Showing all newswire headlines

A longtime Ubuntu user tries switching to OpenSuse

The H's Hardware Hacks section collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. It's where you can find out about interesting projects, the re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition, the Arduino creator's problems with bogus Kickstarter campaigns, a Morse interface for Twitter, a tiny altimeter, a tour of the Raspberry Pi assembly line, LCD displays for the popular mini-computer and a Raspberry Pi-based gas detector.

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone in the land of stars and stripes, it's a pretty safe bet that blood pressures are rising and tensions are high here in the Linux blogosphere. The holiday season is hard upon us, after all, and Linux Girl, for one, has resorted to her preferred coping strategy of warming the barstools down at the blogosphere's seedy Punchy Penguin Saloon.

It’s incredible to see how Linux runs on devices of various sizes, power and built for diverse purposes. Linux is, like technology itself, deeply integrated in our daily lives and we don’t seem to even realize it! While looking into supercomputers I was pleasantly surprised to find different/weird devices that run on Linux: Weird, in a sense that they run on Linux and we never expected them to do so!

Ex-IBM insider Dom Connor reveals what went wrong Part two My last piece on OS/2 was in part a mea culpa, a history of my part in its downfall. However, I can't claim all the credit. In fact, if I'm honest, there were hundreds of reasons why OS/2 failed, and most of them had nothing to do with me. So, here are some of the real corkers.…

The latest news about Kate comes from a posting by Dominik Haumann on the KDE website based on code-commits to Kate’s source code at a recent developer sprint in Vienna, Austria.

Turning the Raspberry Pi into a music player is old hat, but turning it into a personalised DJ is slightly more difficult if a lot more interesting. The Raspberry Pi, an ARM-powered £20 computer sold as the educationalists' dream, is finding its place as a media player in many tech-aware homes, but installing media player XBMC and plugging in a TV is hardly the spirit in which the Pi was conceived, especially when one can get one's hands good and dirty with the minimum of effort.

This fall, I went to Amsterdam to talk about "How Software Patents Are Delaying The Future", on a discussion panel organised by the European Patent Office. The other people on the panel were patent attorney Simon Davies, and Ioannis Bozas, a patent examiner at the EPO. The panel was moderated by James Nurton of Managing IP. Despite our very different views on the subject, we had very friendly and informative conversations before, during, and after the panel.

Jon Masters summarises the latest goings-on in the Linux kernel community, including a look at the features being merged for the upcoming 3.7 release

How to reduce load on your database by minimising the number of database requests you need to make

Vsftpd is one of the most secure and fastest FTP servers for Linux. Usually vsftpd is configured to work with system users. This document describes how to install a vsftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine.

The prototype of the Pi Cam was introduced at Electronica, and its technical specifications and price have now been finalised. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has also announced the winners of its Summer Coding Contest

The H Community Calendar presents the coming month's events in various open source, development, Linux, Unix and other communities, from multi-day conferences to user group get-togethers

Re-purpose old Mac Minis as great desktop Linux PCs

After many months of hard work, I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of UberStudent 2.0.4. As many are already aware, Linux desktop environments have undergone a period of significant change since UberStudent 1.0 was released. GNOME took a hard turn towards the tablet market, injecting much discontent among users, a few forks, and a few new projects, only one which is mature, Unity, which has both its fans and haters (I myself dislike it). UberStudent 2.0.4 retains a traditional desktop environment by choice. Both Xfce and MATE are boot options, with Xfce being the default. I won't bore you with further descriptions.

GIMP developer Nicolas Robidoux seeks to leverage a freedom-based crowd-funding solution to bank-roll completion of the Nohalo/Lohalo/Lojaggy/Loblur suite of image resamplers for GEGL. The idea started back on Nov. 11th in the GIMP mailing list. Robidoux answers whether or not he plans to create a project on Kickstarter or not.

After taking a design path that sent many of its users running to other desktops, GNOME seems to be giving its users what they want: a GNOME 2.x style desktop. But, is it too late? Will GNOME fans come back?

Governments certainly have more than enough to concern themselves with these days – financial crises, natural disasters and terrorism, to name just a few. Given that’s the case, it’s surprising that so many are finding the time to worry about what kind of standards the products and services they purchase comply with. But they are.

It seems the binary curtain among ARM graphics vendors may finally be falling. Aside from NVIDIA contributing to the open-source Tegra DRM driver and other interesting actions recently in the ARM Linux space, Imagination Technologies may finally becoming more open. It's looking like there may be a surprise open-source play out of Imagination for PowerVR graphics in the near future...

With the Linux 3.8 kernel in early 2013 there is going to be an open-source NVIDIA Tegra 2 DRM driver. NVIDIA is currently working out initial patches for applying 2D acceleration atop this mainline Linux kernel driver...