Showing all newswire headlines

About half a year after Google announced its WebM video codec at Google I/O, Chromium has made some interesting announcements on how the open-source browser project plans to support open-source video.

I did a full review earlier of Linux Mint Debian Edition and loved it. Now there’s an update to it and I couldn’t resist doing a quick look. If you aren’t familiar with the Debian version of Linux Mint, you’re in for a real treat. LMDE has quickly become my favorite Linux distribution. It’s a great blend of Debian and Linux Mint.

On November 30, 2010, the German section of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) launched Save As WWF, Save a Tree, a “green” (because not printable) file format. 6 weeks later, I discovered that “Save As WWF” continues to refuse critiques and support from the Free Software Community and also got plenty of other attacks for being anti-enviroment, from a completely different angle.

I really like this book. It fits my needs perfectly. Let me explain. I use Subversion in my day job as a technical writer for a software company. I use Ubuntu (9.10 Karmic Koala) and connect to the subversion repository via the shell. This is pretty much how the book was written, so all of the commands and tasks really fit my personal situation. Not only that, but the level of complexity (or lack thereof, if you're a total subversion guru) is right at my level.

Recently, there has been some discussion about a 1000 core processor or as I like to call them many-core processors. Indeed, a research group has proclaimed they have created a 1000 core processor using an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Such discussions and research stunts are good as they generate ideas, discussions and set milestones, or in this case Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). The reality of a 1000 core processor, however, is going to take a huge fundamental (and probably painful) change in the way computing is done.

If you're looking to setup video surveillance, Linux can help! ZoneMinder is the most popular open source video surveillance server. It runs on any Linux distribution and supports USB and network cameras. Remote pan/tilt/zoom controls are even supported. It features a web-based GUI and mobile phone access for configuring, viewing, and replaying video feeds. It supports multiple users and user access levels, along with several different languages.

The price of hardware has reached a point where extra drives (or single, massive drives) is not an issue for desktop users. But when you have multiple users using a single machine, keeping their usage down is imperative. The last thing you want is to find yourself with a full partition. One way to guard against this is to enable per-user quotas.

For Linux 2.6.38, the kernel developers have integrated the much-discussed patch which considerably improves the response time of Linux desktops in certain situations. The AMD developers have extended their open source graphics drivers to support various Radeon HD 6000 graphics chips. A discussion was sparked by the tricky situation surrounding the graphics drivers for Intel's new processors.

There are two kinds of Linux users in the world – those who use Gnome and those who dislike KDE. You can't blame them – to call KDE releases so far a disaster would be something of an understatement – but the tide has now turned.Over 16,000 bug fixes and 1,700 new features later, the KDE developer unveiled KDE 4.5. The release has started popping up in many Linux distros, and it looks and feels stunning.

If you ask some Linux purists whether they use Linux in conjunction with other operating systems, lots of them will say no. At the same time, many of these same users will happily report that they use a broad, diversified set of applications. Why is diversity in applications embraced by almost everyone, while diversity in operating system usage isn't so common?

Few weeks ago we wrote about apt-fast, a little shellscript that increases the speed of apt-get by many times. Thanks to sourceslist Team , apt-fast got an interface named 1blink-updater to simply install apt-fast, to integrate it with Synaptic and to perform updates.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.0 on a headless Fedora 14 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

4Pane is a multi-pane, detailed-list file manager for Linux. It is designed to be fully-featured without bloat,and aims for speed rather than visual effects. In addition to standard file manager things, it offers multiple undo and redo of most operations (including deletions), archive management including ‘virtual browsing’ inside archives, multiple renaming/duplication of files, a terminal emulator and user-defined tools.

GIMP is perhaps one of the most well known imaging apps available in Libre software. Its virtues are endorsed by many in the Libre software community. In a practical sense however, within North American art and design circles, its uptake is effectively zero. There are reasons behind this, although any attempts to tackle the issues have a tendency to erupt into nothing more than hyperbole and animosity, leaving behind the core issues at hand. This is an attempt to outline three key reasons why some graphic artists and designers perceive GIMP as inadequate when it comes to its suitability in their imaging pipelines.

Thanks for the link Herschel

The GTVHacker dev team has won a cash bounty for being the first to successfully root and enable third-party application support on a Google TV device before Google – Google will reportedly be bringing support for Android applications to the platform some time later this year. According to developer Howard Harte, who originally announced the bounty at the end of November last year, the GTVHacker team used a hardware hack, adding serial console support to the UART1 header on the Logitech Revue, to enable root and install third-party apps on Google TV.

The XBMC project released version 10.0 of its integrated media center software just before the holidays, and if you haven't test-driven it in a while, do yourself a favor and grab the new build now. 10.0 is a substantial improvement in media playback capabilities, including hardware video acceleration, and there is a long list of other improvements and new features — but one in particular stands out: the ability to add and remove plugins on the fly, from within the GUI. It's as close as I've seen to a point-and-click "plays anything" open source media center solution.

This past weekend I unsubscribed from my last opensolaris mailing list. While reflecting on where technology is heading, I had to take a few minutes to reflect on where things were just a few years back. I remember vividly the day that the opensolaris.org website came online. After the announcement came out, I spent 24 straight hours signing up for mailing lists, reading documentation and reviewing the source code for a number of utilities. This had been all too easy with Linux, since all of the code and documentation was available in the public domain. But when the Solaris source came online, I felt like a 4-year old in a HUGE candy store.

SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Beta 1 was released last week, but again is plagued by start problems for many people. All during this SimplyMEPIS 11 development cycle boot problems have stopped many users from testing. Unfortunately, and probably the root of problem, is that this occurs for only some of the users with little hardware in common. To compound the issue, the boot issues haven't been caused by the same reason to the same people each release either. With so much variation, it can be very difficult to nail down corrections.

It's official: the iOS version of VLC has been yanked from the App Store. Though Apple didn't offer any reasons for its removal, the media player is believed to have been pulled thanks to a licensing dispute that started more than two months ago.

Wireless chipset maker Broadcom joined the Linux Foundation, suggesting that it will release more open source drivers for Linux. Over the last month, Timesys, Protecode, and Mentor Graphics have also joined the nonprofit Linux advocacy organization.