Showing all newswire headlines

Back in October there was the very controversial news that Canonical would be replacing the GNOME Shell with their own Unity project as the default desktop shell for Ubuntu 11.04 and going forward. The original version and specification for Ubuntu Unity (and as found in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook) required 3D acceleration and would use Compiz as its compositing window manager. For those without the necessary graphics drivers to support the functionality, Canonical's plan for Ubuntu was to have it fall-back to the traditional GNOME desktop and inform the user of their sad graphics support. However, now Canonical's developing a 2D version of Unity for such scenarios.

IBM showed off its Linux-based Watson supercomputer in an exhibition "Human vs. Machine" game of Jeopardy, while discussing potential practical uses of its natural-language AI in the IT industry, especially in health care and tech support. Watson beat two human challengers in this practice round, but the real winner will be proven in a televised competition in February.

It is not an overstatement that the Motorola Atrix smartphone was one of the bright stars of CES 2011. An often-mentioned, breakthrough feature of the Atrix is its modularity, namely that it can be placed into a netbook dock which gives it work-time (and battery recharge) and a desktop-like work environment (Linux based).

Lutris is a new gaming platform for Linux that aims at providing easy game installation, configuration and launching system for games. It is different from other services like PlayOnLinux as it integrates a large number of games from a number of different systems that includes console emulators also.

Debian 6.0 Sqeeze RC1 is released, this release candidate includes a new SpaceFun artwork, adds support for the Lao and Sinhala languages, support for new computer systems, fixes for Finnish keyboard support, and the Linux kernel used by the installer has been updated to the latest version of 2.6.32.

The open source Lustre technology is a parallel file system that is often found in high performance computing (HPC) environments. Users of the file system will soon get community Lustre distribution, thanks to the leadership of startup Whamcloud.

Awhile back I did a posting about useful/interesting Gnome Panel Applets. Of the late I've been featuring the Enlightenment desktop more and more so I figured it was only fitting that I do a post highlighting some of my favorite Enlightenment Modules.

The official features that Red Hat has added to the revised Enterprise Linux 5.6 include the Ext4 file system. Other innovations include fresher versions of Bind and PHP, along with a number of revised drivers to improve support for current hardware.

While it seems every Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in recent memory has some theme that never really panned out (see 3-D TV), you might want to rethink the trend when it comes to Android. Google's Android attack was in full force at this year's edition with a vengeance. From smart phones to tablet devices of all sizes to Google TV, you couldn't travel the exhibit floor very far without bumping into something Android. For some companies, like Motorola, Android has fueled impressive comebacks. For others, like Sony, it's new territory.

"Does Natty's Unity require proprietary graphics card drivers?" was a question posted on AskUbuntu and who better to answer this question then Mark Suttleworth himself (who apparently is quite an active AskUbuntu user)?

Announced in Debian News: The new Squeeze installer is now out of beta and into Release Candidate 1 status. It's another milestone on the march to Stable for Debian's current Testing distribution.

As pundits predict resurgent iPhone sales with Verizon's iPhone 4 launch this week, Canalys projects Android will shrug it off and continue to grow at more than twice the rate of the iPhone in 2011. Meanwhile, Android claimed 46 percent of U.S. ad impression share in December compared to 32 percent for Apple iOS, says Millennial Media....

This week I promised myself to put the .wwf format to the test. So, I sent a .wwf file to my girlfriend at work and I distributed all documents at work that I didn't find worth printing in the .wwf format. These were the reactions I got.

In testing of OpenBenchmarking.org and preparations for the release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland at the end of February from SCALE, a lot of benchmarks have been happening to test the various analytical features and other new capabilities of this open benchmarking platform. In fact, it is really an overwhelming amount of benchmarks; the power capacity in my office is maxed out as benchmark after benchmark and system after system there is all sorts of test scenarios being looked upon. The benchmarks coming out on Phoronix.com over the past two months have just been barely scratching the surface of what has been going into the OpenBenchmarking.org system. Recently a lot of OpenCL compute benchmarks were pumped in, and since we have only published a few OpenCL Linux benchmarks -- OpenCL on Linux vs. Mac OS X and OpenCL NVIDIA vs. ATI on Linux -- here's some more in this article.

I recently received some mild criticism from a friend when I stated that The HeliOS Project provided a computer for a family with 3 kids ranging in age from 6 - 9 years old. He said that we had wasted a computer on kids that were far too young to either appreciate the technology or use it efficiently. I don't only think he is wrong... I know he is.

As the first of several opinion pieces exploring current issues in KDE, we offer you a video of Aaron Seigo explaining how KDE's success as a community producing all kinds of software led to outgrowing our old name, the "K Desktop Environment", what KDE means now and why it matters.

It was inevitable that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early 2011 would have a fair share of Android-based tablet devices on show. We look at some of the Android devices that will very likely be heading our way this year.

No doubt, Microsoft Windows Small Business Server (SBS) has a loyal channel and a massive SMB installed base. But Zentyal, a Spain-based software company with International aspirations, is promoting an SBS alternative to VARs and managed services providers. The twist: Zentyal marries an on-premise Linux small business server with cloud computing. Here's how.

Patrick Verner announced a couple of days ago, on January 12th, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 5.9 Linux distribution for partitioning tasks. The new release is just a maintenance version that updates two programs and fixes various booting issues.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on a Mandriva 2010.1 Spring server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.