Showing all newswire headlines

I was reading on Femtux about a Google Web Fonts package for ArchLinux and though I'd make one for Ubuntu. I didn't create a .deb but instead I've modified the original ArchLinux script to download and install all the Google Font Directory fonts on Ubuntu. The fonts included are the new Gnome 3 font, Chrome OS font, Ubuntu font and many more.

With over 100 audio and video formats, FFmpeg is at the heart of countless multimedia programs, and it is one of the show-piece projects on the open source scene. Originally founded by Fabrice Bellard, Michael Niedermayer started maintaining the project in 2004. However, a team of 18 developers has now ousted him and appointed seven new project maintainers, among them the main x264 developer, Jason Garrett-Glaser ("Dark Shikari"), and Ronald S. Bultje. Some of the most active FFmpeg developers had been dissatisfied with Niedermayer's project management and had accused him of slowing down the development of the codec library, which is licensed under the GPL / LGPL, by focussing on unnecessary details and causing superfluous discussions.

When you mention hacking in the general public, the image most people think of is a nerdy guy breaking into a computer system from his bedroom. This month, I take a look at some of the tools available to do exactly that. Of course, this is for information purposes only, so please don't do anything nasty. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Most people have heard of tools like Nmap or Nessus, but here I look at some other available tools for playing with networks.

Sponsored tests (from any organization) will always be biased, and therefore unreliable from a technical perspective. There are always tuning parameters that the “loser” will insist were wrong which skewed the results, there are always different ways to architect the test that would have given the “loser” an edge. That’s why they’re sponsored tests.

XPlanetFX is an incredible tool for rendering high quality real time earth wallpaper in Ubuntu. XplanetFX comes with a handy GTK interface which makes things a whole lot simpler. I never knew such a tool even existed until one of our readers mentioned us about it.

Asterisk, the open source IP PBX, has gained serious momentum as an on-premise IP telephony solution. But as hosted PBXs gain popularity, I’m starting to wonder if Asterisk-based cloud services will gain critical mass with customers. Here's the update.

Need to capture some data from you users? jQuery Mobile forms differ from traditional forms in a couple of ways but can save you some headaches when building your app.

First of all setup DNJL PPA to upgrade KVM/QEMU up to Qemu 0.12.5 & Libvirt 0.8.3 on Ubuntu Lucid Server and download the most recent Fedora virtio-win drivers from http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/image... as floppy and ISO image. Notice , that same virt-install will run fine on KVM Server Ubuntu 10.10 due to required versions of Libvirt & Qemu appear to be installed by default.

The Linux blogosphere is "all shook up" these days, skewering Sony for suing a hacker for jailbreaking the PS3, and hammering Mozilla for skimping on hardware acceleration in the Linux Firefox 4 beta. Meanwhile, Google's decision to drop H.264 from its Chrome browser for open source alternatives received praise from the open source world, but also a surprising amount of criticism.

In this review we're going to take a look at the Boxee Box by D-Link. Designed to deliver Internet TV, movies, music, web browsing, photos and other local media to the television, this Linux based set-top device will free you from the confined of your computer and bring you back to the epitome of comfort, your couch!

OpenERP, as you may guess from the name, sells a suite of business applications built on open source code, ensuring low-cost apps for the customer and flexible deployment for the administrator. But OpenERP has always been limited by its status as an on-premises product. Not anymore. Here comes the SaaS and cloud version.

Last month I looked at some of the interesting data you can get out of /proc/. But /proc isn't just for getting information out of the system and into convenient text form. You can also use it to put information into the system, and thereby change it. The sys/ directory, which is where kernel variable information is kept, is where most of the things you might want to alter live. Changes made here will take effect immediately; no need to reboot. A real boon for working sysadmins! Note that you'll need appropriate (root) privileges to change these values. See here for a discussion of using sudo with pipes.

At the time of writing this article, Ubuntu 11.04 codenamed "Natty Narwhal" is still very much in its nascent stages of development. I really wanted to take it for a spin and write about my first hand impressions on latest build Ubuntu Natty. I installed Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Alpha 1 in my USB drive and things went pretty smooth from the word go.

When it comes to tweaking photos, Levels is the most important weapon in digiKam’s arsenal. This tool lets you adjust brightness and contrast by specifying the location of complete black, complete white, and midtones in a histogram, which makes it a perfect tool for fixing under- and overexposed photos as well as improving the overall tonal range of a photo.

Announced by the openSUSE developers a little over two years ago, the openSUSE 11.1 operating system has reached end of life (EOL) on January 13th, 2011.

This tutorial will describe how to install and configure MyDNS-NG and MyDNSConfig 3 on Debian Squeeze. MyDNS-NG is a DNS server that uses a MySQL database as backend instead of configuration files. The advantage is that MyDNS simply reads the records from the database, and it does not have to be restarted/reloaded when DNS records change or zones are created/edited/deleted. A secondary nameserver can be easily set up by installing a second instance of MyDNS that accesses the same database or, to be more redundant, uses the MySQL master / slave replication features to replicate the data to the secondary nameserver.

The use of ACLs is fairly simple, a basic understanding of Linux file and directory permissions is required. Permissions may be set for any number of users or groups individually.

While it was just a couple weeks ago that a VIA Technologies representative had admitted to me their Linux / open-source strategy is basically dead (and they had failed in delivering their Linux goals for 2010), it seems that today the first Chrome 9 (VIA VX900 IGP) documentation has been released. It appears to originate from VIA Technologies but this public release is coming to the community through the OpenChrome driver project. This documentation covers the 2D, 3D, and video engines for these integrated graphics processors.

Instant messaging is typically regarded as a social tool, but it also plays an increasingly important role in the workplace as a medium for professional communication. One of the most important technologies that has helped to advance instant messaging as a business tool is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), an XML-based open standard that fosters interoperability between real-time messaging platforms.

The first release candidate for the upcoming Linux 2.6.38 kernel is now out and it could further improve Linux performance. With 2.6.37, the Big Kernel Lock (BKL) was removed, but apparently there is at least one more big global lock that needed to come out. In 2.6.38 there is a new RCU (Read/Copy/Update)-based path name lookup. The new RCU lookup could end up improving Linux kernel performance by as much as 50 percent.