes pervasive by the day, with increasingly important data being stored in it. This detailed article discusses how to quickly set up and verify a backup process for MySQL within 15 minutes (using open source Zmanda recovery manager)

There's an ancient Unix practice of keeping a system-wide phone directory in /usr/share/ with one-line entries containing name, location, and number, and a shell script named something like phone or tel that calls grep to output lines that match whatever arguments you give. You can improve on that method to create a personal contact manager with surprising speed and power.

Welcome to another of Free Software Magazine’s fortnightly newsletters, keeping you up to date with us, and all things free software... enjoy!

In recent months, there is one thing that’s on my mind - open source revenue vs. revolution. Seriously, while the revolution is well underway within the open source community, one has to question which of these two previously mentioned ideologies will, in the end, be the deciding factor on the future of software and OS' as a whole.

Bigger and Badder! The Fifth Annual Southern California Linux Expo is coming! It will be February 10-11, 2007, at The Westin Los Angeles Airport. Due to year over year growth, we've moved the Expo to a new location which will allow us to expand. We'll have more speaker tracks, and more tutorials designed to show users of all skill levels what Open Source can do. And SCALE 5x will offer more booth space for those interested in showing how they have made Open Source work for them.

This release includes a bunch of version bumps and bug fixes. Most significant updates are Firefox 2.0 and Flash 9. Also sporting Conary 1.1.10 and rAA 1.0.7 which we have started to rebrand for Foresight. It still has the rPath look, but is now labeled "Foresight System Manager" and will soon have a full Foresight look and feel. Mono, F-Spot, Banshee and Beagle have all been updated.

IBM first announced the availability of Linux on the iSeries in May 2001--more than five years ago. With great fanfare, Big Blue has consistently touted this Linux capability as a means for shops to realize cost savings and simplicity by capitalizing on the huge (outside the System i community) movement towards open source software and through server consolidation. All the appropriate heads nodded at the time, and certainly no one is arguing that the System i's ability to run Linux or other operating system partitions is in any way a bad thing.

When the market wipes a quarter of your company's share price because a powerful competitor declares its intention to enter your market space, one would think tough measures are called for. Unfortunately Red Hat, which now has to contend with Oracle competing for support of its Linux distribution, appears to have confused tough measures with talking tough.

One of the biggest turn offs people have when trying to build their own PVR is that things can get complicated quickly, especially if you use a Linux based software solution. Heck, even for the seasoned PVR builders amongst us, we know that configuring everything just right can be a huge hassle and time sink.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on Decibel and the KDE-based NEPOMUK components accelerates. The Unity web rendering engine experiment is removed from KDE SVN, due to a change in the circumstances that prompted its creation. KTabEdit, a guitar tablature editor is imported into the KDE SVN playground. A branch of kde-pim for improvements in future 3.5 releases shows promise with the introduction of several new features. QMA, an experimental email client, continues to mature and is renamed Mailody. Usability and file format support refinements in Amarok. Speed optimisations in KViewShell and KFTPGrabber. More improvements in the state of games in KDE 4.

Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! On the eve of several major new releases, such as Firefox 2.0, Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10, this week's DistroWatch Weekly takes a brief look at some of the new products, comments on the new Fedora 6 release, and asks whether Firefox has lost some of its former glory. In the meantime, Xandros Corporation is rumoured to be under a "reorganisation", while Munich continues its march towards a successful switch of thousands of its desktop and server computers to LiMux, a Debian-based distribution that recently reached version 1.0. Also in this issue: a reader recommends BeaFanatIX, a light-weight and user-friendly distribution that attempts to revive the concepts of the BeatrIX project, while the "First Looks" section introduces the new Xen Demo CD 3.0.3. Happy reading!

Looking for a way to add stock quotes to your web site? With a little Perl scripting and the Finance::Quote module you can script this up in no time.

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been a great success – in that it's a new buying signal for lots of customers who were seemingly getting a bit fed up with paying money to IT vendors for more of the same.

The Spring framework allows you to design Web and enterprise applications that use custom isolation levels in global transactions. This article shows you a way you can use Spring to specify custom isolation levels in global transactions. It article walks through the process in seven detailed steps.

It's Autumn in St. Louis, my favorite time of year in Missouri. Coats are getting progressively thicker as the temperature drops, trees are changing their leaves in a final show of brilliant color before their skeletons show, and darkness is starting to scare away the sun a bit earlier every day.

Calc and other spreadsheets have few advantages over a word processor when you are just making a list. In fact, unless you have a spreadsheet template set up so that cells have word wrap and hyphenation, you might be better off using a word processor if all you have is half a dozen items on the list. However, as the number of list items creeps up into the hundreds and beyond into the lower fringes of database territory, the different ways that you can manipulate lists in spreadsheets starts to give them a distinct advantages.

Eagle-eyed Ubuntu 6.10 users may have noticed that their favorite new version of this popular Linux distribution has an old friend: Firefox.

The origins of LDAP begin with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based in Geneva. ITU began setting email standards which required a directory of names (and other information) that could be accessed across networks in a hierarchical fashion not dissimilar to DNS. The result of their work resulted in the X.500 series of standards which defined DAP (Directory Access Protocol), the protocol for accessing a networked directory service.

Somebody recently noted that, what with all the bombing and killing and tyrannical madness going on in the world, how can we waste all this time talking about free software? Surely there's more important stuff to worry about? Well, they’re absolutely right that there are bigger problems in the world. When I get a chance to do something more direct about it, I plan to. So far, it looks like voting is about it, though.

It is almost a common knowledge that Bill Gates had a certain vision when he co-founded Microsoft: a computer in every home that can be easily operated. Pity that this vision seemed to have had a hidden implication that every of these computers would have to run Microsoft's operating system. Nevertheless, the vision of widespread and pretty much ubiquitous digital empowerment is largely coming true.