Showing all newswire headlines

Last year I’ve bought a new desktop computer and on this one I’ve moved from Ubuntu to Mint as “Home distribution”, but I still have as backup PC an old laptop with Ubuntu, and some days ago I’ve updated it from Xubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, these are my observations about this new release of Ubuntu.

How did Linux originate, where is it presently and in which directions is it headed for the future? These are the big questions that a longtime Linux user and developer named Brian Thomason seeks to answer in a documentary film, if he can secure enough funding through a crowdsourcing campaign on Kickstarter. Here's hoping he succeeds.

A stable release from the Debian GNU/Linux project is normally just that - rock-solid stable. Not so with Wheezy or Debian 7.0 which was released on May 4. One package, Dovecot, a secure IMAP and pop3 server, fails during post-installation. There were so many changes from version 1.2 to 2.0 that it merited at least a mention in the release notes.

The six entries are shown below. If you did not participate in the original survey, this is your chance to have an input. I did not participate in the original survey, but if I did, the order that these images are shown below shows how I would have rated them, from highest to lowest.

Elgg is an open-source and powerful social networking engine used to create your own social networking web site. In this How To, I am gonna show you how to build your own social network website, just like Facebook and Linkedin.

The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 4.0. This is a major release bringing a brand new web administrative interface, several shiny new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use.

If you have lot of developers or programmers who access your servers frequently in your company and if you wanna to keep an eye on what data they are accessing, what commands they are issuing, how long they have been accessing servers and how much system resources are consumed by them, then psacct or acct are the tools that you should have. Already we have covered some topics about monitoring tools such as Nagios and Cacti.

Timothree Besset, perhaps better known amongst Linux gamers as "TTimo" and the former main "Linux guy" at id Software, has announced es_core. The purpose of es_core is to provide an experimental framework for low-latency, high-FPS multi-player games...

RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.

This shouldn't come as any great surprise, but Linux is faster than Windows, and at least one anonymous Microsoft developer is willing to admit it and explain why that's the case.

On May 11, Linus Torvalds announced that the first Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.10 kernel is available for download and testing.

The openSUSE Education Team is proud to present Li-f-e (Linux for Education) 12.3-1. This first release is based on openSUSE 12.3 with all the official updates applied. Li-f-e incorporates the latest stable versions of all popular desktop environments such as KDE, GNOME and Cinnamon and it includes wide range of software catering to the needs of everyone, selection from openSUSE Education repository, multimedia from the Packman repository, development tools, KIWI-LTSP allowing normal PC or diskless thin clients to network boot from a server running Li-f-e and lot more.

Autokey, covered previously on Make Tech Easier, is a great place to store commonly-used text. But one of Autokey’s more advanced features is the ability to script it to do other things. We’ll take a look at two ways to tap Autokey for advanced desktop scripting.

Turning syslog entry timestamps into human-readable, localized dates and times.

Ouya, the Android-powered game console that began its career as a Kickstarter project, has just received $15 million in venture capital funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). For those who haven’t followed Ouya’s wild ride, its Kickstarter project generated a feeding frenzy of $8.6 million in pledges, more than 900 percent of its $950K goal.

Linux Advocate Dietrich Schmitz surveys the Linux Desktop landscape and sees Google Chromebook gaining traction while the Linux Desktop at large spins its wheels. Read why.

United Space Alliance, one of NASA's IT contractors, has migrated several laptop computers used on the International Space Station (ISS) from Windows XP to Debian 6. Apparently, the computers are part of the OpsLAN network which is used to, among other things, log astronauts' movements through the space station, control its on-board cameras and provide astronauts with information about supply stocks and inventories.

When the Xenoid threat was discovered, human society was thrust into an era of martial law. Security became top priority, at the cost of individual liberty.

On Friday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first public draft of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). EME enables content providers to integrate digital rights management (DRM) interfaces into HTML5-based media players. Encrypted Media Extensions is being developed jointly by Google, Microsoft and online streaming-service Netflix. No actual encryption algorithm is part of the draft; that element is designed to be contained in a CDM (Content Decryption Module) that works with EME to decode the content. CDMs may be plugins or built into browsers.

I was explaining on Hacker News why Windows fell behind Linux in terms of operating system kernel performance and innovation. And out of nowhere an anonymous Microsoft developer who contributes to the Windows NT kernel wrote a fantastic and honest response acknowledging this problem and explaining its cause. His post has been deleted! Why the censorship? I am reposting it here. This is too insightful to be ignored. [Edit: The anonymous poster himself deleted his post as he thought it was too cruel and did not help make his point, which is about the social dynamics of spontaneous contribution. However he let me know he does not mind the repost at the condition I redact the SHA1 hash info, which I did.]