Showing all newswire headlines

TheEnigmaticT, a representative in some capacity for GOG, made a very interesting comment in the Linux as a Feature thread in the GOG community pages. Why so interesting? Many of you already know that GOG is set to announce support for an all new platform on October 18th. All signs thus far have been pointing directly at Linux. And with all of the Steam hub-bub running amok on the Internet — and it’s imminent reality — who could blame anyone for speculating in this direction?

The Image Reduction and Analysis Facility (IRAF) is a tool used by pro and amateur astronomers alike. Soon, those users will have a new GUI to try out.

An interview with Xfce developer Nick Schermer. Schermer discusses his Arch Linux setup and the desktop programs he uses daily.

With distributions such as Peppermint Linux bridging the gap between the desktop and the cloud and services such as Ubuntu One providing file storage should we embrace the cloud or should we stay clear

Are you tired of all the new interfaces being pushed to you by Unity, GNOME Shell and, soon, Windows Metro? Do you want to stick to "good old" GNOME 2? Do you want to have a rock solid base for your operating system? If your answers are "Yes", then I have something interesting for you today.

As we’ve announced a few months ago, Mandriva S.A., the company behind the popular Mandriva Linux operating system decided to cease the Mandriva Linux operating system and transfer the responsibility to an independent entity.

After several months of rescheduling we think it's time to let this new jet fly. Zenwalk 7.2 is loyal to its design - providing 1 application per task, everything needed to work, play, code and create, in a single 700 MB CD image, through a 10 minutes automatic install process on any recent computer. Zenwalk 7.2 runs on kernel 3.4.8 with BFS scheduler. The Zenwalk desktop is based on the Xfce 4.10, GTK+ 2.24.10 and 3.4.4, with unique look and feel and perfect ergonomic integration of the application set - LibreOffice 3.6.2, Firefox and Thunderbird 15.0.1, GIMP 2.8.2 and much more. The Netpkg package manager has been improved with multiple mirrors support and better performance.

Interesting dynamic here. When a CIO decided to move his company to the cloud, the users pushed back. When he got executive buy-in from the CFO, things went much more smoothly and users grew to like the change eventually.

The latest release of Zenwalk Linux, version 7.2, is now available and focuses on further improving the Slackware-based distribution's overall performance, as well as updating its underlying components. Project founder Jean-Philippe Guillemin says that the goal of the new version was to "achieve 100% Slackware Linux compatibility," while also keeping and improving upon most of the optimisations throughout all levels of the OS, including the kernel, applications and desktop.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an essential way of engaging with the Linux community. Being able to tap into the wealth of knowledge of individuals logged into IRC enables users to engage directly with developers and other users of distributions and applications. IRC is not just limited to obtaining and giving technical support to others; it can be used for many other activities.

In case you haven’t thought about it lately, it’s a fair bet that everything in your life today depends to some greater or lesser extent (usually the former) on the Internet and the Web.  And in case you’ve never thought about it at all, what makes those vital services possible has less to do with servers and fiber optics than it does with protocols and other standards. 

Arch Linux has two distinct advantages over most systems: it’s customisable and it’s educational. Michael Reed shows us how building Arch is also a lesson in how Linux works…

The US Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) has granted a patent to US IP licensing company Intellectual Ventures on a process designed to prevent illegal copying via 3D printers and other rapid manufacturing techniques. Patent number 8,286,236 refers to a manufacturing control system for the layered creation of objects, for instance via CAD construction files. The patented technology uses a digital watermark verification mechanism to ensure, for example, that a printer will only reproduce an object if the user is entitled to do so.

Herbert Lom, the actor who played the twitchy Chief Inspector Dreyfuss in the old Pink Panther movies, recently passed away. Linux fans can surely feel some sympathy with Lom's character. We may not have Clouseau to grate on our nerves here in the Linux community, but we certainly have something with the potential to be equally annoying: Windows 8 Secure Boot.

The Raspberry Pi Model B has had its RAM doubled to 512MB, but will stay at its original price

Gunnar Hellekson, Technology Strategist for Red Hat's U.S. Public Sector Group, presents a timeline created by tying together data about software the government has released as open source.

With Windows 8 now mere weeks away from launch, hardware manufacturers have been clamouring over each other to announce their latest devices geared towards running it. Interestingly, both of these will also be available with Ubuntu 12.04 pre-installed, indicating that the last batch of Ubuntu netbooks must have sold well for the company…

It is in the nature of things that ideas which upset the status quo or challenge the prevailing orthodoxies are watered down to make them more acceptable, which is why the free software movement is an essential part of the landscape

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has awarded its "Respects Your Freedom" (RYF) hardware certification to the LulzBot AO-100 3D printer made by Aleph Objects. This makes the LulzBot AO-100 the first device to receive the certification since the RYF programme's launch. The programme was originally created in 2010 to endorse devices that respect the customer's freedom and use free software in all parts of the product.

Vuurmuur is a linux firewall manager. It takes a human readable rule syntax and turns it into the proper iptables commands. It supports logviewing, traffic shaping, connection killing and a lot of other features. Suricata is a relatively new network IDS/IPS. It's multithreaded for performance, supports IDS and IPS modes, can extract files from HTTP streams and has a lot of other features. Fedora 17 includes both Vuurmuur and Suricata in its repository. In this howto I'll describe how to get a functional IPS using only Fedora packages.