Showing all newswire headlines

Most Linux users are familiar with cron, which is used to schedule tasks to run at a given time. However, most people don't use cron except to setup system tasks, because it's not the most friendly program to use. Enter gnome-schedule, an easy way to schedule tasks using a GUI. This tutorial will show you how to schedule tasks using the Gnome Scheduler, a graphical front-end for cron.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has released the new Linux 2.6.35 kernel, providing users of the open source operating system with new networking capabilities and performance enhancements, along with filesystem improvements.

In recent months LinuxLinks Towers has been consumed with playing games. In fact, some might contend that game playing has become so excessive that real life has been neglected to a degree. We have seen team challenges, leaderboards, and even the odd wager. Healthy competition to say the least!

In which the FBI gives chase, our hero escapes, The End draws Near

The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

The co-creator of DTrace has seemingly erased all memory of Larry Ellison’s Oracle from his mind, after quitting Sun Microsystems for an engineering veep role at Joyent last week. Bryan Cantrill is the latest in a long list of Sun men to quit the firm, following its takeover by Oracle earlier this year. His exit came just a week after Greg Lavender, the lead developer in charge of the Solaris operating system at Oracle, left the company. Worse still, the OpenSolaris Governing Board, which is supposed to steer the open source version of Solaris, is mulling disbanding because Oracle has had zero contact with the board for the past six months.

Worldwide smartphone analysts Canalys announced that Android deployments had increased by 886 percent in Q2 2010 compared to Q2 2009. The report also showed that Nokia remained at the top of the OEM heap, selling 24 million smartphones in Q1 2010 alone.

Traditionally at Phoronix we have stayed away from publishing benchmarks of Gentoo and similar source-based distributions for the lack of them having a standard or "stock" configuration for which one can easily replicate our tested software stack due to all of the different variables that come into play so the value of these benchmarks are much less compared to those distributions providing pre-compiled binaries for a standardized set of packages. However, satisfying a number of requests, we are publishing such benchmarks today. Rather than using Gentoo itself for benchmarking, we are using Calculate Linux Desktop, which is Gentoo-based while providing a very nice "out of the box" experience, i686 and x86_64 binaries, and overall is a polished and user-friendly Gentoo experience.

In the months since it completed its takeover of Sun Microsystems, Oracle has remained painfully silent over its plans for much of Sun’s treasure trove of open source assets. In the meantime, there are an increasing number of companies stepping up to shepherd Oracle’s lost sheep…

LXer Feature: 02-Aug-2010

A roundup of the big stories hitting our newswire from the previous week.

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 2.6.35 kernel, adding improvements to multicore support, network scalability, memory management, power management, and Btrfs file-system I/O. Meanwhile, we take a peek at Linux 2.6.36, and note Linux Journal's history of the Linux kernel, Slackware, Debian, and some 450 other distros.

As you may know, the Linux and open source community provides a wealth of free operating systems (OSs), called distributions, and software applications. Some are desktop distributions for general-use in the office. However, there are many distributions designed for particular uses. Today, we'll review 4 different desktop distributions specifically designed for educational and academic use.

After finally getting the bold version last week, the Ubuntu font which will be default in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat is finally available for (almost) everyone. Why almost? Here is an email from the Kubuntu-users mailing list: Members of the ~kubuntu-users team on launchpad can now test out the Ubuntu Font which is currently in beta testing. Anyone can join this team.

A census of open source developers has provided a sharp reminder of the necessity of commercially viable open source companies, and also how important it is that commercially viable open source companies employ good people to write open source. This probably isn't news to Reg readers, for whom it might be bleeding obvious - perhaps even tautological. But out in the worlds of academia and policy wonkery, the myth that F/OSS development is some kind of happy, Kumbaya potlatch still persists.

Firebird history after 10 years and the Future .Words from Philippe Makowski, President of Firebird Foundation

If you have more than a handful of servers, maintaining them by hand becomes a tedious task. Of course, you can automate this with shell scripts, but this is an ad hoc solution. Puppet can help you to reach a more consistent way of managing your servers. Here's how…

Checkinstall is a utility that builds a .deb, .rpm or Slackware package from a third party source code tarball. This allows you to introduce such third party software using the standard package management features of your distribution. In contrast, the conventional instructions for installing such software packages puts your package manager out of sync with the actual collection of software installed on your Linux box.

We all know that Android does not allow the camera LED to be controlled directly from apps and hence, you cannot use the camera LED as a Torch or Flashlight unless you are rooted. There are many flashlight apps on the Android Market Place but none of them will work for you if you don’t have a rooted phone. BUT this changed recently

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.6 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs and includes many new features.

One Laptop Per Child wants to join forces to help develop the Indian government's planned US$35 tablet. In a congratulatory note to the government, OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte said the world needs the $35 tablet, and he offered the country full access to OLPC hardware and software technology.