Showing all newswire headlines

Just in time for Christmas, the KDE development team proudly unleashed a minutes ago, December 22nd, the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming and highly anticipated KDE Software Compilation 4.8 environment.

At the request of our readers we have decided to revive our usual desktop customization tutorial for the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, because of Unity (again).

Chakra Edn 2011.12 is the third and final edition of the Chakra Edn line of Chakra, a desktop GNU/Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. The first two editions were Chakra Edn 2011.09 and Chakra Edn 2011.11. I always like to start my reviews by providing information about the installer and installation process of the distribution being reviewed, but since there were no changes or new features in Tribe, Chakra’s installation program, there is no point in rehashing information that is already available in Chakra Edn 2011.11 review.

More than a month ago I was the first to write about the CoreBreach racing game coming to Linux. Well, there's some more interesting news to deliver today. Besides being a racing game and not yet-another-first-person-shooter for Linux, what also made the CoreBreach Linux port interesting is that it's originally a Mac OS X title and for still using the Apple APIs on Linux they took advantage of GNUstep in porting this Objective-C 2.0 game to Linux. The game also has custom 3D rendering engine. (All of the technical details about the Linux port are talked about in this Phoronix article.)

"Does he really give you presents?"

I just nodded and smiled then looked back on the computer screen. See, personally; and even at an early age, I've been uncomfortable with the whole Santa Claus thing. Again, it's a personal thing and I don't judge or begrudge anyone for perpetuating the tradition. It just sits inside me wrong. But then I came upon the answer I wanted to give him.

Give 2012 a productivity boost with these Android apps. With Android devices on the rise it’s time to consider how best to put your smartphones and tablet PCs to work. Here is a selection of ten Android productivity apps that could give your work a serious boost.

Habey announced two ultra-compact PCs with a choice of VGA or HDMI ports, plus SATA, gigabit Ethernet, and USB connections. The BIS-6624 features an Intel Atom Z510 (1.1GHz) or Z530 (1.6GHz) and adds CompactFlash and SD slots, while the BIS-6625 uses an Atom E640 (1GHz) or E660 (1.3GHz) and adds a third mini-PCIe slot.

Lanner announced a fanless industrial PC that includes dual Ethernet ports, digital I/O, six serial ports, and dual video outputs. The LEC-2110 is powered by a dual-core Intel Atom D525 processor, accepts up to 4GB of RAM, has a CompactFlash slot, and is available with either a PCI or PCI Express expansion slot....

The International Trade Commission has given Microsoft a partial victory with its initial ruling on the patent infringement claims the software giant lodged against Motorola in October 2010. The ITC judge has determined that Motorola infringes four separate claims in one of the seven (originally nine) patents that Microsoft named in its complaint. The judge has not found evidence of infringement of the other six patents.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m proud to announce the playable alpha release of the first major game for GBGames: “Stop That Hero!”, a deceptively simple strategy game that puts you in the role of the evil villain. Available for GNU/Linux.

Pear OS Linux Panther 3 is the latest edition of the desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, but with a desktop appearance that is fashioned after the Mac OS X UI. It is the only distribution released this year that actually makes GNOME 3 look really good. It is not perfect, but it is a lot better than other distributions that use the GNOME 3 desktop environment. As good as I think it is, there are aspects of it that could have been better configured out of the box. This short tutorial provides some tips on how to tweak those areas to make the UI a bit more user-friendly than it already is.

The pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) continues to inspire opponents to come up with creative solutions to circumvent it. A new anti-SOPA add-on for Firefox, titled “DeSopa,” is such a counter measure. When installed, users can click a single button to resolve a blocked domain via foreign DNS servers, bypassing all domestic DNS blockades and allowing the user to browse the site though the bare IP-address (if supported). “I feel that the general public is not aware of the gravity of SOPA and Congress seems like they are about to cater to the special interests involved, to the detriment of Internet, for which I and many others live and breathe,” DeSopa developer T Rizk told TorrentFreak.

One last push/reminder: we've got a Kickstarter campaign going on right now at Kickstarter.com , and without your support, we might not be able to make this game! So please tell your friends!

The International Trade Commission handed down a ruling on Monday saying that several of HTC's smartphones infringed on an Apple patent and would be subject to an import ban beginning in April 2012. The case is important for Apple, as it is the first substantive ruling that Android devices definitively infringe on an Apple patent. Despite this, however, the end result of this particular ruling may have little material effect on HTC, Google, or other handset makers—HTC says it plans to remove the offending feature, and there's plenty of time to do so before the ban kicks in.

A year and a half ago I did an entry entitled "Overview and Explanation of Linux Desktop Environments". Anyone that is in the technology field (or knows even a little bit about it) knows that 18 months is a like a life time in the world of tech. Today I would like to re-cap my previous post with a few additions that have been added in recent months and mention a few desktops I missed last time.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: December 21, 2011) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 10X -- Hilton Airport Hotel, Los Angeles, California: January 20-22, 2012: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale10x/events/lpi-exam-cert...)

Unix based operating systems like Linux offer a unique approach to join two discrete commands, and generate a new command using the concept of pipe(lines). For example, consider command1|command2. Here, whatever output is generated by the first command becomes the standard input for the second command. We can develop more and more complex Unix command sequences by joining many commands while maintaining input output relationships.

This article is a bit different from my usual column in two ways. First, it's starting with a hardware and software combo—something I've not done before. Second, the projects are linked to each other and come recommended to me by Perth LUG member, Simon Newton.

Change is the one constant in the IT business these days. Everywhere you look the world is shifting, and in August alone this year we saw a bevy of surprising announcements from some of the most trusted technology brands.

The main feature or duty of a proxy server could be a gateway that receives HTTP requests from clients and forwards the request to the destination and relays the answer back to the requestor. Squid is most popular open-source software that brings this to us. It also has some excellent features for doing something else such as web access controlling, bandwidth controlling, restriction policies, and content caching and filtering. Actually people install SQUID to pursuit 2 goals: first reduce the bandwidth charges by content caching and second for restricting access to particular contents. The following guide explains advantages of using Squid and will show you how to install, configure, control, and maintain the Squid Proxy Server on RHEL5 and CentOS Linux.