Showing all newswire headlines

After 10 years of full-time linux use, I'm finally content with my newly-discovered ripping program. I can easily create high-quality and reduced-bitrate copies of my music for home and mobile-device listening using Asunder.

Free software evangelists take pride in spreading the news about freedom and open source. They inform those that still feel locked into the old software distribution systems. The days of computer users being bogged down with virus-infested, bloated, and locked down systems are quickly coming to an end.

So, given that the vast majority of users don't actually use an OS as anything more than a launchpad for their word processors, IM clients, games and web browsers, why has Linux failed to make any real impression in the desktop OS space? The problem, in a nut shell, is that the word processors, IM clients and games they use in Windows don't run in Linux. Linux has failed on the desktop because it can't be used to launch the applications everyday users are familiar with (and I don't count Wine or its various commercial incarnations as suitable for everyday users). This is where technologies like Flash, HTML5 and ChromeOS and GeckoOS, and to a lesser extent the variety of tablets that are available today, are starting to level the playing field.

I have recently received a comment on the post about Pardus Linux, which made me think a lot.

The question in comment was:

What is your best favorite KDE distro? Mageia, Pardus, Kubuntu, Mandriva, PC Linux OS, Mint KDE.... which? :) I will use your choice :) thanks too.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a CentOS 6.0 server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

Procedure to keep in sync Xen 4.1.2-r(X) on Ubuntu Oneiric ( development branch) with tip of Xensource's xen-4.1-testing.hg stable mercurial tree follows bellow, which provides a flexible way to apply the most recent changesets instead of back porting them to Xen 4.1.1 having permanent concern regarding consistency of selected set of CSs.

Writing and running your first app with code executing on the CPU and the GPU

In the time of free wifi and free internet connections in every hotel, bar or cafe you should be sure your connections are secure. In some cases you can’t trust the connection but you need to go online and read some mails or share some documents. In this case some basic tools like SSH and Firefox can help you to build an secure connection to an known computer in the internet you can trust (for example your own root server).

Looks like Mozilla wants to do it all alone and go the whole vertical. From browsers to version games and now looks poised to play Operating Systems giantsMicrosoft and Google Chrome at their own game. That both Microsoft and Chrome have had far too many battles is indeed to Mozilla advantage,

Compression of files is a necessity these days. It’s not only helps you in saving your space but also helps you in quick sharing and back up purposes. Text files compresses more than the web images and videos because they are already in the compressed form .You must have observed many open source softwares in the .tar.gz packages. These are the compressed file made out using the tar and gzip (gunzip) utility. So let’s get started with these great utilities

An interview with Linux Mint leader Clement Lefebvre about his desktop Linux setups. If you've ever wondered what goes into creating Linux Mint, this is a good place to start.

This article describes a method for remotely accessing virtual servers. The aim is to be able to have clients access virtual servers across one or more physical hosts as if they were on the same LAN.

This detailed review pits Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple’s iPad 2, and includes more than 200 screenshots showing the Galaxy Tab's home screens and apps in operation. Despite the iPad 2's near-perfect performance, the review suggests that if you want greater control over your tablet environment, more openness to non-Apple standards (such as Adobe Flash), or greater ability to adapt to new technologies and standards as the emerge, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 may be the better bet.

Intel is preparing its summer 2011 xf86-video-intel driver update. The xf86-video-intel 2.16 driver brings several new features to the Intel DDX, which is now available for testing in form of a release candidate...

In this previous part of this article we learned about types of shells . In most of the Linux distributions , bash shell is the default shell. So we are going to discuss the working of bash shell in this article . Fasten your seat belts and get ready for the bash ride Normally we think that when we type a command, shell looks for the command in all the directories defined in the PATH environment variable. But in real it goes through the following sequence to reach the above step. Redirection Aliases Expansion Shell Function Shell Builtin Hash table PATH variable

What's 'texture memory'?

While recently there was the merging of Mesa pipe-video to master. most of the recent video decoding work going on within the Gallium3D world has been into the ATI/AMD R600 Gallium3D driver for XvMC and now VDPAU support too. This is after the R300 support matured a fair amount, but the first one to the Gallium3D video decoding party was Nouveau. Worked on several years ago as part of the Google Summer of Code was Nouveau Gallium3D video coding. Fortunately, some of this work has been resurrected...

If you've ever needed to edit one or more files to make quick changes, you've no doubt found that doing it using a text editor can be a slow slogging process. Linux, thankfully, has a number of tools that make it easy to do this non-interactively. One of the best is sed, a "stream editor" that can help you make quick work of filtering and transforming text. This weekend, take a few minutes to introduce yourself to sed.

The most recent releases of GNU Emacs have been found to be in violation of the GPL in that a handful of binary files in a Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools have been distributed without their relevant source codes....Steps are being taken to resolve the matter very rapidly.

Welcome to the 158th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!