Showing all newswire headlines

In an age where Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is the dominant tech company and proprietary smartphones and tablets account for an ever-growing segment of the market, it can be easy to forget that not all hardware is built on closed standards. Opengear, however, reminded the channel recently that open hardware platforms can be profitable as well with the announcement of two significant achievements in the remote-management market.

The desktop computing landscape is rapidly changing all around us. Microsoft is now pushing Windows 8, the biggest change Microsoft has made to the desktop since Windows 95. This means that whether a Windows user chooses to switch to Mac OS X, Linux, or stick with Windows, he/she is in for a new learning experience. A transition to Linux may just be more familiar than making the jump to Window 8, and there are many open source alternatives to popular Windows applications. This large list of open source alternatives could make your transition to Linux easier than you thought possible.

Booting Linux using UEFI just once on various Samsung laptops is enough to permanently stop them working. Several reports have been posted on the Ubuntu bug tracker, but the problem is likely to also be present in other Linux distributions, as it appears to be caused by a kernel driver for Samsung laptops. Kernel developers are currently discussing a change which would disable the driver when booting via UEFI.

Fedora 18 features the exciting Gnome 3.6 desktop which offers numerous aesthetic and usability enhancements. Here I will point out many of the various improvements, so you can decide if Fedora 18 is the right distribution for you.

HP is preparing to launch its first entry into the Chromebook marketplace, if a PDF found on its site can be believed. According to this listing, HP's currently-unannounced Pavilion Chromebook will feature a 1.1GHz Celeron processor, 2GB of RAM, a 16GB solid-state drive, and a 14-inch, 1366 x 768 display.

And now we come to my favorite part of this series, high-end Linux audio production. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: stable, efficient, and you don't get gouged for software licenses. You have to be careful to select audio hardware that is well-supported on Linux, but this is less of a problem than it used to be.

In the last two articles we have learned how to install and run GNU R on the Linux operating system. The purpose of this article is to provide a quick reference tutorial to GNU R that contains introduction to the main objects of the R programming language . We will learn about basic operations in R, functions and variables. Moreover, we will introduce R data structures, objects and classes.

New features and other enhancements for the performance benchmarking of *BSD operating systems have been committed with the forthcoming release of Forsand...

In the more than 30 years that I have been involved with the tech industry I have seen a lot of strange things but none stranger than the events of today at the Linux Conference Australia. iTWire senior Linux writer Sam Varghese has been ejected from the conference. Why? Well, you may ask and then wonder what the Linux community in Australia has come to.

But note the phrasing above: “Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans…” Better vertical integration without having to pay the full price for ownership, the putative “several billion dollars” would give Microsoft a significant ownership, 10% or 15%. This is completely at odds with the buyout’s supposed intent: Getting out of the PC clone race to the bottom.

Or maybe there’s another story behind Microsoft’s beneficence: The investor syndicate struggles and can’t quite reach the $22B finish line. Microsoft generously — and very publicly — offers to contribute the few missing billions. Investors see Microsoft trying to reattach the PC millstone to their necks — and run away.

Hats off to Steve Ballmer: Microsoft looks generous – without having to spend a dime – and forces Dell keep making PCs.

Commodore OS Vision 1.0 Beta 9 has been released. Commodore OS Vision is a 64-bit Linux distribution, based on Linux Mint, created for Commodore enthusiasts purchasing Commodore USA hardware. These are essentially restore disks for pre-installed Commodore systems. Commodore OS Vision uses the classic GNOME 2 interface and features extensive Compiz/Emerald desktop effects. It includes dozens of games of all genres (FPS, Racing, Retro etc), the Firefox and Chromium web browsers, LibreOffice, Scribus, GIMP, Blender, OpenShot and Cinellera, advanced software development tools and languages, sound editing through Ardour and Audacity, and music composition programs such as the Linux MultiMedia Studio. It has a classic Commodore slant with a selection of applications reminiscent of their classic Amiga counterparts.

In the past I’ve posted an article about Anonymous browsing with Tor that can be useful when you use your favorite browser and you wish to stay anonymous thanks to the Tor software. Tor (short for The Onion Router) is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software directs internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers to conceal a user’s location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms”, back to the user and is intended to protect users’ personal freedom, privacy, and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

This post is the first in a series I am going to be publishing about using elementary and python to develop applications. The first examples gets a functional GUI window in less than 50 lines including comments.

How can people be very concerned about government surveillance, and still trust a company like Microsoft? And if people are concerned about government surveillance, what about surveillance by private organizations? Has anybody looked into backdoors in Verizon’s Internet routers?

Linux gaming world is growing continuously since Valve has released Steam for Linux. Now Blizzard is intending to give Linux community some love. So Phoronix.com has an information from a trustworthy source that Blizzard is going to publish a game title for Linux later this year, but it's unclear what exactly it will be.

Ceph, the open source distributed file system that is playing an increasingly important role in the world of Big Data despite its young age, took another step into the cloud with the announcement of the general availability of the DreamObjects cloud storage system from DreamHost. The update follows a beta version of the service that launched last September, but brings with it expanded offerings and incentives.

15,000 Raspberry Pi’s provided to UK Schools as part of Google Giving

We are proud to announce the return of Firefox Flicks, Mozilla’s global video competition that invites Firefox fans and filmmakers to create short videos, or “Flicks,” that help tell the Firefox story. Last year was a huge success and we received more than 400 videos submission from thousands of filmmakers all over the world.

In 1996, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a unique search engine called "BackRub" that ran on the school's server. After one year, BackRub's bandwidth outgrew the university's needs. Its creators rebranded BackRub into Google, a respelled reference to "googol." It is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

OWASP Mantra-OS 12.04 is available. OWASP Mantra-OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution built for penetration testing and secure computing.