Showing all newswire headlines

Today in Open Source: Stock Android or an OEM version with bloatware? Plus: Top Android 4.3 features, and Ubuntu versus Xubuntu

Apple and Google have always been a study in contrasts when it comes to product development styles and that can have a huge impact on IT in an age when employees are bringing their own devices.

Version 3 of the Scarygliders X11RDP-o-Matic has now been officially released.

The Mozilla Labs team recently posted about a new personalization initiative for Firefox, which fits into the larger “Personalization with Respect” aspiration that Jay Sullivan articulated in May. We want to give individuals more participation in their Web interactions so they can more easily get what they want, in a clearly defined way. This idea is gaining traction with leading publishers and marketers who see their craft as providing valuable, engaging and content-rich experiences to their audiences.

Allocation is setting aside, or reserving, space for use. On a computer, it is setting aside the space on a hard drive for use to store files. The files can be newly created or those being modified. Each file system supports one or more different allocation methods and many types of allocation methods exist.

This latest version of Android Jelly Bean has many good, new features for both developers and users.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an Ubuntu 13.04 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites. I use PHP-FPM in this tutorial instead of Lighttpd's spawn-fcgi.

A day after saying it’s drawing near, the Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 4.1, the latest and greatest in the office suites line

Every year I attend the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference as an exhibitor. This year's conference was busier than any I've ever been to. So many people had either heard of us (ByWater Solutions) or Koha or just about open source in general. One librarian though approached our booth with caution. She informed me that she was told to come see what we were about by a manager but that she was very nervous. What she actually said was, "Open source scares me."

The next set of titles has been Greenlit on Steam, 16 titles in total, 2 applications and 14 games, 7 of the games will support Linux! Not bad!

This is a simple Ubuntu versus Xubuntu article, or is it? This article attempts to disassociate the operating system from the desktop environment.

The Chromecast is not an original idea, but are their any original ideas left in this arena. Cynically, the question is, how many backdoors are there in this thing?

Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical is seeking $32m in crowdfunding for a smartphone-PC hybrid, the Ubuntu Edge. It's a solution to a problem you can solve more cheaply

The open-source OpenDaylight Software-Defined Networking project is maturing quickly.

nginx is a powerful and modern HTTP server. It is perhaps most commonly used as a reverse proxy, also known as a load balancer or front end proxy. It follows the UNIX philosophy of doing one thing, and doing it well, and as such, it relies on several helper daemons to become a full-featured web server such as Apache. For example, to serve PHP, it relies on php-fpm to do the processing, while nginx itself handles the caching and speaking the HTTP protocol itself. In this article, we will talk about common configuration options, and how they relate to its performance.

Google has a simple and inexpensive new way to stream Internet videos on your TV. The company on Wednesday introduced Chromecast, a small device that lets you stream content to your television over a WI-Fi network, using your computer, phone or tablet as a remote control. The company said its goal is to create a device with zero setup time, no learning curve, and one that works with all platforms and devices.

The upcoming version of Google's Android operating system offers several enhancements designed to strengthen handset security, particularly in businesses and other large organizations. Ars will be giving the just-unveiled version 4.3 a thorough review in the coming days. In the meantime, here's a quick rundown of the security improvements. The most significant change is the addition of a security extension known as SELinux—short for Security-Enhanced Linux—to reinforce Android's current hack-mitigation model.

Google today unveiled a $35 HDMI stick-style device that wirelessly beams content from the Chrome browser of a desktop, laptop, or mobile computer to an HDTV. The Chromecast beaming technology initially supports content from Netflix, YouTube, and Google Play, and the controlling Chrome browser needs to be running on recent versions of Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS, and Chrome OS.

OpenOffice 4.0 was released yesterday by the Apache Software Foundation, bringing with it a new sidebar designed to make better use of widescreen monitors and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.

Here is the first video in my Tout-powered 40 Seconds of Linux series in which I talk about Linux until the rooster crows. And the rooster always crows at the 40-second mark.