Showing all newswire headlines

Oracle has had a mixed bag of success with open source. As part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle inherited a long list of open source projects. Some of them, like OpenOffice and OpenSolaris have met with community opposition that have led to forks. The NetBeans IDE however is another story. Under Oracle's leadership, NetBeans is thriving with nearly a million active users. What makes NetBeans different? Why is it succeeding under Oracle's leadership while other projects are not doing as well?

Canonical announced that the Ubuntu Open Week for Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04) will take place between 2nd to 5th May, 2011, on the Ubuntu IRC, in the #ubuntu-classroom channel.

Nielsen reports that 31 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers said they would prefer Android for their next phone, compared to 30 percent for the iPhone. Overall, Nielsen estimates that 37 percent of smartphone subscribers and 50 percent of recent subscribers use Android phones, up sharply from January.

If you don't include master pages (which are really styles under another name), then Scribus supports three types of hierarchial styles: lines, character, and paragraph. As in any other self-respecting word processor or layout application, these styles allow you to apply detailed sets of formatting options quickly, without having to change each instance of a formatting option individually.

Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when you’re asked to do a week’s work in twelve hours or less? It should. It should give you a warmer feeling when you can do it in far less time. Give your C-Level suitors this one in under an hour and they’ll think you’re as magical as Mr. Scott aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Mr. Scott often surprised the always demanding Captain Kirk with his ability to fix just about anything within the very tight time constraints placed on him. Instead of dilithium crystals and altered phaser electronics, you’ll have to work with Ubuntu and Drupal.

The Gnome project announced that the Gnome 3.0 release included more contributions by women than any previous release, an increase the project attributes its new internship program.

The eventual release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is almost here. And we have already featured the essential to do list after installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Now, not everyone among you is going to install the latest Ubuntu from scratch. So here are the two ways in which you can upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal directly from Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

OpenQRM 4.8 (http://www.openqrm.com) was released on March 31, 2011 with OpenVZ and LXC support. Additional features in this release include remote VM console and support for ICING and automated VLAN management with OpenVSwitch. Enhanced high-availability using Pacemaker + Corosync is something very valueable for a mission-critical datacenter included in this release among others.

Sometimes you want to download something but don't want to wait until it finishes so you can shut down the computer. In this case you can use Sentinella.

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal beta is already here and in a few days time, the final release will happen. We have already reviewed the latest Ubuntu 11.04 beta and we think it is ready for prime time, well, almost. We did encounter some amount of instability in the new Ubuntu Unity mostly because of Compiz, but overall we believe Ubuntu 11.04 is going to be a release to look forward for. Leaving all that aside for now, let's just concentrate on things you could do after installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

GNOME Shell is truly great and I especially like how easy it is to extend it through extensions like the new ThemeSelector extension. ThemeSelector GNOME Shell extension is a new, unofficial GNOME Shell extension that adds a new tab in the Activities overview where all the GNOME Shell themes (not GTK themes!) installed under ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/themes show up. To change a theme, all you have to do is click it and you don't even have to reload GNOME Shell.

How Nginx+Varnish compare to Nginx alone? Nginx: Is a Webserver with great performance when serving static files. Varnish: Is a HTTP accelarator, that can be put in front of any webserver, including Nginx, but how it can help Nginx? Here you will find some tests, that will give an idea about the answer of that question.

Inkscape is frequently mentioned, and lauded, as one of the best examples of open-source software available today. It is a mature, feature-full and flexible product, thanks to a very dedicated developer community. The latest version, 0.48, adds new tools, such as the Airbrush (which many have longed for), and advanced path editing, among many other additions and improvements.

I am a Unix / Linux guy writing this article out of sheer frustration, so if one does not like pointed, accurate ranting about that Not A Unix OS to which one may be partial, stop here.

Google has announced a patent-sharing program around WebM in an effort to guard the open source web video format from legal attack. On Monday, with a blog post, the company introduced the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative, which brings together companies willing to license each other's patents related to the format. Founding members include AMD, Cisco Systems, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Matroska, Mozilla, Opera, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the Xiph.org Foundation, as well as Google.

At the core of Linux is open source software that is enabled by open source licenses. Open Source licenses are what enables Linux to thrive, but other legal mechanisms, in particular the U.S. patent system, continue to lurk on the edges as a risk to the continued growth of Linux. This past week, the Linux Planet got both positive and negative news on the patent front, as the lawyers took center stage.

Here is another great all purpose Linux distribution with lots of the newest software only a few clicks away. Although things don’t appear to have changed much in recent years there are still some great improvements under the hood.

A Texas jury has ruled against Google in a suit that alleged some of its use of open source Linux code amounted to patent infringement, something that could have big implications for other companies using Linux technology and other open source systems. In the verdict, delivered last week, the jury decided that Google should pay US$5 million for the infringement.

The recently held Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (LFCS) had its traditional kernel panel on April 6 at which Andrew Morton, Arnd Bergmann, James Bottomley, and Thomas Gleixner sat down to discuss the kernel with moderator Jonathan Corbet. Several topics were covered, but the current struggles in the ARM community were clearly at the forefront of the minds of participants and audience members alike.

Landing in the Phoronix e-mail inbox last night was a question by a reader asking how hardware vendors determine the operating systems used by their customers and their respective market-share since there isn't anything to "phone home" and report usage statistics. In other words, this reader had just purchased four desktop processors and he was wondering how to inform AMD that he's a Linux user. This is in hopes of going towards their Linux tally and eventually increasing their Linux level of support.