Showing all newswire headlines

In the almost 20 years since Linux was first released into the world, free for anyone to use and modify however they like, the operating system has been put to a lot of uses. Today, a vast number of servers run Linux to serve up Web pages and applications, while user-friendly versions of Linux run PCs, netbooks, and even Android and WebOS phones.

Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive. Even the OpenSolaris Governing Board is out of the loop and they may abandon the cause in August if Oracle doesn't make their OpenSolaris intentions clear and appoint a liaison. This evening though is one of the first signs that Oracle may let the OpenSolaris operating system live on with their support...

One of the most compelling reasons for using free or open source software is that it provides an opportunity for the user of the product to add whatever features he wants or needs. But the ability to add features is constrained by a project's size and complexity, and the nature of available documentation. So, while GIMP is one of the most well-known and successful open source software projects, its huge code base can be intimidating.

When your camera is 500 feet up hanging from a balloon, how do you tell it when to shoot photos? Or you want to shoot some time-lapse photos of clouds, the changing light on a mountain, a slow-moving highway repair crew...Akkana Peck shows us how to remote-control all kinds of Canon camera functions using CHDK, the Canon Hack Development Kit.

We've covered Tor in LJ before (see Kyle Rankin's "Browse the Web without a Trace", January 2008), but that was some time ago, and this subject seems to be more timely with each passing day. Also, with Tor being at only 0.2.x status, it still qualifies as software in development, so I'm justified in featuring it this month.

VMware and Zimbra are preparing to launch an open source attack against Microsoft Exchange, starting on August 1. The effort will ultimately include thousands of VMware partners. Here are the details.

Want to buy a Dell machine loaded with Linux? Shame, as it appears that Dell Europe would really rather you bought a Windows-powered one, despite having a website devoted entirely to selling Dell Ubuntu laptops. And, oh boy, does it use some strange arguments to dissuade you from becoming a Linux convert.

After tons of popularity surrounding the Peppermint OS release last month, today Cloud lovers get a treat in the first release of Peppermint Ice, version 07142010. Take a detailed look at the live CD, installation process, and popular applications in this Peppermint Ice screenshot review.

Lots of people fear the cloud because of security and privacy concerns. Christian Baun looks to the clouds and offers nine common-sense tips for saving your data on and around cloud services...

Akademy is a great time to meet people and understand some of the exciting new projects and buzzwords in KDE. One project that has been generating a lot of interest recently is ownCloud, the KDE cloud computing project launched by Frank Karlitschek. We caught up with Frank to understand ownCloud better, find out about the current status, and plans for the future.

NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source. NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.

Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has mostly been solved - for desktop systems. The situation in the fast-growing mobile space is not so comforting, though. As can be seen in recent conversations, free support for mobile graphics looks like the next big problem to be solved.

Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.

RMS's utopian advice runs counter to commercial logic and fails to advance the cause of software freedom.

July 16th, 2010 marks the next release in the "stable" line of Wine releases. New stable releases of Wine are so important that my two favorite commerical Wine products, Bordeaux and Crossover, have both jumped right in Wine 1.2's new stably goodness with soon to be release product updates.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2010.1 Spring desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The procedure driven by virt-install (libvirt 0.8.2) has been managed via keyboard due to mouse pointer stayed frozen at center of VNC window all the time of installation and finally at Gnome Desktop came up at the end.Get access to text mode console and edit /etc/inittab to switch to initdefault 3

How do you eat an elephant? In small bytes. That old saying applies to Canonical’s emerging Ubuntu cloud strategy. Instead of pursuing the entire cloud hosting industry, Canonical is quietly seeking 10 hosting partners to pilot Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. Here are the details.

Last Friday the Wine Project shipped Wine 1.2. This was the work of 328 people in over 23,000 separate patches over a span of two years.

The Linux and open source community provides countless user and server applications. They also provide solutions to help support these and other applications, even to support non-technical departments. You'll find many help desk or customer service trouble ticketing systems in the FOSS (free and open source software) world. Right now we'll review 5 different solutions.