Showing all newswire headlines

The Kool Desktop Environment, later known as K Desktop Environment or KDE, was launched after Matthias Ettrich issued a call for programmers on de.comp.os.linix.misc in October 1996, and soon had 40 programmers contributing. In the mid Nineties, Linux had X and a variety of diverse and ingenious window managers, but no unified toolkit for the development of applications with a common look and feel. A typical Linux desktop would use a window manager – probably FVWM, which looked a little like Windows 95 – and a scatter of applications, some of which ran in the terminal window while the rest used a variety of widget sets, no two of which looked alike or behaved in the same way.

Linux developer Matthew Garrett, who does a lot of research into UEFI topics, writes in a blog post that by storing a large amount of data in UEFI variables, he managed to disrupt a Samsung notebook running Windows to such a degree that it subsequently refused to start. In his post, the developer also points to some sample code of the Windows program that he executed at administrator level to disable the notebook. The developer had previously speculated that some Samsung notebooks with UEFI firmware may be rendered inoperative under Windows in the same way that they were when starting Linux under certain circumstances. The experiment to confirm this was successful.

If Linux Girl didn't have to spend such a large proportion of her salary dry-cleaning her cape each week, there's no doubt she would invest those extra fortunes in some of the many purveyors of ibuprofen and other pain-relieving medicines. Why? Because of all the headaches FOSS fans are forced to endure here in the Linux blogosphere.

The kernel developers are planning a kernel-based implementation of the D-Bus protocol, which will offer faster communication between system processes and between applications

What excites me about ZWheelz is the potential to improve our education system, environment, energy independence, and economy—all with what I like to call, one "EZ" project. It all began when I built a plane from a kit, then saw the documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car?, and decided to build an electric car. Turns out, it functioned really well, and I began wondering: "Why aren't there more electric vehicles on the road?"

Let’s say it finally happens and the big OEMs get tired of dealing with Microsoft and decide to make Windows only one choice of several on new computers. Not a world like we have now, where the likes of Dell halfheartedly offer half baked and broken installs of Ubuntu, installs that need serious tweaking before they’ll work. Not that world, but a pretend world of Linux being offered across all models, with a choice between two or three distros. You know, OEMs giving Linux exactly the same treatment as they give Windows today.

The mobile revolution has changed user expectations of how they interact with different products. Meeting these changed expectations requires a huge amount of re-thinking from user experience (UX) designers. Pascal Mangold, CEO of Magnolia, recently explored this trend in an article on how the mobile revolution is challenging open source product interfaces and explained how Magnolia CMS, an open-source enterprise-grade Java Content Management System, redesigned its web-based interface to give its users an innovative new "driven by touch" content management experience.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into PureFTPd for virus scanning on a Fedora 18 system. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through PureFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

Chakra 2013.02 'Benz' (a code name that will follow the KDE 4.10 series) has been released. KDE 4.10 is about the most polished release KDE has put out to date; one feature that stands out is the fast improvements of Nepomuk. Our tools have gotten a lot of attention too, the live image has switched to using GFXboot - this will give many more options for language and keyboard settings and it adds a few hardware checking tools in a visually pleasing way.

TopCoder challenge helps immune system research If you want a massive improvement in the software you use, the cheapest way to get it is to host a competition on TopCoder.…

Would you buy a copy of Microsoft Office for Linux?

Unigine Corp will be announcing next week the release of Unigine Valley 1.0 and the 4.0 update to their very popular cross-platform Unigine Heaven technology demo. Unigine Valley is an incredibly beautiful tech demo of the Unigine Engine coming to Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems. In this article is an exclusive preview of Unigine Valley as well as the significant Unigine Heaven 4.0 update.

KDE Meetup will be the largest KDE event in India since conf.kde.in in 2011. It will be held February 23rd and 24th at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT) in Gandhinagar. KDE Meetup will be a great opportunity for anyone who is interested in free and open software or who wants to get involved with the KDE Community.

Thanks to Microsoft's Windows 8 UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot there was no easy way to boot Linux, or any other operating system, on Windows 8 PCs. Now, there are two ways, the recently released Linux Foundation (LF) UEFI secure boot system and Matthew Garrett's shim system to boot Linux on these PCs. Soon, there will be only one unified way.

No Heroes is an in-development First Person Shooter by one man behind Drunken Lizard Games featuring parkour, fun gameplay, realistic physics and more! The game will be released sometime in 2013.

Looks like a Valve developer has let it slip that Blue Shift will be on Linux!

Debian developers are still working on making the operating system compiler agnostic so that its packages can be built with LLVM/Clang and other compilers rather than continuing in a monogamist relationship with GCC...

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 18 desktop (with the XFCE desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

This project provides tools to play with geographical data. But it also works with non-geographical data!

Razor-qt is the lightweight Qt-based desktop environment that's come around in mostly the past two years as a much more slim desktop alternative to KDE. It's similar in nature to Xfce but written in Qt rather than GTK. This Qt desktop environment is on initial approach for its next release and further out they are getting excited over Qt 5 and Wayland...