Showing all newswire headlines

Xen Core Dom0 support features started to merge mainline Linux during 2.6.37 merge window. In particular, kernel may be loaded under Xen, daemon xend starts in Dom0. However, xen backend devices are not yet in the vanilla kernel. It’s impossible to create and start guests.

Heaven help us all (all us Americans, anyway) — it's election time again. That means we've once again descended into a morass of partisan invective, not to mention lies, damn lies, and (of course) statistics. Except that this election year it seems that everyone is behaving even worse than last time, when everyone acted even worse than the time before, when, well, do you sense a trend here?

The Paul Allen against the World case is moving forward. In fact, faster than the parties probably expected. There was a stipulation to extend time to complete initial disclosures from November 1 to two weeks past whenever the claims were clearer, either through an amended complaint or two weeks after infringement contentions are due. But the judge denied it. And he goes on to remind the parties that the date for filing the joint status report is November 8.

Toshiba’s NB250 netbook stands as a value version of the company’s critically acclaimed NB305, but can it still deliver? Russell Barnes finds out…

The LDAP command line can be a bit frightening at first, but once you get to know it it's not all that bad. In order to successfully manage your LDAP data from the command line you need to be familiar with three commands: ldapadd, ldapmodify, and ldapsearch. They may be, at first, a challenge to understand, but once you get the basics they are as simple as any other Linux command.

I’ve been interviewed for Roy & Tim’s show TechBytes. We mostly discussed the upcoming release of Fedora 14 (tomorrow) and a little bit about Gnome Shell vs Unity. It’s going to be an awesome show as it’s the first official episode other than the pilot (test) episode.

OpenBSD 4.7 came out this past summer, but OpenBSD 4.8 is now available for those interested in this BSD operating system that focuses on providing portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography. With OpenBSD 4.8 there is now ACPI-based suspend-and-resume support for most systems utilizing Intel or ATI graphics, but the suspend-and-resume support when utilizing NVIDIA graphics is still problematic. There's also other hardware support improvements, new tools, daemon improvements, and various other improvements to this free software operating system.

If you open nautilus and browse to the root filesystem, you’ll see something that looks like the image to the left. This is the default layout of the filesystem in Ubuntu 10.10, and is a peek into the ancient (by computer science standards) history and genealogy of Linux. The directories listed above are holdouts from one of the oldest standards, the Filesystem Hierarchal Standard, FHS. FHS is the system that defines what belongs where.

Video fanatics were thrilled when an iOS version of VLC made its way to the App Store recently. Finally, users could watch all manner of videos in a number of codecs from their iPhones or iPads, just like they do with the (ever-popular) VLC desktop clients. That may not last forever, though: a wrench has now been thrown into the mix by one of the many VLC code contributors, leading to a complex dispute over VLC's GNU Public License (GPL) and whether an app released through the App Store—or any mobile OS store, for that matter—violates that license.

Last week was the Ubuntu 11.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida of the United States where a variety of topics were discussed. Aside from the very surprising announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will use the Unity Desktop rather than GNOME's interface, most of the coverage on Phoronix was focused around the X.Org / graphics side of things, such as the xorg-server and Mesa to be used by Ubuntu 11.04 and the other discussions. Of course, other things were discussed too at this Ubuntu Developer Summit, and here's some of the other major happenings from the event.

Salix KDE edition is released. This is the very first official release of Salix KDE. this release includes the elegant KDE 4.4.3 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE centric software, all in the size of a CD-ROM sized image. Salix OS is a Slackware-based Linux distribution that is simple, fast, easy to use and compatible with Slackware Linux.

I like Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, a lot. But, let me warn you right now, that it's not a Linux for beginners. That's not to say that the newest version of Fedora, Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It's not. But, if you need a lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you'll be better off with Ubuntu.

Ever since Microsoft’s horrible 2009 fiscal year, which saw its first-ever revenue decline and layoffs of more than 5,000 employees, the company has been much more rigorous about shutting down failing products... With that in mind, here are the next 10 Microsoft products with targets on their backs.

[Another article confirming their 'end of life' cycle. - Scott]

Fresh off of an $8.5 million round of funding that was announced earlier today, Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert is feeling pretty good about the open source business model. The company that he co-founded in 2007 sells software and products that leverage Drupal, the open source project he started in 2000. Drupal has grown from Buytaert’s experiment with new technologies into a worldwide group project that includes thousands of programmers. The White House, Harvard and MTV all use Drupal to run their sites. Acquia is just one of many companies profiting from the volunteer project.

Usually I work only with the software, I’m not an expert of the hardware, but the excellent presentation by Riccardo Lemmi made me want to read a bit of material on the world of open hardware in general and Arduino in particular. Open source hardware ( OSHW ) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software (FOSS). Open source hardware is part of the open source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e.schematics, bill of materials and PCB layout data) in addition to the software that drives the hardware are all released with the FOSS approach .

Over the passed few months there has been a lot of chatter about former Sun Microsystems' projects. Many have been lamenting Oracle's decisions on how best to steward these projects, and forks have surfaced. I used many of the products in question when they were maintained by Sun, and I find myself looking into a future that seems better rather than worse.

Samsung and Google are planning to announce a "Nexus Two" heir to the Galaxy S smartphone on Nov. 8 based on Android 2.3, says industry reports. Another report says the Nexus Two will go on sale exclusively in the U.K. for the holiday season.

Those who remember a time before Ubuntu will undoubtedly also remember that GNOME, although probably the second most popular desktop manager, didn't hold too much share of the Linux desktop market. KDE was king, and GNOME was a distant second. Then Ubuntu appeared and not only climbed its way to the top of the distribution game, but brought GNOME with it. Polls over the last few years have shown its use increasing to the point that it is oftentimes equalling or out-ranking KDE. But what will happen to GNOME now that Ubuntu 11.04 is going to ship with Unity?

Following the fork in the open office suite development and the foundation of The Document Foundation, the dispute with main sponsor Oracle appears to have come to a head. More than 30 leading figures in the German-language section who have previously donated their time to the OpenOffice.org project have announced their resignations. They include almost all of the core figures in the German-language branch of the project, which now finds itself without leadership.

The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to finalized. And yes, these tests cover only a portion of the spec. But we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months.