Showing all newswire headlines

"Has Linux dropped off the face of the Earth?" The answer is obviously no. Linux is still around, stronger than ever, but the desktop OS does seem to be disappearing. Of course this is true of Windows and Mac OS, at least from the average user's perspective. Desktop Linux is strong with those who use it; those who have been using it, but the buzz seems to be gone.

A list of FLOSS for science related books released during the month of October 2011.

Red Hat proudly announced that the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 operating system will fully support the power saving features of the AMD Bulldozer Opteron CPUs.

The ColorHug is a small device which can measure the displayed colors very accurately. It is extremey portable as you can plug it to the USB port of the computer and hold it against the display. The device will help you caliberate the colors of your screen, thus showing the 'true' colors of the objects that you see on your screen.

Shuttleworth's gamble is that users will change their minds as they gain familiarity, that Unity will gain traction as a universal interface, scalable across all devices, and that it will be as attractive to a certain class of user as Apple claims to be. Only time will tell whether Oneiric Ocelot, and the advent of Unity as the only choice for the Ubuntu desktop, marked the moment when Ubuntu began to scale the heights of universal acceptability, or fell back to earth with a bump.

Another dangerous bill is winding its way through Congress, this time it's the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by Texas representative Lamar Smith. Smith's bill would establish a system for taking down Web sites that the Justice Department "determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement."

This guide explains how to password-protect web directories (with users from a MySQL database) with mod_auth_mysql on Apache2 on a Debian Squeeze server. It is an alternative to the plain-text password files provided by mod_auth and allows you to use normal SQL syntax to create/modify delete users. You can also configure mod_auth_mysql to authenticate against an existing MySQL user table.

AwOken along with Faenza icons theme are surely among the most feverishly updated icon themes for GNOME. With the arrival of Unity and GNOME Shell though, all these popular icon themes needed to adapt in order to stay relevant. AwOken icons theme 2.3 update does just that. Latest iteration of AwOken comes with a number of updates which makes it look more integrated with Ubuntu's Unity and GNOME Shell desktops.

Gaming within a Linux environment, particularly the flagship distros, may not take your breath away yet. Is it on a long journey ahead?

Unknown Horizons is a city building/real time strategy game inspired by classic strategy games Anno and Settlers. In the game you have to expand your small settlement to a strong and wealthy colony, collect taxes and supply your inhabitants with valuable goods and have to increase your power with a well balanced economy with strategic trade and diplomacy. The developers are always hard at work. They have released third major update in the year bringing in lots of new features and improvements.

A Linux kernel security vulnerability was discovered in the Linux kernel for OMAP4 packages, affecting the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

Quite unexpected Google released their source code of Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich)

Google has just released source code for the latest version of Android, that is Ice Cream Sandwich. According to this Google Groups post by Jean-Baptiste Queru a.k.a JBQ, the code for Android 4.0 is currently being pushed to the servers and will take some time to complete. The release, which also includes the source code for Honeycomb, will enable manufacturers to start prepping their own devices for the big upgrade.

Web-based desktops. A concept so dirty that it has to be associated with The Cloud. It’s even dirtier to think that you can save a lot of money by embracing that concept.

Arbor announced a bedside PC for hospital patients that includes an 18.5-inch touchscreen, a five megapixel webcam, and a VoIP handset. The M1857 has a 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, a 160GB hard disk drive, plus smart card, RFID, and barcode scanning capabilities, according to the company....

Sometimes the fastest way to parse a known XML stream is to write your own lean parser. Even in Ruby, this gives remarkable performance benefits

Lenovo, the successor to IBM's PC division, released the N5901 to set a new standard in wireless input, putting a mouse and keyboard in a form factor that can easily be manipulated with a single hand.

Fedora 16 was released a few days ago and I was looking forward to this release. I used to be a Fedora user in the early days, when I had more time to play with my PC. Ever since I switched to Debian and then Ubuntu, I just fell in love with apt-get's smart dependency resolution. I was finally out of the RMP hell. I did dabble with Fedora here and there, once in a while but 14 and 15 were both quite unstable for me. So, I distanced myself from Fedora.

Last week we saw release of freshest version of Fedora, community Linux distributions supported by RedHat. The most popular option of Fedora is GNOME, and Fedora 16 includes the most recent version of it, GNOME 3. But as soon as I am KDE fan, I could not miss a chance to try another option of Fedora, this time with KDE desktop environment.

One of the founders of the nascent Diaspora social network has died at age 22. I have included the story on Ilya Zhitomirskiy's untimely death from the Associated Press, followed by my thoughts on Diaspora and where it stands given that Google+ is pretty much steam-rolling over the rest of the social-networking space.