Showing all newswire headlines

If you've ever paid attention to the market share statistics for desktop operating systems you probably know that Linux is most frequently pegged at about one percent. That's a dramatic underrepresentation, of course, due largely to the fact that Linux is free. Whereas Microsoft, for example, keeps careful count of each and every copy of Windows it distributes, in the case of Linux there's typically no vendor keeping count. Rather, users simply download, share, and enjoy the open source operating system to their heart's content without any official monitoring.

Never memorize what you can look up. This is one of the essential rules of system administration, and it applies very well to creating crontab entries. If you're not an expert on cron, don't worry -- just use the Corntab site or iPhone app. Generally speaking, cron syntax is not hard to remember. You have five fields to specify the minute, hour, day of the month, month of the year, and/or day of the week that you want to run a job automatically. It seems straightforward, but plenty of users and admins get it wrong -- not because it's really difficult, but just because it's not something they do often enough to memorize the correct syntax for oddball times.

A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

Synapse is a semantic launcher (Gnome-Do like) written in Vala that you can use to start applications as well as find and access relevant documents and files by making use of the Zeitgeist engine

Themes for Ubuntu and Linux are truly coming of age. Without any doubt, Faenza icon theme is easily the best I have used in my Ubuntu. Here is a collection of three cool GTK themes namely Divergence, Orta and Equinox that are the best in my list of GTK themes to use with Faenza.

Stream filtering allows you to take a text file, extract only the specific data that you want to see, and then to display it in the manner that you want to see it.  You'll get to see several text-stream filtering utilities to help you do this.  In order to show you the full power of these utilities,  here is a quick review on the concepts of pipes and redirectors.

The SuperComputing Conference is THE international conference and expo for all things HPC (High Performance Computing). The astute attendee of this year’s conference could see that storage is a big part of this year’s show. Two major storage trends from this year’s conference: really fast storage and really dense storage.

An increasing number of contributions to the open-source Linux kernel are coming from mobile and embedded equipment vendors, according to an annual report about to be released by the Linux Foundation.

It will not have escaped your notice that the patent system has been the subject of several posts on this blog, or that the general tenor is pretty simple: it's broken, and nowhere more evidently so than for software. Anyone can see that, but what is much harder is seeing how to fix it given the huge vested interests at work here.

The Brazilian subsidiary of Electrolux has joined with ProFusion Embedded Systems to develop a refrigerator that includes a Linux-based touchscreen computer. The Infinity I-Kitchen's computer is based on a 400MHz Freescale i.MX25 processor, offering a 800 x 480 display and an Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) user interface.

This article describes the setup of a redundant Linux OpenVPN gateway on Debian / Ubuntu and how to setup client authentication with certificates.

This post follows up “Howto” http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/RHEL6Xen4Tutorial . Install kernel-2.6.32.26-174.xendom0.fc12.src.rpm on RHEL 6 Server.

Last night an update was published as to the state of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, which is the Unity desktop interface that Canonical will be using in their next Ubuntu release rather than the GNOME Shell. Most all other GNOME distributions, however, will be using the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.0 when released in March. As it so happens, another development snapshot of the GNOME Shell arrived last night too...

Some iPhone fans should really dismount from their iHorse. This is an argument I had to forgo having in favour of discussing the pros and cons of the BlackBerry Torch, iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S with someone else trying to decide which phone to buy. “Everybody just copied the iPhone,” is the sweeping, unsupported statement that makes me see red.

The Bordeaux Technology Group is proud to announce a 50% off recession busting sale on Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenIndiana. With the current US unemployment rate hovering near 10% and rumors of the possibility of a double dip recession. We want to do our part to help save individuals and small business as much money as we can on their Wine related software needs.

Unlike virt-manager, virt-install is a command line tool that allows you to create KVM guests on a headless server. You may ask yourself: "But I can use vmbuilder to do this, why do I need virt-install?" The difference between virt-install and vmbuilder is that vmbuilder is for creating Ubuntu-based guests, whereas virt-install lets you install all kinds of operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and distributions in a guest, just like virt-manager. This article shows how you can use it on an Ubuntu 10.10 KVM server.

I love coffee, I love tea. I love the Java Jive and it loves me.* If Java is giving you jive, put your fears aside. You'll soon love it sweet and hot. Or maybe not. How many times have you run into problems with Java? Chances are very good that most of you have. If you perform a Google search using the words “Linux” and “Java,” you’ll have an all-day scavenger hunt on your hands. Searching for answers to installing Java, making it work and surviving the aftermath could use up whatever energy you’ve gleaned from actual cups of java. If you install the correct package, you need never fret again. You’ll learn to love Java again. You might even sing about it.

If you are a user of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice you might be familiar with styles and formatting. These are pre-defined text formats that you can select from in order to change various aspects of your text. With both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice you have the ability to create custom styles and formats that can be used, and re-used, easily. And best of all, this is all done without a single bit of scripting or coding. Thanks to the Styles and Formatting tool, you can become a LibreOffice power-user in no time.

Novell channel partners are expressing mixed reactions to news that the software vendor, once a critical player in the channel, will be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. "We've been assured by Novell that there are no planned changes to partnerships," said Phil Cook, lead architect for identity management technology at Identropy, a Novell platinum partner that provides managed services built around the vendor's identity management software. Cook said Novell sent an e-mail to reassure all of its partners on Nov. 22, the day the sale was announced.

Recently two pieces of first class anti-free software diatribe hit the headlines. The first is Microsoft’s “please don’t use OpenOffice.org” video and the second is Steve Jobs’ anti-Android rant. Both are pretty shallow attempts at deflection and have been rightly called out as actually endorsing the subject of the attack as a valid opponent. In both cases it does seem to say that Microsoft and Jobs are concerned enough about OpenOffice.org and Android respectively that they need to tell the rest of us how bad they are. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.