Showing all newswire headlines

I’ve been going back and forth on whether to get rid of my Sun Sparcstation 20 and all of the hardware and software that goes with it. After I got the SS20 for $10 plus a nominal shipping fee (and it’s the shipping that’ll kill you) from eBay, I got it running with OpenBSD and Solaris 9 at various times. Yeah, it’s a 1995-era system, And even though SPARC is optimized for Unix in a way x86 will never be, there’s only so much you can do with a 50 MHz SPARC CPU and 256 MB of RAM.

Clement Lefebvre and the community behind the Linux Mint project announced a few minutes ago on their official blog that Linux Mint 8 (Helena) operating system will reach end-of-life on April 29th, 2011.

This howto describes how to set up a local intranet web based office suite server (on Ubuntu 10.10 server) based on Feng Office which used to be OpenGoo. Feng Office has a range of groupware type products such as word processing, email, calendar, and presentations.

Gnu Free Call is a Free Software, server-less alternative to Skype. Here is an introduction to Gnu Free Call written specifically to help non-geeks to understand why such a project is important for everybody, both in normal life and when disasters strike. Includes explanations from Haakon Eriksen, the project coordinator.

As Android makes big gains, traditional enterprise-friendly cell phones from RIM and Microsoft continue to bleed market share.

KDE's KWin compositing window manager now supports suspended compositing that can be toggled by applications to provide a cleaner solution for stopping for removing the OpenGL context created by the KDE window manager and blocking the effects system so that directed full-screen applications and games should work better, especially with less than stellar graphics drivers...

As you probably know (if you don't, read the Ubuntu 11.04 beta 1 post again), Ubuntu 11.04 will ship with an option to use the classic Gnome Desktop so Unity is not a must if you don't want to use it. All you have to do to use the Gnome panels is to select the Ubuntu Classic Desktop in the login screen.

Well, according to Mark Shuttleworth (see his comment here), there won't be such an option in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot:

Probably you have already saw these small black and white image in some sites or while walking around your city, or if you have a smartphone probably you have already used them; they are QR Code. In this article we’ll see how to create these image in Linux and some uses of these images.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11.4 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Of the five big names in the Tablet PC OS market, who will emerge dominant?

The TOR project has gained much popularity over the last months. The Free Software Foundation has also given the project the Award for Projects of Social Benefit. This is fantastic news for an open source project. However, all this popularity combined with the way TOR is promoted through its web site and sometimes the Press may lead typical internet users into thinking that TOR, apart from providing a form of anonymity, is also a secure way of communication with the various internet services. This is not true.

Development on the Portable C Compiler (PCC) began back in the 1970's, but this week version 1.0 of this BSD-licensed compiler was finally released...

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Okular now supports searching for words with ligatures. Work on new NetworkManager 0.9 branch in NetworkManagement and PEAP-GTC wireless authentication suppport. A new plugin which provides a rating and an annotation menu action for files and folders (Dolphin/Konqueror) from Nepomuk.

I have a FreeBSD file server sitting in my office that has happily been serving files for a few years now. But the server is built from a conglomeration of very old parts and some of them are now wearing out. I am in the process of building another PC from old parts to replace the existing server. ...

Scientific Linux (SL) 6.0 is the latest release of a Red Hat-based distribution specifically tailored to meet the needs of the scientific computing community (see Figure 1). It's championed by Fermilab and used for some experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Fermilab released its first version on SL in 2004 with a target audience of the high-energy physics community. Since then, it has been adopted by research facilities across the world.

Browser add-ons are a great way of bolting on new functionality and customizing the experience to a high degree. But they're also a great way of slowing down browser quite a lot, which is why Mozilla is introducing several new measures to cut down on poorly optimized add-ons for Firefox.

Earth science (also known as geoscience) is the focus of understanding the sciences related to the planet Earth. It includes a wide range of fields such as geology, geography, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology. Some people are surprised to learn that astronomy is also regarded to be an earth science. Geology is generally considered to be the primary earth science.

Camino—the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface—is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen.

For those that have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction April 1st is a dangerous day for internet surfing - doubly so in the world of FOSS. Mischievous web admins were a-foot in many places around the world wide web for the last twenty-four hours, the following is a round up of some of the better ones I came across.

Mentor Graphics released an "OpenMCAPI" open source implementation of the Multicore Association (MCA) MCAPI (Multicore Communications Application Program Interface) specification for inter-process communications. The announcement comes two weeks after the MCA released the MCAPI 2.0 spec, adding a new "domain" layer touted for improving messaging routing and security.