Showing all newswire headlines

Linux shop man on app servers, business and keeping devs interested Seven years after Red Hat snatched JBoss out from under Larry Ellison’s nose, the enterprise Linux distributor is continuing to squeeze the juice from the open-source application server.…

In this edition: a camera for the Raspberry Pi, Firefox 18.0.2, Joomla 2.5.9 and 3.0.3, Ruby 1.9.3-p385, Piwik switches to GitHub, a petition for Oracle to remove the Ask Toolbar from the Java installer, code completion for Vim and Webconverger 17

Morphlabs, which as built itself up as a provider of OpenStack products designed for service providers and enterprises, has launched a modular, OpenStack-based public cloud platform. Designed for cloud services providers, mCloud Osmium enables them to quickly implement highly-scalable public clouds without the need for large amounts of research, development or capital investments.

Cleaning up the code has been a major focus. "The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty-five thousand lines of comments from German to English," the Document Foundation said in its LibreOffice 4.0 announcement. "All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community."

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has introduced technical account management (TAM) services for cloud computing, virtualization and storage. The consulting offerings are highly important as the open source company attempts to compete more aggressively against VMware (NYSE: VMW) and EMC (NYSE: EMC), in particular.

The openSUSE project would like to announce the first release candidate of version 12.3 of its popular Linux distribution. Major updates include the KDE desktop environment 4.10, GNOME 3.6 and Linux kernel 3.7.6. This preview includes a large number of fixes made to Factory since the beta, as well as the last major set of version updates. RC1 needs a real workout to ensure we fix any remaining issues in time, so don't wait for RC2, put it on your spare disk and give it a try now. Major changes include: PackageKit 0.8.7, Apper 0.8, fcitx 4.2.7, MariaDB replaces MySQL.

The cron daemon is a core component of any Unix-like operating system. On the surface, cron is a scheduler, meant to run a command at regular intervals. However, if we dig a little deeper into the configuration options, we find that we can configure cron to be as detailed and granular as we need. If you need a script to run every seven minutes, five days a week, between the hours of 8AM and 4PM, cron has you covered.

LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.

SolusOS is a new Debian-based distro that uses the GNOME 2.3 desktop. SolusOS comes with such core applications as Firefox, VLC, and LibreOffice. It’s a relatively easy way to get both Debian and a GNOME 2 desktop in one, convenience package.

Linux Australia, the umbrella organisation for all Linux user groups in the country, has decided to pick up the remainder of the tab for the visit to Australia and New Zealand by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Last weekend at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Ian Romanick expressed plans to enhance the "out of the box" / automatic configuration experience for games on Linux. He wrote in his talk's abstract, "Every game for desktop PCs has the ability for the user to tune quality and performance settings. However, for the out-of-the-box experience, these games also need to detect the hardware installed in the user's system to select the initial settings. On Windows and Mac, there are a number of system interfaces provided for this purpose, but on Linux it is surprisingly difficult. This talk will cover some current best practices used by shipping Linux games. It will also introduce some interfaces under development to improve the current state of affairs."

The developers behind the Devhelp project, an API documentation browser for the GNOME desktop environment and the GTK+ toolkit, announced yesterday, February 6, the immediate availability for download and testing of Devhelp 3.7.5.

Dev version for now, but first phones will ship in October Ubuntu main man Mark Shuttleworth says plans are on track to produce smartphones running a mobile variant of the Ubuntu Linux OS by October 2013, but developers should be able to start working with the platform even sooner.…

While Android and Apple's iOS continue to rise, the arrival of Windows Phone 8 actually saw Microsoft's share of the smartphone market fall. The race for the number three smartphone operating system is wide-open.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThe Call for Presentations for Akademy 2013 is now open. Akademy is the KDE community conference. If you are working on topics relevant to KDE or Qt, don't miss your chance to present your work and ideas at the conference from the 13th - 19th July in Bilbao. The days for the main talks are Saturday and Sunday, 13 and 14 July. The rest of the week will be unconference sessions and workshops.

Linux has won the desktop wars and Tux now represents the dominant desktop operating system. We’ve been in this position for a while now. The reason many of us haven’t recognized it is because this win doesn’t look anything like we thought it would. When wishes come true, they’re rarely what we envisioned.

Earlier this year, Google introduced its Google Drive cloud storage service. Cloud storage is a model of networked on-line storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage that third parties generally host. Hosting companies operate large data centers, and people who require hosting buy or lease storage capacity from them. The data-center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to their customers' requirements and expose them as storage pools, which the customers themselves can use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resources may span across multiple servers.

Chromebooks quietly are making some noticeable inroads, with Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) recently joining Acer, Samsung and Lenovo as leading PC makers with a toe or two in on Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Chrome OS-based cloud notebooks. Acer president Jim Wong even recently said that about 10 percent of the Taiwanese manufacturer’s U.S. notebook shipments since November were Chromebooks—a performance he believes is repeatable and can be extended to other markets.

LibreOffice 4.0.0 is finally here, and marks a full departure from the OpenOffice code of old, with a new Android remote control app and CMIS support

As Microsoft struggles to stay relevant, squeezed between the iPad on one side and Chromebook on the other, sales of Windows 8 devices are grim -- and if you're an IT pro looking to the future, it's worth noting that there are alternatives now.