Showing all newswire headlines

strace is a useful little utility – installed by default on most Linux systems – which allows you to find out what a program is doing under the hood by tracing the system calls it's making. strace is a great basic debugging tool; but it's also fascinating to use even when you're not tracing a problem. It can teach you a lot about how a Linux program works.

First off, don't panic. We don't know for absolute sure that somewhere in the $2.2 billion acquisition of Novell by Attachmate and the “concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash” that those unidentified IP holding were, in fact, Novell's ownership of UNIX.

This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more.

Attachmate Corp., an investment group including Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo, agreed to buy software maker Novell Inc. for about $2.2 billion in cash. Novell investors will get $6.10 a share, Attachmate said in a statement today. That’s 9.1 percent more than Novell’s closing price on Nov. 19. Novell will also sell some intellectual- property assets to a group technology companies led by Microsoft Corp. for $450 million.

In the first article in this series, we commenced our historical search for design patterns in Linux and Unix by illuminating the "Full exploitation" pattern which provides a significant contribution to the strength of Unix. In this second part we will look at the first of three patterns which characterize some design decisions that didn't work out so well.

Novell, Inc., the leader in intelligent workload management, today announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Attachmate Corporation would acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion. Attachmate Corporation is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash, which cash payment is reflected in the merger consideration to be paid by Attachmate Corporation.

Keyword filters block unwanted web pages on the basis of potentially fallen words found in them. However, to be sure that a page is indeed offensive, keyword filters nowadays are not designed to block sites on the basis of just about any potentially offensive word. Instead they measure the number of potentially offensive phrases and often the number of times they occur so as to allow a limited number of occurrences in pages such as those on anatomy, forms requiring gender information, crime reports, statistical reports, administrative information, art etc. The leading keyword blockers like Dansguardian which is extremely popular on Linux or SafeSquid which is popular on Linux and Windows use this method known as a weighed keyword score.

LXer Feature: 22-Nov-2010

In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..

Following Thanksgiving is Black Friday, which is followed by Small Business Saturday, and then comes Cyber Monday, the biggest day for online retailers. Just as you have pick pockets and shoplifters out in force starting on Black Friday, the hackers and spammers will be out in force on the Internet, preying on your ambition to find the best deals online. We are going to go over a few things you, as e-consumers, should be aware of; and if you are one of the millions of people who have an e-commerce web site, we have a few tips for you as well.

After reading the Linux 2.6.37-rc3 release announcement on the Linux kernel mailing list, another interesting thread was found and it's about getting hardware vendors to do their initial hardware bring-up under Linux prior to any Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X support. A number of reasons are provided why hardware vendors should support their hardware first under Linux and also why they should foster open-source drivers along with its challenges.

A new and improved Debian installer awaits for Debian 6.0, but is it better than what's gone before? We take a tour of Squeeze's installer beta and find out.

Just read an over at zdnet which basically says that Android is a failure for Google because it is open and carriers/OEMs are stripping off google search from it and putting replacements like baidu/Bing. This, for sure, is not the case because Google didn't create android so that it can be the sole owner of it, but something else.

Greetings, this is an updated Install, Setup, and Configuration guide for Sick Beard on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This guide should also be easily adapted to other GNU/Linux distributions like Linux Mint 9, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Lubuntu and somewhat close for Debian Squeeze, Sidux, and any other Debian (and even Gnome) based distos. This guide will be actively maintained and updated throughout the two year life of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release.

LXer Feature: 21-Nov-2010

The big stories this past week included an update on how far away Chrome OS is, a Ubuntu vs.Fedora comparison, 5 unusual games for Linux and a 200 line kernel patch that makes your desktop snappy. Enjoy!

The Ubuntu Font Family is the first time that a libre typeface has been designed professionally and explicitly with the intent of developing a public and long-term community-based development process. When developing an open project, it is generally necessary to have firm foundations: a font needs to maintain harmony within itself even across many type designers and writing systems.-

While the Mesa software stack has made some steps towards supporting OpenGL 3.x, this free software library used by open-source graphics drivers is still a ways from supporting this industry graphics API thats years old and has already been surpassed by OpenGL 4.x. There hasn't been too much major progress lately on GL3 support, but some think it could be achieved next year. When there is OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa, it will be released as Mesa 8.0. Regardless, the OpenGL 3 status document for Mesa has been updated.

In previous Ubuntu versions, there was a Google Earth .deb package available in the Medibuntu repository; unfortunately there is no such package for Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). While it is possible to install the Google Earth package for Ubuntu 10.04 on Ubuntu 10.10, there is another way of installing Google Earth on Ubuntu 10.10. The method described in this tutorial will create a Google Earth .deb package for Ubuntu 10.10 from which Google Earth can be installed.

While the Nouveau driver may not yet have a stable Gallium3D or DDX driver release nor does it have capabilities like stabilized power management or OpenGL 3.x, if you want to overclock your NVIDIA graphics card with this open-source driver, you can now do so today. Martin Peres who has been working on Nouveau power management support and timing management, has produced a patch to support custom clock manipulation of the NVIDIA graphics card's core clock, memory clock, and shader clock speeds. The voltages can also be manipulated too whether you are manually overclocking or underclocking your GPU with this Linux kernel DRM driver.

Today, I opened up a terminal, issued the su command, and typed in my root password on my Fedora 14 laptop. I then issued the "yum update" command to install all of the latest Fedora 14 updates. I am running Fedora 14 on a 64-bit Toshiba Satellite L675 laptop.

The weekend before Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, Nokia invited thirteen members of the KDE community to get together in their offices in that same city for a developer sprint. The topic was Ovi and KDE, specifically how they can work together to widen adoption for both communities, both from a software development perspective and from a purely collaborative effort perspective. The developers were also invited to the main Qt Developer Days (DevDays) event too.