Showing all newswire headlines

Mozilla has released today Thunderbird 6.0, this new release of the open source cross-platform email client and news reader comes with some new features and many bugs fix.

This week was punctuated by three phenomenal stories that show how free software is prospering. C++ has been one of the staples of free software for several decades. It is the programming language of choice for a lot of programmers, and it just got a brand new revision. Google has provided some much-needed backing of free software by buying Motorola Mobility and its associated patent pool. Microsoft has waived a backhanded truce flag at the Linux community by saying that it no longer sees Linux as a threat.

Linux Mint 11 LXDE, a recently released edition of Linux Mint, is one of a handful of distributions that does not come with a screen resolution switcher installed. Several are in the repository, but they are not installed. This short tutorial will show you how to install and use them.

Cloud might be all the rage, but file and print server technology is still critical -- just ask Samba. There are many different constituents on the Linux Planet. The cloud, mobile and even file and print sharing are all key targets for Linux. This past week, there was news on all fronts; in the coming week, there is likely to be even more.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot Alpha 3 was released few weeks ago. I decided to properly install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric in my netbook along with Ping-Eee OS this time around instead of just experimenting it with a USB install. I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 as my primary OS for almost 2 weeks now and this is how I feel about it. Read on.

Welcome to the 160th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

Many Linux/Unix programmers are not aware that a battle over Bash scripts is currently raging in a US (Kansas) courtroom this week.

When I first wrote on this story on April 5th, I expected that pressure would be put on Google and that Android would quickly be brought back into compliance with the GPL. That hasn’t happened. Pressure might have been placed on Google, I don’t know, but if so it’s done no good. Four months have passed and Android still isn’t compliant. Thankfully, it seems that era is now over, and the organizations that enforce the GPL are going to have to go after Google and all Android vendors for these violations.

Tons of attention over the past year have gone to tablet platforms and cloud platforms, but open source platforms may just have contributed the most important advances in technology since 2010.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 6.0 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

What is my opinion about OpenSuSE 11.4 KDE? Is it better than GNOME version? I definitely say yes, it is. It has some features which GNOME version lacks. They all brought in by KDE.

Benjamin Franzke, the open-source developer that for a number of months has been contributed to Mesa / Wayland, has continued with his work. His latest achievement is landing some new EGL code in Mesa, which will benefit Wayland too...

How I helped out a group of older users by introducing them to computer games that particularly appeal to them — and to the idea of FOSS, even if they don’t realize it.

Is your network safe? Almost all of us prefer the convenience of Wi-Fi over the hassle of a wired connection. But what does that mean for security? Our tests tell the whole story. We go from password cracking on the desktop to hacking in the cloud.

Outside of the direct X.Org / Mesa / Linux work being done this year as part of Google's Summer of Code, one of the more interesting projects is work by a student developer with GIMP who is bringing OpenCL support to the graphics program's GEGL image library...

Intel's Eric Anholt and Ian Romanick have each published a large number of patches to the Mesa development list. Eric dropped a series of 37 patches that implement his MapTextureImage work for OpenGL while Ian Romanick has nine patches today for his Mesa IR cleaning...

The Debian Project turns 18 today, 2011Aug16. Thanks to Ian Murdock, the Free Software Foundation, all the Debian developers and everyone else who has made Debian successful.

Throw a party for Debian Day 2011, post a Thank You to the Debian Project, or just browse the over 35,000 packages for something fun to play with today.

So try to follow the bouncing ball of this gargantuan patent-caused waste of energy and resources. First, Google’s Android smartphone platform is under attack from a number of competitors, all using patents against Android–including competitors Apple (iPhone), Microsoft (Windows phone), RIM (Blackberry), and Motorola, as well as Samsung. Now the Samsung part is a mess: apparently Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement, as part of its attack on the Android platform. Apparently the competition is too much for Apple. And then Samsung strikes back against Apple with its own patent infringement claims. And at the same time, another division of Samsung is one of Apple’s key suppliers of SSD drives, memory chips, and displays. Got it? Apple sues its key supplier, to stop Android competition; its key supplier sues it back; and yet the arrangement between Apple and the Samsung division supplying it with these components continues on. Wow.

So bodhi is a Pali/Sanskrit work that loosely translates to "enlightenment". They seem to make heavy reference to this lineage in their artwork and as well as their naming. For example, they have two recommended software sets: Nikhila (meaning entire/all in Hindi) - their full featured software collection Pratibha (meaning light in Hindi) - their lightweight software collection...