Showing all newswire headlines

Android has continued to gain smartphone OS market share this spring, gaining four percentage points from February through May to take 13 percent of the market, says ComScore. Meanwhile, a recent Pew report shows that 40 percent of Americans are now using mobile phone Internet services, up from 32 percent in 2009.

A flaw in the module pam_motd (message of the day), which displays the daily motto and other information after login (to the shell), can be exploited under Ubuntu to expand access rights. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access. Ubuntu has already provided a patch for the flaw. Operators of multi-users systems should install it as soon as possible because directions are already in circulation via Twitter on how to exploit the flaw to get access rights to the password file /etc/shadow. The file can then not only be read, but changed.

Although FAT32 or FAT16 are very old file systems, which reflects on their poor performance in comparison with other file system alternatives they are still widely used by many electronic devices. Usually, these devices include USB stick's, digital cameras , camcorders and etc. Chances are that you own and store personal data on a device with FAT flesystem is very high as is a likelihood of an accidental deletion of your important data. In this article we will use testdisk utility to undelete files from FAT file system.

The days of cowboy coding are long gone at most organizations, replaced by a renewed interest in generating quality software. Continuous integration (CI) testing is a vital component in the practice of agile programming techniques that lead to high-quality software. Learn the theory and practice of CI testing by exploring Buildbot, an open source CI system written in Python.

This two-day introduction to Linux broadens attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. They get familiar with the architecture and various components of the operating system, learn both graphical and command line tools, and learn to do basic networking. This class is scheduled for July 20th - 21st, 2010.

Firefox has been taking heat from Google Chrome over speed for some time, but the world's most popular open source browser is getting ready for a comeback. Can Firefox 4.0 woo back some of the early adopters who've embraced Chrome? It looks like it will have a very good shot.

Twitter does not generally allow you to have a discussion. At least not me, who can barely say anything in less than a 1000 words, but here is a recent thread. The opinion about the software not being feature rich is a valid issue and being too complicated is something that I too find with writing software in general. But that the author feels it is less feature rich because it is Open Source, or more correctly, because it is free is something that bothers me.

If you are creating a custom Dialog for Android, and following the Android Developers’ Creating Dialogs tutorial, then most likely you would have faced a Force Close with an exception showing up in logcat. I did too. Although I figured it out quickly, it might not be easy to find out for many, so posting the solution for reference

Android's share of the smartphone OS market went up between February and May of this year while everyone else took a hit, according to the latest data from comScore. The analytics firm released its three-month MobiLens report Thursday, observing that Android's share of smartphone subscribers had gone up a full four percentage points in the US, though it still remains fourth on the list after RIM, Apple, and Microsoft.

In Part 1 we learned how to safely install CHDK on a Canon point-and-shoot camera to get high-end features. Today we learn how to use some of those features like movie zoom, RAW mode, histograms, and much more.

Power management features for Radeon graphics chips, the first groundwork for supporting 3D with Evergreen GPUs, H264 decoding in Intel's Ironlake driver and the support of Intel's next generation of desktop and notebook chips, are some of the major graphics driver advancements of Linux 2.6.35.

The fragmentation of Linux has become a hot topic in recent weeks as industry leaders debate how the community can collaborate to compete against single, vertical operating systems without creating an ecosystem that pulls the community in too many directions at once to be truly effective. As FOSS developers work at a fever pitch to create Linux-based OSes, handheld devices, enterprise-level servers, and mobile phones, the point at which they join forces can make the difference between getting a leg up on other operating systems and lagging behind.

KDE Software Compilation 4.5 Release Candidate 2 (KDE SC 4.5 RC2) is released. The final version of the KDE SC release will be available by August 2010. This latest KDE release will introduce "improvements across the board in terms of innovative new features, greater ease of use, accessibility, good looks, better networking and further internationalization", according to the KDE team.

When Canonical unveiled Ubuntu's branding overhaul and new desktop theme earlier this year, the company also revealed that it had commissioned well-known type foundry Dalton Maag to design a new font specifically for Ubuntu. The font will likely be used by default in Ubuntu 10.10, which is scheduled for release in October. Today Canonical launched a closed beta for the new font, making it available to testers and Ubuntu contributors. I tested it on my desktop computer, running Ubuntu 10.04. After installing the package, I enabled it in the GNOME appearance preference dialog. It matches the new Ubuntu logo font, but it's designed for optimal screen readability. It looks very smooth on my LCD monitors and is very easy on the eyes. I think it's a big improvement over Bitstream Vera Sans, the font that currently ships by default in Ubuntu.

Compiz is a compositing window manager that enables users to enjoy clever desktop effects and transparency. Compiz is included in many distributions' default installs and in many others' repositories. At one time its future was in question with new major desktop environments planning to incorporate their own effects. When those effects failed to materialize as publicized, the popularity of Compiz continued to grow. But with newer systems and desktop enviroments, Compiz needed to be rewritten. So, after a long developmental period, Compiz 0.9.0 was released.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art, semantic, personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, Web standards, and usability. It was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architected personal publishing system. While primarily geared towards functioning as a Weblog, WordPress is also a flexible CMS capable of managing many types of Web sites. In addition to the basic blog functions, it also has an integrated link manager, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, file attachments, XFN support, support for stand-alone pages, Atom and RSS feeds for both content and comments, blogging API support (Atom Publishing Protocol, Blogger, MetaWeblog, and Movable Type APIs), spam blocking features, advanced cruft-free URL generation, a flexible theme system, and an advanced plugin API.

Since Unix based operating systems are the only thing I have running on my hardware it was only natural I would install Ubuntu on my new tablet. The following is what I did to gain full functionality of the tablet under Ubuntu (And Linux Mint and Zorin).

This guide explains how to install Maia Mailguard, a spam and virus management system, on a Debian Lenny mailserver. Maia Mailguard is a web-based interface and management system based on the popular amavisd-new email scanner and SpamAssassin. Written in Perl and PHP, Maia Mailguard gives end-users control over how their mail is processed by virus scanners and spam filters, while giving mail administrators the power to configure site-wide defaults and limits.

The Spring version of the popular Mandriva Linux distribution is now available for download on mirrors worldwide.

Six years ago, Jane Silber met Mark Shuttleworth at a party in London. Having started at Canonical just over a week later, she is now stepping into Shuttleworth’s shoes as the CEO of the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution…