Showing all newswire headlines

With the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 a few weeks back we decided to run some benchmarks of this operating system against PC-BSD 8.1, OpenSolaris b134, and Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. For those unfamiliar with Nexenta Core Platform, it is an operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a Linux user-land provided by the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron" package repository, complete with apt-get support for easy package installation.

Vintage style is sometimes desired to achieve a certain mood and aesthetic for a photograph. In this Gimp tutorial I’ll show you how to make your photographs Vintage in a few short easy steps.

Mozilla has reportedly stopped issuing security updates for its open source Firefox web browser as it looks into a bug that is causing some users' systems to crash. According to InfoWorld, the non-profit organisation behind the development of Firefox is no longer alerting users of older versions to upgrade to the latest releases – typically users automatically receive an update notification within 24-48 hours of the release being available.

Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth has defended Canonical's lack of participation in GNOME against accusations of riding on the coattails of the project's number-one maintainer, Red Hat. After giving it some thought, Shuttleworth concluded that open-source is bigger than any single project and that Canonical's mission is adding new tools and components to the ecosystem at large, rather than focusing on aspects that already work.

The Mozilla Project announced the release of a new JavaScript benchmark that focuses on real world applications and forward-looking applications. Called Kraken, the benchmark addresses the elements of the Web that people often complain about for being too slow.

It is not quite ready for primetime, but with the announcement of OpenIndiana, a so-called spork of Oracle's OpenSolaris Unix distribution, the server world is getting a familiar, re-opened, and community-developed operating system aimed specifically at data center workloads.

A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is. What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?

No, I do not want to talk of Linux MINT, but as is practically possible to apply some tricks to make our desktop a bit more nature oriented. However let me say that thanks to your choice of Linux operating system you are already on the philosophical choice closer to nature..

Marina is a senior software engineer at Red Hat and has been involved in free software development for quite some time. She shares with us her opinions about the importance of software freedom and how to get more women involved in the free software community.

While Kristian Høgsberg is now likely on his way to Toulouse, France for the 2010 X Developers' Summit, over the past day he has been working on some minor changes to the Wayland Display Server that he has now been working on for a while to leverage the latest Linux graphics technologies like kernel mode-setting and is something we initially reported on back in 2008 when it began.

We all know that there are passionate partisans of the GNOME and KDE versions of Linux Mint; yet, oddly, you rarely hear about people raving about the Xfce version. That’s a shame, because sometimes less is truly more. Linux Mint 9 Xfce has a lot to offer to those who have limited hardware, or who simply prefer not to deal with the eye-candy bloat of GNOME or KDE.

It's been a while since I last reviewed a shooter game for Linux, and one of them was World of Padman (reviewed here), which was a cartoon-like, funny first-person shooter. Well, the same goes for Warsow, the game I'm going to talk about in this article. Every graphical aspect of Warsow indicates we're dealing with a cartoon-like universe, from the character models to weapons and maps.

If Debian means one thing, it’s functionality. You typically don’t go to Debian for cutting-edge features or fancy bells and whistles, but if you’re after an extremely versatile, stable, and dependable Linux, it can’t be beat. One of Debian’s newer offerings is the ability to create a custom Live CD directly from their website. You choose your options, they generate the image. Like all things Debian, it’s not flashy, you’ll get no AJAX animations or jQuery effects, just a functional, flexible, and powerful tool, and here’s how to use it.

If you are long time Ubuntu user, then just may be you are also a compiz inspired linux convert, like me. Even now, I don't use a lot a compiz animations in my desktop, but I can't think of a Gnome desktop without Compiz. They are blended together so well. Compiz is nearing another major release and a lot of changes are coming.

The Linux-based Android mobile platform is exploding, with thousands of tasty apps to choose from. Juliet Kemp shares a few of her favorites, from secure remote administration to eBooks to file managers and more. The huge number of apps available for Android is both a joy and something of a trial. Finding an app that does the thing you want can be something of a hit-and-miss experience. Here's a roundup of a few of the most useful ones.

Palm webOS design VP Peter Skillman has left the troubled company to head the MeeGo user-experience at Nokia. Skillman joins Matias Duarte, the UI designer for webOS, as the second senior ranking webOS employee to leave for another mobile OS.

Linux Mint, long known as a multimedia-ready spin on Ubuntu, has gone deeper and released a Mint distro based not on Ubuntu but on Debian Testing, and my first impressions running the system from the live DVD is that this is a game-changer in the Linux world.

Blender is a free open source 3D modelling and graphics software widely used for making animated movies. Here is a nice collection of 8 short films and animations made using Blender which I think will give you an idea on Blender's capabilities. Enjoy the ride.

Open source Dropbox alternative releases early beta. Like using Dropbox but looking for a good open source alternative? The good news is that there is a new online storage sharing application heading your way and it's completely open source.

Forget Perl’s claims, Emacs really is the Swiss Army chainsaw of the *NIX world. Join Richard Smedley on the first of a three-part series revealing how you can do most of your day-to-day tasks without leaving Emacs – even if programming is a small or non-existent part of your typical day…