Showing all newswire headlines

Microsoft Windows updates took so long to install that my laptop fell asleep. I had to wake it up just to get my computer to shut down. Then it blames me. WHAT!?

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen has tipped plans for an upcoming update to the Boxee software for PC, Mac, and Linux desktops. Ronen says the update will bring the free desktop Boxee A/V player more into sync with what's available on D-Link's Boxee Box device, although it will continue to lag releases of Boxee for devices.

I have been a Compiz fan ever since I started using Linux. Compiz is also a very integral part of Ubuntu, more so with the introduction of new Unity desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. There are many Compiz effects that are not enabled by default and some of them are really good IMO. Useful Compiz tweaks for Ubuntu 11.04.

On May 7 and 8 I attended the Linux Audio Conference for 2011 held in Maynooth, Ireland. Due to a temporary mental malfeasance - for some reason I assumed the Earth rotated in the opposite direction - I booked my flight for the wrong departure date and was unable to change its itinerary without paying out a hefty sum to the airline.

Imagine you're a virtual archaeologist of the future reviewing last week's change logs for the Wikipedia entry for Paul Revere....

As Adobe faces increasingly stiff competition on different fronts, one might think the company would be eager to reach the broadest base of end-users possible. Yet its record of engagement within the open source channel remains lackluster at best. Let’s take a look at Adobe’s trends on this front, and what they might mean over the long-term.

Virtualization and cloud computing are here to stay. Negative commentary and paranoia won’t change that.

Things have been progressing nicely and we now even have 2 mash trees with install images for testing available for, one for ppc, the other for ppc64....

I took some time to contact Jeff Hoogland, lead developer for Bodhi Linux, and asked him a few questions about the distribution he is in charge with.

"Bachelors are not the only ones who can use GNU/Linux desktops," blogger Robert Pogson pointed out. "I have had students from grade 1 to 12 use it just fine. None of them needed to configure the clock..." Trenholme's article, in fact, "is an example of the trolls who visit my blog with some obscure problem never seen by other humans."

As expected, Python 2.7.2 and Python 3.1.4 have been released by the Python developers. Both releases contain the security fixes to stop redirection errors that were included in May's Python 2.5.6 and last week's Python 2.6.7 "security fixes only" releases, but these are general maintenance releases and therefore contain many more fixes and corrections – although only Python 2.7.2 is a current production version.

To celebrate World IPv6 Day, I thought I would join the “festivities”—one day late, unfortunately—and enable IPv6 on my home network, with a total switch-over if possible. The three most common services on my network are OpenSSH on all three nodes, and NFS and HTTP on my central server running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, so I wanted to make all three work over IPv6.

The VPN is very often critical to working within a company. With working from home being such a popular draw to many industries, it is still necessary to be able to access company folders and hardware that exists within the LAN. When outside of that LAN, one of the best ways to gain that access is with the help of a VPN. Many VPN solutions are costly, and/or challenging to set up and manage. Fortunately, for the open source/Linux community, there is a solution that is actually quite simple to set up, configure, and manage. OpenVPN is that solution and here you will learn how to set up the server end of that system.

Canonical is pushing forward with ensuring ARM-compatibility for future versions of Ubuntu. In order to do that it needs a proper build environment and hardware to allow contributors to submit and build the 20,000+ packages that make up the Linux distribution.

This tutorial was written for Firefox 4 and Ubuntu 11.04, however pretty much everything contained here applies to older releases and will probably work in future versions too. This how-to covers pretty much everything needed to get you started with Firefox: installing Flash, customizing it, installing add-ons and themes, and useful tips for working faster with it.

Dear Fedora fans, we are sorry to announced today that the Fedora 13 (Goddard) Linux distribution will reach end of life (EOL) next Friday, on June 24th, 2011.

I want my desktop to be clean and simple, I don't like it look cluttered, especially since I have Unity launcher at my disposal with easy access to favorite applications and 'places'. In Ubuntu, when you mount a drive, it will be shown in your desktop by default. I don't like it that way and this is how I hide mounted drives and removable media from showing in my desktop.

This was a pretty quiet week in the world of free software. However, as always, there were still several compelling stories in our never-dull community. This weeks stories deal with some of the most popular projects in the worlds of Linux, GNU, and free software: openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, FreeNAS, and Mageia.

Most likely, today, some hacker tried to crack your WordPress site, its data and content. Maybe that was just a one-off from some bored kid. Just as likely, it was an automated hit, trying dozens of attacks to find a soft spot. Then again, quite likely it was both. What we must do is to solidify your WordPress and other logins so you can securely administrate while keeping your data and credentials flying well under the radar. We'll put the best web protocols to work, along with added defenses, chiefly from Apache.

I have nothing against Apache's version of OpenOffice.org -- even though the donation does seem like one last spiteful gesture by Oracle against The Document Foundation. But given the challenges it faces and LibreOffice's head start, I also see little chance of it succeeding