Showing all newswire headlines

Every week I read the posts on the /r/linux4noobs sub-reddit and the questions that appear are very common such as: "Can I use Microsoft Word; Can I use iTunes; and what about Minecraft ?" Here are some of the answers to the more typical questions.

We're going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin.

Kai Willadsen had the pleasure of announcing today, February 23, that the Meld visual diff and merge tool reached version 3.11.0, a release that includes many new features and improvements.

The highly anticipated Mobile World Congress (MWC) event will start tomorrow, February 24, in Barcelona, Spain. As expected, Canonical will be there to showcase the latest version of its Ubuntu operating system for mobile devices, dubbed “Ubuntu - the human touch.”

This past week saw a number of interesting events on the Linux Planet, including a quickly resolved incident between Red Hat and Piston Computing.

3 Laws of Hospital Health Information Technology (HIT) Implementation. 1) Implementers and salespeople who don't know what they are doing will always get a binding, multi-year contract first. 2) Hospital management and owners will always do the wrong thing. 3) Everyone will grossly underestimate the time, difficulty, and expense it takes to fully implement Health IT in a hospital.

Linux cheatsheet, including general commands, one-liners, Bash tips, system calls.

It's always "somewhat interesting and entertaining to see the ebb and flow of the top Linux distributions," said 451 Research's Jay Lyman. "One of the highlights is typically the Linux operating systems with staying power. After years of jockeying, we've seen Ubuntu in the top few distributions consistently for some time, which speaks to its desktop and developer popularity."

After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.

I work a lot with spreadsheet tables of points in the landscape. Each point has a latitude and a longitude, in decimal degrees. If I want to check where particular points are on the map, I could import the whole table into a GIS program and then select the points of interest. But that's way too slow! Here's a much faster way, using Google Earth as the quick-and-dirty mapper.

After exactly one month of testing, the main Linux kernel packages of the Arch Linux operating system have been finally updated to the current version, 3.13.4.

I must say, Hedgewars is a really beautiful experience, in that it perfectly resembles the feeling of the original Worms game, and adds a great online playing experience via the in-game online server browser, new weapons, sound themes and game modifiers.

Planetary Annihilation the massive scale RTS game has another major update, it now includes their own version of a minimap.

There is a very interesting project underway to recreate the ZX Spectrum and more. The Bluetooth ZX Spectrum has been successfully crowdfunded, and it is due to go on sale in September 2014. If you want to go back to the 1980s - to the wonderful era of 8-bit gaming, you can instead try one of the many ZX Spectrum emulators.

Digital Tribes got in touch with us recently to get the word out about QBEH-1: The Atlas Cube the prequel to QBEH a game which sadly has no Linux version, but this one will.

I was notified by a Valve Linux team member today that they have some new code out that should help in automating Steam Linux game benchmarks.

Standing for TINT Is Not Tetris, that’s exactly what it is. A terminal-based tetris clone with highscore saving and 9 levels.

For those KDE users wishing to learn more about the forthcoming "Plasma Next" desktop work alongside KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5, there's new information available.

Just a few months after the launch of its first handsets, Finnish smartphone startup Jolla has announced that Sailfish OS, the Linux-derived operating system that powers its devices, has reached version 1.0.

The distribution uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment with a custom desktop shell called Manokwari. It looked good the first time I took it for a spin (on BlankOn 8), but I wasn’t too impressed with some aspects of it. But that was 18 months ago, maybe things are better on BlankOn 9.0, which is code-named Suroboyo.