Showing all newswire headlines

Like Jason Perlow, I doubt that the NSA is really that into me. It's all those other three-letter acronym (TLAs) organizations, such as the FBI, IRS, and SEC, which might have access to my data that I worry about.

Then there’s that other great first, that first look at some of the great free and open source software that ships with Linux distributions, opening a world that had up until then been nonexistent. Remember the rush, when your first installation was complete and you watched your computer boot into the strange new world of whatever desktop environment was the default on your new chosen distro? How exciting it was, searching through the menu, clicking on this, clicking on that, having a first look at GIMP, AbiWord, Evolution, KMail, Konqueror, Galeon and more. Wow! How weird it was to discover browsers not branded as Internet Explorer or Netscape, full featured photo editing without the Adobe imprint, and office suites that had nothing to do with Microsoft or WordPerfect.

It would be pretty handy to have five Linux live distros ready and waiting on your USB drive. Multisystem is an awesome tool created by LiveUSB.info, that works similar to our Windows based MultiBootISOs USB creator, but was created for use within Linux. It also uses Grub2 instead of Grub Legacy, and can be run from within Ubuntu Linux to create a Custom Multiboot UFD containing your favorite Bootable Live Linux Distributions.

The operating system at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD 9.0. It's been exposed that the operating system powering the PlayStation 4 is Orbis OS, which is a Sony spin of FreeBSD 9.0. It's not a huge surprise FreeBSD is being used over Linux, in part due to the more liberal licensing. The PlayStation 4 is x86_64 based now rather than Cell-based, which makes it easier to use FreeBSD.

This Open Source Guide is about LDAP, OpenLDAP 2.x and ApacheDS on Linux and the BSD's (FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD). It is meant for newbies, Rocket Scientist wannabees and anyone in between.LDAP is a complex subject. This Guide was born out of our pathetic attempts to understand LDAP, since it promised a veritable nirvana - common source for information, unlimited scalability using a replication model, inherent resilience, fast read performance, fine-grained control over who can do what to what data - the list goes on. Wonderful stuff.

App.net cofounder Bryan Berg noticed that LinkedIn was DNS-hijacked tonight and that traffic was rerouted to a shady India-based site, http://www.confluence-networks.com. That’s bad for LinkedIn, but there’s worse news for you. According to Berg, that site does not require SSL (secure sockets layer), which means that anyone who visited in the last hour or so sent it their long-lived session cookies in plain text … a potential security risk.

AntiX 13.1 was released this past week for those looking to load Linux on low-end computers. AntiX isn't a Linux distribution about killing off X.Org, but rather is about running Linux on low-end hardware.

The Linux 3.10-rc7 kernel was released today and if all goes according to plan this will be the last release candidate prior to the official release of the Linux 3.10 kernel.

Caixa Magica is a Portuguese Linux distribution based on Mandriva Linux. Linux Caixa Mágica 20 is now available for download. You can get it from our Linux Caixa Mágica download page by selecting the version from the drop-down menu. This new version brings updates to all packages, new installation options (like LVM support), latest hardware support, and global performance improvements among many other things. For the main software packages you have Linux kernel 3.8, GNOME 3.6.3, LibreOffice 4.0.2, Firefox 21, Chromium 25.0.1364.160, LibreOffice full manual (Portuguese only) and much more.

For those curious how AMD's Bulldozer CPUs are performing with this week's release of LLVM 3.3, here are some benchmarks of LLVM/Clang 3.3 along with some early benchmarks of the latest Clang 3.4 development code from the AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core CPU.

Today I want to do a roundup of the available text editor for our Linux computer, in particular I’ll take a look at the graphical text editor, so no vi, emacs, nano or joe today.

I’ll post what are in my opinion the pro and the cons of some of the text editor I’ve used in my day by day works, I’m not a programmer but sometimes I’ve to write some shell script or php functions and these software can really help you in these activity.

This weekend, I decided to install a new distro on my netbook. I saw Linux Deepin just released a new version so I gave it a try. And it was a right decision, Linux Deepin is really a perfect distro in my opinion.

Edward Snowden, the former CIA technician who blew the whistle on global surveillance operations, has opened a new front against the US authorities, claiming they hacked into Chinese mobile phone companies to access millions of private text messages. His latest claims came as US officials, who have filed criminal charges against him, warned Hong Kong to comply with an extradition request or risk complicating diplomatic relations after some of the territory's politicians called for Snowden to be protected.

The real-time strategy game Planetary Annihilation, developed by Uber Entertainment, has been released in an alpha version for Linux, Windows and Mac on Steam.

Intel's Chris Wilson has done a Saturday morning release of the xf86-video-intel 2.21.10 driver to get out more performance tweaks and regression fixes. This xf86-video-intel 2.21.0 release also takes care of X-Video support for Haswell (though using VA-API is still the best video playback choice for Intel) and various other bugs. Chris lists the bugs.

A request from Reg forums, where dogged, a silver badge commentard, asks: I've decided to do something about my old Motorola RAZR V3xx. I love this thing. The form factor is perfect. It's pocket size, it's damage resistant, it's HSDPA, it's easy to use, it never drops calls, it gets four days usage from its tiny battery without issue.So, i thought, I'm still a programmer. I can do embedded work, I do it all the time. Why not? Why not? Because it's 2013 and there are no available resources to study from is why not.

Up this Saturday morning on Phoronix are some OpenGL/gaming performance benchmarks of eight different desktop environments currently available from the Ubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" package archive when using Intel Core i7 "Haswell" graphics with the Linux 3.10 kernel and Mesa 9.2.

For those wishing to play with the next-generation Unity 8 interface atop the Mir Display Server while running Ubuntu Touch, a Personal Package Archive (PPA) is now available. There's also been other Mir and Unity 8 progress made this week.

A Chinese startup called “Geak” (seriousy!) has developed an Android 4.1 smartwatch with built in WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and GPS wireless communications. The China-targeted Geak Watch runs on a 1GHz MIPS architecture SoC equipped with 512MB RAM and 4GB flash, and features a 1.55-inch 240 x 240-pixel touchscreen and IPX3 water resistance.

Speaking of Groklaw, it was déjà vu all over again this week, with PJ once again reporting on the case of SCO v. IBM. Yup, they’re back in court. We’re reminded of the early days of Saturday Night Live when week after week Chevy Chase on “Weekend Update” would reassure the audience that Spain’s late dictator Francisco Franco remained dead.