Showing all newswire headlines

Personally, I'm feeling more and more torn within the Ubuntu ecosystem. As a developer, I'm thrilled to see the company focus more on growing the business and making Ubuntu more suitable for business (though I'm convinced Unity will derail this effort). But as a user, I'm saddened to see that my voice is no more heard by Canonical than it is by Microsoft or Apple. I am, to them, just a user. They know what's best for us.

For four days, starting on Friday April 15th, about half a dozen souls gathered in the hive01 headquarters in Stuttgart. The goal of this very first ownCloud sprint was to discuss, plan and of course hack on the web services project. To kickoff we had a brainstorming session and discussion of the topics that were to be dealt with over the following days. We extensively debated fundamental things concerning the future directions of ownCloud.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated a quadruped robot intended to test gait control and locomotion -- and eventually mimic the movement of a triceratops. The flexibly jointed, 3.1-foot FROG-I robot runs Linux on an Intel Xscale PXA270 processor, communicating via Wi-Fi with a host computer, while lower-level functions are controlled by two Texas Instruments DSPs....

The Commodore brand finally staged its comeback Wednesday, ... the Commodore 64 runs a version of the Linux operating system on an Intel processor, and boasts 2GB of memory and a modern Blu-ray or rewritable DVD optical drive.

I wanted to experience the thrill of browsing anonymously, or to a navigation system that does not easily reveal the information on the connection you use. The choice of which software to use is gone on Tor, but only because it is the most famous. Personally, I proceeded to download the latest version of TOR available for my GNU/Linux directly from its site.

A jury has found that in using Linux on its back-end servers, Google has infringed a patent held by a small Texas-based company and must pay $5m in damages.

In 2006, Bedrock Computer Technologies sued Google and several other outfits – including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, and AOL – claiming they infringed on a patent filed in January 1997. The patent describes "a method and apparatus for performing storage and retrieval...that uses the hashing technique with the external chaining method for collision resolution", and the accusation is that companies infringed by using various versions of the Linux kernel on their servers.

Now and then, office-type documents need to be converted. The latex users have always been able to produce a variety of formats from the command line, but for the OpenOffice/LibreOffice users, manual labor has been the solution. That changes with unoconv. Now you can convert to most file formats directly from the command line.

NetCitadel announces release of Firewall Builder version 4.2. Firewall Builder is a leading firewall management solution for Linux iptables as well as many other firewall platforms.

April is raining Ubuntu and its family and open source world seems over loaded on Debian distros, what with Canonical adopting a bi-annual release this month forwards. Debian and its derivatives appear to be the flavour of the month but there are far too many Linux distros that are apt for Summer.

On April 20th, Nvidia launched version 270.41.06 of its graphics driver, which brought initial support for Xorg Server 1.10 and support for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system.

This probably won't come as a surprise to many, but the "social Web browser" has thrown in the towel. Don't cry for the Flock team - they're flying the coop for Zynga to go make Facebook games or something. But Flock's loyal fans are out in the cold. Why'd Flock fail? There's a few lessons to be learned.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on an OpenSUSE 11.4 server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

The DoJ and FCO have jointly agreed that Novell's patents are a threat to open source that needs neutralising.

We all should be afraid, very afraid at the prospect of the US Senate taking on legislation to regulate the cloud. Can you think of anything that could stifle innovation faster than the US Congress?

In the first IPv6 for Linux crash course, we covered some of the bare basics of IPv6 on Linux. Today we're going to learn how to use routable IPv6 addresses, some iptables rules to keep our experimentation from leaking out into the world, and about implementing DNS in IPv6.

Freedom House’s Sanjay Kelly and Sarah Cook just released a new report: Freedom on the Net 2011: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media. According to the report, two electoral democracies - Turkey and South Korea - engage in substantial political censorship.

The Rawstudio raw photo editor made its 2.0 release on April 8, boasting a hefty list of improvements. There are new features, such as tethered shooting and automatic distortion correction, almost every tool in the toolbox has seen an improvement — including some you might not think needed improving. If you shoot with a raw-capable digital camera, it's time to update.

Independently of each other, security specialists Dan Kaminsky and Will Dormann from Carnegie Mellon University's CERT have found that, in the past few years, the number of flaws and exploitable vulnerabilities in individual versions of Microsoft Office has fallen dramatically, achieving results that are even below those of OpenOffice. However, their findings should be treated with caution, as they are based on automatic evaluations and say little about the actual threat potential.

The third major installment of the Gnome desktop released earlier this month and I am sure many users found themselves shell shocked with more than a few of the changes. Some will adjust, some will stick with Gnome 2 (or the classic desktop), and I am sure more than a few will go looking for something else to use as their desktop of choice.

While surveys suggest that 90 percent or more of large enterprises use at least one open source application, estimates place the percentage of small businesses that use open source software much lower. Yet open source software offers small businesses the same low costs and flexibility that enterprises enjoy.