Showing all newswire headlines

Google took a step backward with Honeycomb last week. Instead of locking the source they should start treating Android as a real open source project and start enforcing the Android trademark.

A lot of people have recommended the SugarSync file-synchronization service as an alternative to Dropbox. SugarSync offers 5 GB for free vs. 2 GB for Dropbox and has more flexible pricing when you want more storage. The big problem with SugarSync, for me anyway: No Linux client.

The business office is where the Linux desktop should reign. Why? Linux is a reliable, stable, secure solution that would have any business user working day-in and day-out without fail. With an unheard of resistance to viruses, trojans, and worms, the office user enjoying the Linux desktop would have no concerns about down time as does the average Windows user. But what tools are there available for the usual office worker? Plenty!

I’ve been planning to build a computer for at least a year. I started with the idea of a mini-ITX motherboard and case to produce a small, low-power desktop, to which I’d hook up a keyboard, mouse and monitor and use as a traditional desktop computer. However, what I need (and/or want) is a server. I’m thinking principally of a file server-slash-backup server. Maybe a light-duty web server.

F-PROT Antivirus ‘Fire & Ice’ is Free for Linux home users and has earned the VB100 Certification from Virus Bulletin, World’s Leading PC Security Publication

On a security mailing list over the weekend, an unknown party published details about the structure and content of databases on the website of database vendor MySQL. The information was apparently accessible via a security hole on the MySQL.com website.

According to a recent study from The Patent Board, Red Hat's patent portfolio is now ranked 50th in the Information Technology category. The top patent holder in the IT category is IBM. Red Hat's position at number 50 is a 16 spot jump since November of 2010. Red Hat now holds 137 granted U.S. patents as part of its intellectual property portfolio. "Open source is Red Hat's mission, and our patent program is done for the purpose of protecting and defending Red Hat and open source," Rob Tiller, assistant general counsel and vice president, IP at Red Hat told InternetNews.com. "The patents relate to a variety of technologies."

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Wineskin Pro 2.0 today. Wineskin Pro 2.0 is our initial release of Wineskin for Intel based Mac computers. This release has a custom built Xquartz X11 server that Microsoft Windows Games require to run in full screen mode.

I looked at three different ways how to popularize Linux and make it more mainstream as well as a household name. In the post I will look specifically at how I would sell Linux to schools, examining all the aspects of such a deployment and how I would do it and what distro and software I would use.

Like any messy love triangle, Nokia has a situation on its hands as it runs into the arms of Microsoft while trying to extricate itself from Symbian in a graceful way.

James Gosling, the father of Java, has joined Google – despite his previous criticism of the company's Java-happy Android operating system. Gosling announced his new job with a post to his personal blog entitled "Next step on the road", but did not provide specifics. "Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities. I find it odd that this time I’m taking the road more travelled by, but it looks like interesting fun with huge leverage," he wrote

Big Fat Alien, a Kelowna based indie game development studio is coming up with new fun space explorer and platformer for Linux in this April called BEEP. In this game you play a role of robot that is sent to space to explore and find what lies beyond earth. You are in control of a space ship that can travel in the solar system. Land on any planet or a mass of land and your adventure starts.

Last week I introduced tmux, a handy "terminal multiplexer." This week, we'll take a look at basic tmux usage and configuration. To start tmux, just run tmux or tmux new-session if you're feeling verbose. Then you'll have a session with one window and your usual login shell. To add a second window, run Ctrl-b c. (Same thing if you want a third, fourth, and so on.)

OpenVPN, or Open Virtual Private Network, is a tool for creating networking "tunnels" between and among groups of computers that are not on the same local network. This is useful if you have services on a local network and need to access them remotely but don't want these services to be publicly accessible. By integrating with OpenSSL, OpenVPN can encrypt all VPN traffic to provide a secure connection between machines.

LXer Feature: 28-Mar-2011

Upgrading the default KDE email client (KMail) was supposed to be a trivial task, but it ended up as a divorce of sorts forcing me to re-kindle old flames from days gone past... in having to flirt with Google.

Editor's note: Please read Mr Stephenson's (of OpenSuse's KDE team) reply to this article here - hkwint

More cores mean better performance, right? That's not what Amdahl says. Learn one of the foundations of parallel computing in "Amdahl's Law." Prepare yourself for math. And lawn mowing.

Martin Gräßlin has been making some very interesting advancements to KWin in the past year or so, after having issues with open-source Mesa drivers, this German developer has made this compositing window manager for the KDE Plasma desktop run on OpenGL ES 2.0 and even optional support for OpenGL 3.x. He wouldn't mind some help though, so this summer for KDE's involvement in Google's Summer of Code he has proposed three fairly interesting projects, two of which benefit KWin on Wayland.

When tweaking photos in digiKam, you probably would want to keep the originals intact. And this is where the Versioning feature can come in rather handy. It allows you to save each edited version of an original photo as a separate image complete with a list of all applied actions.

Remastersys is a complete system backup tool, but it can also be used to create your own customized remix of an Ubuntu and Debian installation. Basically, you customize a running system and create an install disk that will recreate it. If you've ever wanted to create your own distribution, you won't believe how simple this is to use.

Apparently Microsoft wanted to make a statement specifying that they could take any legal action Microsoft considered pertinent given the builder's lack of a Microsoft certificate of authenticity or original license included along with a computer built/sold by the independent builder. The builder states that given that they sell their computers with Free Software instead of Windows, the software has licenses...