Showing all newswire headlines

Are you wondering what Linux and Free/Open Source software have to offer you? Check out Cynthia Harvey's monster list of 715 FOSS applications for all occasions and all operating systems.

Puppy Linux 'Wary' is a parallel development to Puppy, Luci Puppy, but with a different target market - older hardware. Puppies built with recent Linux kernel and X.Org may not work properly on older computers. PuppyLogoIn particular, some analog dial-up modem drivers cannot be compiled with recent kernels.

Here it is time for new q4wine release tagged by 0.120-r1 version. Unfortunately, due to lack of free time, many planned features was not implemented and are targeted for next release. However this release does have many new features and bug fixes in it.

VectorLinux is one distribution that seems to hum along under most users' radar. This is a mistake because Vector has many of the characteristics that make Linux great while adding some that has often been heralded by competitors as not existing except with larger commercial distributions.

KVM as a “full virtualization” is a nice feature because it allows you to run any operating system virtualized. However, it’s relatively slow because the hypervisor has to emulate actual physical devices such as RTL8139 network cards and the most recent SeaBios emulates IDE interface.This fragment from KVM guest dmesg log is fair enough

aMSN is a powerful, highly configurable and feature-rich client for the WLM (formerly known as MSN) protocol with support for skins, plugins, system tray integration, webcam, tabbed chat windows, multi-accounts, offline messaging, chat history, display picture and many, many more. The configuration options are abundant via the Account->Preferences menu.

AriOS is the successor of mFatOS, an Ubuntu remaster we talked about a while back. AriOS 2.0 was released today and it's based on Ubuntu 10.10 - the new version tries to replicate Unity but as opposed to Unity, it's customizable thanks to Avant Window Navigator. In AriOS, everything works out of the box and most popular applications are installed by default which I'm sure those with a limited Internet connection will appreciate.

Caine is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.04 for forensic scientists and security-conscious administrators. Poised to do battle against IT ne’er-do-wells, Caine has a comprehensive selection of software, a user-friendly GUI, and responsive support.

There is a word that is to me as a pebble in a shoe, as fingernails on a blackboard, and that is the word consumer. Consumer is a perfectly good word that has become incurably tainted. One dictionary definition is "a person who acquires goods and services for his or her own personal needs". Farther down on the same Dictionary.com page it says "one that utilizes economic goods; specifically : an individual who purchases goods for personal use as distinguished from commercial use". And so we have Consumer Reports, consumer protection laws, Consumer's Union, and other organizations devoted to protecting consumer's rights and interests.

I experienced a strong sense of deja vu and began to wonder if this was going to be a reprise of Sun’s sale to Oracle and the forking of OpenOffice, one of the crown jewels of GNU/Linux. The premise of this article, to paraphrase an American general, is that old software never dies, it just gets forked. The question therefore is: is OpenSUSE safe and what is Microsoft up to?

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin [cq] has ordered government agencies there to open-source software by 2015, according to translated documents. Putin's order, signed this month, follows news reports from October saying the Russian government was planning to drop Microsoft products in favor of a national open-source operating system based on Linux.

This year, I'm giving up making predictions. By my count, my record for 2010 was slightly worse than random chance, and my inability to impress readers individually with cold readings makes me conclude that I should leave fortune telling to the tarot readers.

The Indian KDE community will organize its first conference at Bengaluru in March 2011. The 5 day event will bring together KDE contributors, Qt developers, users and FOSS enthusiasts. We realise that there are not many KDE/Qt related events that are accessible to Indians. FOSS conferences or meetings are an excellent way to show people the technology first hand and ways to contribute to it. We not only dazzle them with the world of KDE, but show them first hand how simple it is to get involved and make a difference. This is our motivation for conducting this event.

There are not many download accelerators for Linux that integrate well with web browsers and have support for downloading links right from the browser. PyAxelWS Download Accelerator Extension for Chromium now allows users to accelerate downloads by using a simple python script PyAxelWS and HTML5 Web Sockets.

The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike "regular" Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.

The second release candidate of the Document Foundation's fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, has been made available and announced in the Document Foundation's blog. In the announcement, the developers say the release is "beta quality software", ask for users to play with it so they can test and give feedback, and list over 80 individuals who have contributed to development between the third beta and current release candidate.

Using free software in education is not just about saving money. It's also about preserving choice, not locking a student's experience into a certain way of doing something. With Linux, there's no vendor lock-in. Free software is more likely to be open-standards compliant, and it's going to be more open to different languages, localities and curricula.

I've been thinking and thinking about everything, and I've figured out what I need to explain to you next. Reading the log of the recent OpenSUSE board meeting discussing setting up a foundation for the project turned on the light in my head: you need to understand bylaws. Because corporations are setting up foundations to get you to donate code to, and they set them up to suit themselves, not to benefit you. There's a difference between the community setting up a foundation to be a project's home and a corporate sponsor doing it. I'm going to write about that in more detail later. To really explain it, I need to explain some things that you might think will be boring or too foreign, but if you can learn Perl, you can learn bylaws.

Firewall Builder is a firewall configuration and management GUI that supports configuring a wide range of firewalls from a single application. Supported firewalls include Linux iptables, BSD pf, Cisco ASA/PIX, Cisco router access lists and many more. In this tutorial we are going to cover how to use Firewall Builder to configure a NAT rule that translates both the source and destination IP addresses of the original packet. This type of NAT configuration can be useful in a variety of network configurations.

LXer Feature: 27-Dec-2010

Welcome to the last Roundup for 2010 and please accept my apologies for being a day late getting this to you. It seems the holiday festivities have caused me to lose track of time.. Enjoy!