Showing all newswire headlines

"So we all know that users who are new to the command-line find it intimidating, no matter what operating system, they just find it intimidating. These users are the kind of people who never used early Unix or MS-DOS, they were introduced to computers with graphics and point-and-click interfaces. And I've been wondering: What's so intimidating? I know for a fact that some people know what the command-line is, they know its power, a simple mix-up of the 'dd' command's 'if' and 'of' options and your drive is broken, and that alone is intimidating enough to avoid it."

Back when the 2010 Linux Plumbers Conference was looking for presentations, the LibreOffice project had not yet announced its existence. So Michael Meeks put in a vague proposal for a talk having to do with OpenOffice.org and promised the organizers it would be worth their time. Fortunately, they believed him; in an energetic closing keynote, Michael talked at length about what is going on with LibreOffice - and with the free software development community as a whole. According to Michael, both good and bad things are afoot. (Michael's slides are available for those who would like to follow along).

When thinking of an open source developer, most us of probably think of a male in his 30’s, overweight, long beard, and socially awkward. While this is just a stereotype and not a true reflection of all open source developers, there is some truth in the weight category and I have some T-shirt statistics that make the case.

LXer Feature: 19-Nov-2010



Ever since I installed Kontact 4.5, it has been showing an MySQL warning when starting. The exact error in the logs is:

Can't open and lock time zone table: Table 'mysql.time_zone_leap_second' doesn't exist trying to live without them

While it's only a warning, I don't like to have my logs filled with warnings. Hence, I went on a hunt to prevent this warning. Lots of posts said this issue is fixed in newer versions (certainly not for me!), or it doesn't matter. But that wasn't good enough for me so I felt relieved when I found a workaround yesterday, which I shall explain below.

When Microsoft released the seventh Platform Preview of Internet Explorer 9 last Wednesday, Microsoft said that the browser had overtaken its competition in terms of JavaScript performance. Microsoft based its statement on the results of the well-known WebKit SunSpider JavaScript benchmark: according to Microsoft's tests, IE9 PP7 came out on top.

Gingerbread, the latest update for Google's Android smartphone operating system, is now just weeks, or perhaps even days away from release. The Android 2.3 release was rumoured for November 11 but Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, speaking at the Web 2.0 summit earlier this week, said Gingerbread would only ship "in the next few weeks."

Since Xen is not included in Linus' kernel, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat and others are moving to KVM for virtualization. This post details one way to move your Xen infrastructure to KVM with minimal downtime.

With ARM processors growing in popularity in the server market, now is a great time to start thinking about brushing up your development skills on the architecture…

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to configure PureFTPd to accept TLS sessions on an OpenSUSE 11.3 server.

The Arduino is a small programmable device that can hold a small program and perform tasks such as reading temperature sensors, turning on or off switches, and can even serve as the ‘brain’ for a robot. I have used the Arduino (actually freeduino) for projects related to HVAC and hydroponics automation.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 18, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced a new affiliate for their program: LPI-Greece (http://www.lpi.org.gr). LPI-Greece will be managed by the Greek Linux User Group - GREEKLUG (http://www.greeklug.gr). GREEKLUG is a non profit organization founded in 2009 and provides Linux and Free Software/Open Source Software support, volunteer services and IT consulting in Greece.

Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file.

Linux Mint's version 10 release advances its position as an Ubuntu-variant well worth considering when choosing a full-featured desktop Linux OS.

An Oracle official detailed on Tuesday the submissions of upcoming Java releases to the formal specification process, including versions 7 and 8 of Java's standard edition. The technologies under consideration have been formulated as JSR (Java Specification Requests) for consideration by the Java Community Process, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of Oracle's Java platform group, said in a blog post. "These JSRs have been a long time coming. They're now -- ?nally -- on the JCP  ballot for approval; results should be available in two weeks."

Bodhi is a minimalistic, Linux distro that uses the Enlightenment desktop. Bodhi comes as a 350~meg download.

A document management system enables individuals and businesses to manage documents, making it easy to locate a previous document version. This is important from a record control perspective, and to ensure that compliance standards are met within a user-friendly environment.

We all know that Google is huge and there are more than enough examples of people crying the end is nigh regarding the seemingly insurmountable rise of the one-time search engine. But are they really that big? Do they have that much of a hold over us and should we be worried? Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

What is SPICE? It stands for "Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments". What does that mean exactly? SPICE is a remote display protocol designed specifically for use with the Linux kernel's built in virtualization hypervisor KVM. SPICE is similar to terminal services but rather than multiple users sharing a single, remote physical machine, SPICE allows you to graphically connect to and use a local or a remote KVM virtual machine. I got SPICE going on a Fedora 14 host machine with a Fedora 14 KVM virtual machine. I made a 13 minute video showing SPICE in action with common apps and multimedia.

Often you may not necessarily know what kind of hardware you have—you may have a no-name box from a smaller company or a used machine. This month, I present the tools you can use to find out what you have installed.

With Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" set to be released in the coming months, we have decided to run a set of benchmarks looking at the performance of Debian 6.0 across different sub-systems relative to the performance of Debian 5.0 "Lenny" and Debian 4.0 "Etch" to see how this new release may stack up.