Showing all newswire headlines

Oracle and IBM have unveiled a new collaboration which will allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) reference implementation. According to a joint statement issued by Oracle, the two partners will make the OpenJDK community the primary location to facilitate open source Java SE (Standard Edition) development. The new collaboration will also center on the Java language, JDK and Java Runtime Environment.

While some users of the Lenovo G555 laptop and its Atheros AR8132 Ethernet interface report no trouble with networking in OpenBSD using the alc driver (courtesy of FreeBSD) that made its debut in version 4.7 of the operating system, that wasn't the case for me. The wired Ethernet interface shows up in the dmesg as alc0 but doesn't "light up."

A trojan recently analysed by Webroot is said to rely on retrieving web page passwords from a browser's password storage, rather than logging a user's keyboard inputs. To make sure it will find all the interesting passwords in Firefox, the malware, called PWS-Nslog, makes some changes to jog the browser's memory. A few manipulations in a JavaScript file prompt Firefox to store log-in information automatically and without requesting the user's consent.

The new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) has just been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 10.04 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 10.10.

I found a computing treasure in a local Goodwill store three weeks ago: a book about System/360 assembly language. (Assembly language is the human-readable form of the concrete instructions carried out by the computer.) In earlier years, this would have been a wonderful surprise, but a previous find precludes that from happening... Last year, I found a special treat in the discount bin of a local grocery store: a movie, in Mongolian. In the rural Midwest USA, that is difficult to surpass that for surprise finds.

There are all kinds of fancy backup applications, from free to complicated and expensive. But it's still hard to beat the speed, simplicity, and flexibility of the old standbys.

Thank you Mr Chairman. We should like to thank you for the opportunity to take the floor during this very important meeting. The agenda includes several items of great interest to the Free Software Foundation Europe, and the Free Software or open source community at large. Free Software relies on licenses to give users the freedom to use, study, share and improve a program. These licences in turn rely on copyright. Free Software is, however, fundamentally incompatible with patents on software.

It is very clear to me that Linux, GNU, and free software are more popular than ever. It is also very clear that this makes a lot of people in high places very afraid. Patent lawsuits and propaganda seem to be the customary responses to Linux's ever increasing popularity. However, there is a great infrastructure that has been built that provides a powerful platform to combat the Linux-naysayers: Youtube. With billions (perhaps trillions) of video views, it is very clear that Youtube has become the dominant force for spreading information freely.

Oracle is no longer totally isolated on Java — IBM now stands with the giant, in a move that potentially stymies Google's Android. IBM said Monday that it's putting its efforts into the OpenJDK project, run by Oracle, and switching away from the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF's) Project Harmony on Java Standard Edition (Java SE).

It's not open source, of course, but the Freemium model offers a fully functioning free version of a service or software. Users who want additional features (or content) over and above the free version have to pay. For software vendors in particular it offers a way to scale quickly and build a user base.

The Medibuntu repository for Maverick (10.10) is ready to be used with your freshly updated/installed Ubuntu distribution. Some packages have been removed for this release: Googleearth, realplayer, gizmo5. These softwares can easily be installed following the documentation provided on their respective websites. They will still be maintained for earlier versions.

A fractal is a geometric shape or quantity which displays self-similarity and non-integer dimension. The property of self-similarity applies where a self-similar object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself. If you zoom in on any part of a fractal, you find the same amount of detail as before. It does not simplify.

Yesterday's Kubuntu 10.10 release features new KDE software for your phone. Working with KDE's Plasma Mobile team, Kubuntu have created Kubuntu Mobile, suitable for smart phones and available for i386 and ARM platforms. This is a technology preview of the upcoming Plasma Mobile workspace and is not ready for day to day use.

Just in time for the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) release, Stack Exchange has introduced a new website, called askubuntu.com, dedicated to Q&A for Ubuntu users, developers and partners. Here’s a look, and some thoughts on where the site fits into the Ubuntu ecosystem.

With all the hype surrounding mainstream Linux distributions like Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora, it’s easy to forget that there are quite a few other excellent distros out there. Case in point – Zenwalk. As Dmitri Popov discovers it’s a great way to give your old hardware a new lease of life…

Dalibor Topic was the one to give me this idea, though I’m not sure if he’d remember the tweet. He was, however, the one who pointed me at MarkMail‘s archive of open source list traffic, which I’d seen before, using a by domain constraint, which I hadn’t. The idea is simple: MarkMail maintains a searchable index of the mailing lists for a number of open source projects (these, specifically). As a means of demonstrating the value of its MarkLogic Server, it parses the individual messages into XML and renders them queryable according to specific dimensions.

James Michael Dupont (Mike) is a software developer that is doing a lot to promote Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in Kosovo and other Balkan countries. This year, Mike invited a first class team to spend a couple of weeks in the southern Balkans, to explain why and how FOSS can play a great role in the social and economic development of those countries.

In what has become an unfortunate tradition for the past few releases, prior to the release of Ubuntu 10.10, AMD provided Canonical with a pre-release of their latest proprietary Catalyst driver at the time. They have done this to fix some major bugs, but primarily to provide a working ATI/AMD proprietary graphics driver that will run against their latest Ubuntu Linux release as usually their latest public releases at the time do not support Ubuntu's kernel and/or X.Org Server. With Maverick Meerkat, which was released yesterday, there is a pre-release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver, which will not be released to the general public until later in October.

On most Linux setups, MySQL comes as a readymade installation package, making it easy to get started. It is, however, a little more complicated to run multiple instances in parallel, often a setup handy for development. This is because in contrast to Windows, MySQL is usually not installed in a self-contained directory, but most Linux distribution packages spread it across the appropriate system folders for programs, configuration files, and so on.

Today is 10/11/10 on the US calendar, mm/dd/yy. Happy binary day! Today is binary day in the US, 10/11/10. European calendars put the day first, 11/10/10, which is still binary. Yesterday was binary day too, 10/10/10. It might seem like cheating a little bit to use a two-digit year, but I'll worry about Y3k later.