Showing all newswire headlines

First we had the KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.0 debacle. ... Many people were so upset about radical and broken changes to KDE during this period they left KDE swearing never to return.

Expected to be released in about two months, the next kernel version will offer optimised virtualisation, add bad block management components to the software RAID code and include an extended Nouveau driver for NVIDIA's Fermi graphics chips. Several developers have been criticised for their clumsy use of Git in this development cycle.

The popularity of smartphones and media tablets will mean worldwide mobile connections will reach 5.6 billion by the end of this year, up 11 percent from 2010, according to Gartner. While related revenue will be up a higher 22 percent, providers will still struggle to recoup their costs, the research firm adds....

The good news: Khronos has published version 4.2 of the OpenGL specification in conjunction with the GL Shading Language version 4.20 specification. The bad news? The open-source Linux graphics drivers are falling hopelessly behind in keeping up-to-date with the latest upstream OpenGL releases and what is supported by the proprietary drivers and those for other operating systems...

One question we get a lot: What are the best community server distributions? That question isn't as simple as it sounds. What makes a distro "the best"? Why community distributions, specifically? It's not a simple question — but read on and we'll point you to six distros that will help you reach a satisfying answer.

Linus Torvalds officially released the Linux 3.1-rc1 kernel on Sunday afternoon, following the 3.1 merge window being open for more than two weeks.

Ubuntu Software Center is getting a complete makeover in its GTK3 avatar and first tech preview of this whole new look landed today in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. Being just a tech preview as of now, the current Software Center is still there by default. The new interface features a carousel at top for banners and featured items. Software categories have been moved over to the left with New and Top Rated apps section at the center of the main home page. Many sub-categories have their own top rated section now. The current sidebar in Ubuntu Software has been removed completely and a new new toolbar with drop down categories have been added at the top, giving a much cleaner look.

Keeping your secrets secret is an important consideration, so we have taken the four most popular encryption systems and ordered Linux User’s chief group tester, Garath Halfacree, to do what he does best. Which is the ultimate option? Read on…

There's just one and a half days left to the Humble Indie Bundle #3, but in less than two weeks the game offering has already grossed nearly $1.9M USD. Recently the developers behind these indie games had allowed the community to ask them questions on Reddit about their work. Ryan "Icculus" Gordon was one of the developers responding and he had provided some interesting comments...

You said what? To whom? Google is fighting to hide an email in which it seems to admit to knowingly infringing the Java patents, but with the text already public it will be a hard fight to win.…

Tails is a live media Linux distro designed boot into a highly secure desktop environment. You may remember that we looked at a US government distro with similar aims a few months ago, but Tails is different because it is aimed at the privacy conscious “normal user” rather than government workers.

Gentoo Linux "The future is now" has been released, which is the Gentoo 11.2 LiveDVD...

Yet we are doing everything in our power to create silly artificial walls between developers and users. I wish there was a Wikipedia-alike way to develop (or at least quality check) an OSS desktop. Lets face it, there's a lot of people out there who cannot code but who have much better UI taste than the average OSS GUI developer. We are just not making use of that potential and that's a big lost opportunity no matter how you look at it.

There are a lot of desktop background switchers available, but Gnome 3 has changed it's interface just enough to stop most of them from working. But a little project from Dhananjay Sathe provides a fairly easy way to setup a Gnome 3 desktop background slideshow.

Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Oneiric Ocelot development release is out and available to download, check release notes, download options and what’s new in Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Here.

This tutorial is supposed to show new Linux users how to handle Linux without having to browse through your desktop to edit files. The core commands to do this are the same on every Linux distribution, however there is a large variety of commands that differ from distribution to distribution, as does the install command.

PC and mobile users often need video conversion tools because of the restrictions placed on various devices. While one device may play H.264 perfectly well, another may insist on MPEG2. These limitations are not insurmountable. With the proper video conversion tools, you can make videos that play everywhere from...

Minitube it’s an application to watch youtube movie without using Flash or your browser, i’ve talked about it in a former article.

But from some time there were problems and the app was not able anymore to load properly the youtube video (this was with version 1.4.3 from around 1 month ago).

Flavio released on 5 of august a new release, the 1.5 that fixed this problem

There's more news this weekend out of Berlin about the Linux desktop. Beyond KDE on Wayland and primitive talk about GTK4, at the joint KDE-GNOME Desktop Summit, plans for KDE Frameworks 5.0 were announced...

Ontario Superior Court [Canada] grapples with legalities of anonymous postings on the Net.