Showing all newswire headlines

I concede that I am a big fan of Elementary Project and the goodies it brought to the Linux desktop eco system. I also accept the fact that, reviewing a developer only preview of an application and calling it "not ready yet" is kind of self defeating. But the kind of expectations a project like Elementary OS carries around makes it vulnerable to close scrutinisation at every level. Consider this as one such *very* early Elementary OS review.

Google's Linux-based Chrome OS operating system should be with us by now. But at that point last December when we were led to believe our netbooking futures were about to be redefined, Google postponed our date with destiny and asked us to try again in another six months. It seemed the road ahead wasn't quite as clear as Google wanted it to be, and six months is presumably enough time for the masters at Menlo Park to fine-tune their revolution and get things back on track.

While the Linux 2.6.38 kernel isn't even released yet, it's likely to be released in the next day or two. After that and a few days of downtime, the merge window for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel will be opened. What features can one expect for the open-source Linux graphics support? As is usual these days, there's lots of expected changes.

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has announced that it will hold its first ever summit on open source software development later this month. According to NASA, the Open Source Summit will bring together engineers, policy makers and open source community members to talk about "the challenges within the existing open source policy framework and propose modifications to facilitate NASA's development, release and use of software". The event will take place on the 29 and 30 March at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Minty Freshness is a new theme created by Skies Of Azel, the Orta theme developer, especially designed for Linux Mint Debian Edition (the theme could become the default LMDE theme).

"promoting e-voting just because it can be done with Free Software continues to not make sense. If the software running the system were open it would still not solve any of the problems listed above, or give citizens any meaningful advantage. In the real world, having the source code of a voting machine would change nothing at all at the voting booth"

Xilinx recently released version 13.1 of their ISE Webpack toolkit. If you haven't used ISE, its the tool that lets you build logic descriptions for FPGAs using schematics, Verilog, or VHDL. You can simulate your design or build bitstreams suitable for use with most of the Xilinx FPGA or CPLD products. I applaud Xilinx for making a Linux version available although I have often noted quirks on the Linux side that seem pretty fundamental.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 9, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Panasonic is joining the organization as a Gold member.

Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are the most influential distributions that use the Red Hat Package Manager. Although their influence lags behind that of Debian and Ubuntu, it is still strong enough that Fedora remains consistently in the top three most downloaded distributions on Distrowatch, and is the ultimate source of 50 (15%) of the 323 active distributions listed.

Bodhi has released 0.1.7, a further development release of the Bodhi Enlightenment desktop Linux distribution. As I've mentioned before, Bodhi is focusing on providing usability with a minimal footprint.

By using the Enlightenment graphics environment, Bodhi creates highly configurable, and aesthetically pleasing, visual effects without loading the system down with bloat.

As Bodhi is a tributary of Ubuntu, and so it's no surprise that Bodhi works as a liveCD and not just an install disk. As an old Debian hack myself, I'm so used to install disks doing nothing but installing that it's still a bit of a pleasant surprise.

Fusion Linux 14 'Thorium' is officially out. This release has been in the making for the last 5 months. Work on this release started even before Fedora 14 got released, which is the base for Fusion Linux 14. We had a lot of features, desktop components and overall polish to tie together into one coherent whole before making this release.

View the Fusion 14 Screenshot Tour

Even as Microsoft extols its cloud credentials, it fiercely protects its desktop business, and with that approach risks creating confusion about its priorities in the marketplace.

Recently I decided I needed a new guitar amplifier for my studio. Its sole employment would be studio work, so I looked for a small lightweight amp with a good sound, high-quality digital effects, and amplifier/cabinet modeling. Of course I'm always on the look-out for hardware that can be edited from a computer running Linux, and did I mention that a low cost would be nice ? Well, thanks to a timely tip from an on-line friend I discovered that Fender manufactures an amplifier that meets - and exceeds - my expectations. Read on to learn how a Fender Mustang amplifier found a home here at Studio Dave.

NASA is playing host to the Open Source community by hosting a Summit on March 29thand 30th at its Mount View, Ames Research Center in California. The Summit is part of NASAs contact program between its core team of development engineers and with leading names in the open source community.

The first of the bashshell.net "5 Days of find" series, this tutorial breaks down the basics. With the Linux find utility, you can perform powerful searches on just about any criterion you can think of, and then, from the same command-line entry, invoke another utility to do whatever you need to do with the results.

Following bellow is attempt to test mentioned patch to resolve problem with loading KVM with “-vga qxl” by /usr/bin/qemu-kvm (v. 0.14) on Fedora 14 ( Libvirt Preview Environment ) . View : http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/84704/. Test was successful for SL6,F14,W2K3,W7 KVMs (without QXL driver installed) and failed on Ubuntu 10.10 KVM no matter of presence or absence of QXL driver.

I was sad to hear that Sir Maurice Wilkes passed away in November. Sadder still to see that it didn't make nearly the news splash that some other early computer pioneer deaths have made.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into PureFTPd for virus scanning on an OpenSUSE 11.3 system. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through PureFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

Classic top down arcade shooter Steel Storm is all geared up for release of Steel Storm Episode 2 'Burning Retribution'. The game is available to pre-order and users will get access to beta build as a bonus. Steel Storm Episode 1, released in October last year, is highly popular among Linux gamers because of its addictive gameplay and rich 3D cel-shaded graphics. Steel Storm Episode 1 made into the Top 100 indie games for the year 2010 in a contest announced by IndieDB. The game is also available on Desura.

openSUSE 11.4 brings a host of KDE and GNOME updates, the first release of OpenOffice fork LibreOffice, and numerous speed improvements. Perhaps the biggest news, though, is what's not included. That would be GNOME 3.0. Unfortunately for openSUSE fans, the distro's release schedule just didn't quite mesh with GNOME's, so GNOME 3.0 will have to wait for openSUSE 11.5, due at the end of the year. Perhaps another reason for GNOME 3's absence is that KDE is the default openSUSE desktop. Prior to the release of openSUSE 11.3 last year, the openSUSE project announced it would shift its default desktop to KDE. While the distro is still ultimately desktop agnostic - the DVD installer packages both KDE and GNOME - the project is clearly putting the emphasis on keeping up with KDE ahead of GNOME.