Showing all newswire headlines

The Free Software Foundation has announced the initial criteria of the "Respects Your Freedom" hardware endorsement programme. Under the programme, the FSF will endorse products that comply with its conditions, which include; using only free software in all parts of the product, ensuring the software can be built using only free software tools and allowing user installation of modified software. The non-profit organisation is seeking to get feedback on these criteria and hopes to use the process to raise the interest of hardware manufacturers.

Whether you are a command line newbie or a proficient terminal user, you'll probably appreciate CLI Companion. This nifty little tool couples the terminal with a database of frequently-used commands.

Itching to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10? Not so fast! Look before you leap, you may want to stick with Ubuntu 10.04, especially if you’re a netbook user.

During OpenOffice.org's tenth anniversary, Oracle announced it will participate in ODF Plugfest, one of the conferences aimed at furthering the Open Document Format interoperability, held October 14 - 15 in Brussels . Oracle also stated they would continue developing, improving, and releasing OpenOffice.org as open source software.

New open source projects launch all the time and there’s so many great ones out there it’s hard to find the diamonds in the rough. Here are 10 promising young FOSS projects to keep an eye on as their development grows. Download or use them in the meantime as they develop, they are awesome!

Like it or hate you have to admit: Ubuntu has done wonders for the Linux desktop. Through Canonical's works, community development, and the various spin offs such as Linux Mint, PinguyOS, Zorin, and many others there is no arguing that Ubuntu based systems are the most popular choice for the Linux desktop operating system. Ubuntu has almost become synonymous, or at the very least as popular, as Linux in general.

Urban Terror is one of the most popular Linux multi-player first person shooter (FPS) game played by hundreds of players daily. The cross-platform game that runs on Windows and Mac as well comes with many multiplayer game modes like team survivor, team deathmatch, capture the flag, capture and hold etc.

While we already know that by the time KDE Software Compilation 4.7 rolls around it may optionally support OpenGL 3.0 within the KWin compositing manager, but with time KDE's Plasma may begin using more OpenGL too. Aaron Seigo has written a lengthy blog post about what he hopes to achieve with Plasma and its library going a few releases out into the future. This includes a rather extensive rework of Plasma and its drawing, which would include the use of more OpenGL to allow for greater hardware acceleration.

Every now and then, when surfing the blogosphere, I come across waves after waves of postings stating how “Linux needs to rely less on the CLI” or “Windows is perfect for basic users because everything can be done with the GUI”…blah, blah, blah. In fact it was this article that prompted this posting. It gets tiring reading the same things over and over again, but it hasn’t stopped me from adding my 2 cents.

This week's entry looks at a unique new audio editor, some important updates, and a very cool programming environment for graphics (and much more). As always, some tasty treats are cooking in the Linux audio kitchen.

I didn't want to do it, but I had to move from the 2.6.33 kernel to 2.6.34 to make both sound and video behave properly in Fedora 13 on my Lenovo G555 laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD graphics and Conexant 5069 sound.

Over the last few years, it has become clear that one of the most pressing scalability problems faced by Linux is being driven by solid-state storage devices (SSDs). The rapid increase in performance offered by these devices cannot help but reveal any bottlenecks in the Linux filesystem and block layers. What has been less clear, at times, is what we are going to do about this problem. In his LinuxCon Japan talk, block maintainer Jens Axboe described some of the work that has been done to improve block layer scalability and offered a view of where things might go in the future.

With the arrival of Ubuntu 10.10, the list of reasons to try Linux for your business just got a little longer. The free and open source operating system is now more user-friendly than it's ever been before while still offering the many security and other advantages it has over its competitors. If you're among the legions of new Linux users out there, congratulations on making a smart move! Now that you're on your way to a lifetime of freedom from high costs, vendor lock-in, constant malware attacks, and the many other disadvantages associated with Windows and Mac OS X, you should be aware of some of the classic mistakes Linux newcomers sometimes make.

Palm’s WebOS (a Linux variant) based phones have been out for a while but I haven’t had the need to consider them until recently (in the form of my Treo 650 broken down).

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has confirmed Linux users will finally have access to its AUSkey authentication software within two months, following compatibility complaints in May when the service was launched for Windows and Mac OS X only.

Now if I recall not to long ago a Microsoft representative was quoted saying "We love open source". Apparently they realize that many other people love open source as well, so many in fact that it is cutting into their bottom line - thus the offensive attack video you can see above.

Ubuntu 10.10, also known as the Maverick Meerkat, arrived on October 10th, 2010 and is the twelfth release of the Ubuntu OS.

But, there is more to this story. Reputed information security investigative journalist Brian Krebs reports that one of the two Microsoft IP addresses was involved in a denial of service attack against his website on September 23. According to him, the owner of his Web hosting provider, who is also a co-founder of the SURBL (Spam URL Blocklist) project, notified Microsoft about the possible compromise of its systems, hours after the attack. It's not very clear why Microsoft failed to properly investigate the report at the time and allowed the abuse to continue on its network for another three weeks. The websites promoted a rogue online pharmacy known as "Canadian Health&Care Mall," which is believed to be associated with a spam affiliate program called Bulker.biz. One thing the Bulker.biz gang is known for, is compromising poorly configured Linux or UNIX-like systems and using in their operations. By routing traffic through these servers, which use the IP addresses of well known organizations and companies, the spammers can evade various blocklists. This connection points to a high likelihood that Microsoft's compromised network hardware devices were running some Linux flavor.

The official OpenSUSE 11.4 release is due out in March 2011 and there’s at least one very good reason to anticipate its arrival with excitement. Ken Hess explains all…

The new Kubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) has just been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Kubuntu 10.04 desktop installation to Kubuntu 10.10.