Showing all newswire headlines

As I noted in my post “Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?", one of the reasons there are no large pure-play open source companies is that their business model is based on giving back to customers most of the costs the latter have traditionally paid to software houses.

Minimizing is not always seen as the same thing; Plus, an exploration of just how bad it can get with a small laptop screen.

Online banking is becoming a very popular way to satisfy our banking needs and this even includes people with no or very little technical background. There are numerous advantages when doing banking transactions online, such as 24/7 bank opening hours, ability to make transactions from anywhere in the world and convenience. The only problem is that we do not take our secured home PC everywhere with us. Consequently, the use of other computer and operating system rather than our own for online banking may involve a great security risk. However, what we can and usually carry on us everywhere we go is some sort of the USB key storage device. This article describes a way of building our own customized Online banking USB live Desktop.

After a long time waiting the most interesting update of the Intel drivers for Linux is now a fact. We can now have this great hardware acceleration for playing h.264 video. Or in other words we now have hardware acceleration for HD content with our Intel video cards. As an owner of U400-138 with Intel 4500 MHD I have been waiting for this over a year but now I can play 720p without an issue. And so here is how to install this.

Following the release of the first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 back in April we delivered our first RHEL 6.0 benchmarks while putting it up against CentOS 5.4 and Fedora 12. Now that the second beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 was released last week, we took the workstation build and have benchmarked it against the latest releases of Ubuntu, CentOS, and openSUSE.

Microsofts ISA proxy server is popular in many corporations. Unfortunately support for NTLM authentication is spotty in Linux at best. This article will show you how to connect to the internet via an ISA proxy when NTLM is not supported.

Last week, I wrote about the somewhat-vague definition of the open core business model, and how it compared to the dual-license business model. Open core, like dual licenses, are all part of the whole "ways-to-make-money-faster-with-open-source-software" genre of business, but they are not the same thing.

While there are a good number of gnome applets to choose from by default, there are piles of other applets you can find online to install. The following are a list of four of my favorites I use on my various Linux systems around my house.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that its Open Accessibility Workgroup is releasing IAccessible2 for Windows under the BSD license. It is also announcing the availability of AccProbe, a new desktop application testing tool that is available under the BSD license. AccProbe uses IAccessible2 platform services to assist developers in discovering and correcting code problems in their Windows applications. It was developed in Eclipse by IBM and donated to The Linux Foundation's Open Accessibility Workgroup.

LG announced an LG Optimus Series of mobile devices, including two Android 2.2 smartphones -- the Optimus One and Optumus Chic -- and promised an Android-based Optimus tablet. Meanwhile, a rumor about an Android 3.0 "Gingerbread" platform split-up has been squelched, and a photo of the Android-based "HTC Vision" emerged as the device's manufacturer announced robust 2Q financials.

In a post on his blog, developer Jon Lech Johansen, also known as DVD-Jon, says that, "Google does far too little curation of the Android Market, and it shows." Among other things, Johansen, the co-founder and CTO at doubleTwist, is well known for his involvement in reverse engineering the content-scrambling system used for DVD licensing enforcement and for doubleTwist, an iTunes-like application for managing and synchronising content on various devices including Android mobile phones, BlackBerry devices and Palm smartphones.

Google is updating the stable version of its Chrome Web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, addressing a handful of security vulnerabilities -- including four that could put users at risk simply by viewing a maliciously constructed image file. Those vulnerabilities addressed in Chrome 5.0.375.99 are rated as "high" severity, and include a high-memory corruption flaw that could be triggered by an invalid PNG image file. Google awarded security researcher Aki Helin $1,000 for the discovery of the vulnerability, which he reported June 7.

Have you ever felt that you are being watched in whatever you do online? Websites seem to know who you are and can greet you with your name when you visit them. Google always seems to know what you are searching, even before you started the search. Getting scared? Perhaps it’s time to turn your privacy filter on. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released five new stable Linux kernels, correcting minor errors of their predecessors and including improvements which are unlikely to generate new errors. As so often with kernel versions in the stable series, it remains undisclosed if the new versions contain changes which fix security vulnerabilities, although the number of changes and some of the descriptions of those changes certainly suggest that all the new versions contain security fixes.

In a move to bring screen-orientation awareness to mobile Web applications, Google has added accelerometer APIs to the WebKit HTML renderer. The APIs are based on the DeviceOrientation Event Specification, a W3C Web standard draft that describes DOM events for monitoring orientation changes and accelerometer activity.

Two popular Linux distributions recently released new developmental versions on the road to their finals. One is early in its cycle and the other is about to cross the finish line.

Although digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice.

Have you been looking for open-source storage management tools that are easy to use and provide a graphical representation of your storage. Alas, there are no comprehensive tools but there are graphical tools that you can pair with command-line wizardry, particularly LVM.

opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM Version 1.4.1 is now released and ready for download from SourceForge.

Getting a bit tired of the font selection your distribution ships with? Want a bit more variety for presentations or publications? Tons of fonts are available under open licenses, but only if you know where to look. You'll find plenty of "free" fonts online, but not all of them are licensed under free or open source licenses. You have to be a bit careful when choosing free fonts if the licenses matter. Some are free to download but not distribute or modify, others are distributed without any licensing information at all. Those make me a bit nervous, as it's hard to tell whether someone is distributing a font legitimately or not. Other fonts have custom licenses that wouldn't qualify as OSI-compliant but might be good enough for personal or business use.