Showing all newswire headlines

Why spend your hard earned money on proprietary software when open source software provides a similar (or better) amount of functionality? That's a very good question.

This happens lot of times. I login as a normal user and start to edit httpd.conf or lighttpd.conf or named.conf in vim / vi text editor. However, I'm not able to save changes due to permission issue (all config files are owned by root). How do I save file without creating a temporary file (/tmp/httpd.conf) and then move the same (mv /tmp/httpd.conf /etc/httpd) as root using vim / vi itself?

Patents could lead to the mutually assured destruction of the software industry and the parading of pledged patents in the opening of a dispute between IBM and TurboHercules threatens to upset the only progress towards a safer world for open source.

Apple might have just tipped its iPhone OS 4.0, but Android has jumped to nine percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to ComScore. Meanwhile, Nielsen says U.S. smartphone sales will eclipse feature-phone sales by 2011, and ABI Research predicts that over 800 million Android apps will be downloaded this year, making it the fastest-growing OS in app downloads.

Open source developer at Microsoft, Garrett Serack announced today plans to bring a native running open source platform to Windows. In a blog posted today, Serack announced the Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp). The post outlines the challenges of developing open source applications in a Windows environment and the differences between developing on UNIX and Linux and Windows.

While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload. Unfortunately, with there being hundreds of different Linux kernel configuration options, this is often a deterrent for any hobbyist to sit down and invest a great deal of time in testing out the different combinations of kernel options to generate the best performance for one's needs. Even for the experienced professionals the process of tuning the kernel configuration for a specific workload can require significant man hours and manual testing. But how would it be if you could find the optimal kernel configuration for your specific workload without any real human involvement? Well, it's possible to quite easily generate an ideal Linux kernel configuration in an autonomous manner.

When you run a webserver, which could be Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd, you may want to know how it is performing, actually, usually any web server can handle a normal day of work, but what happens when the server under your administration gets, stumbled, or appears in Slashdot, or digg front pages, now a days even twitter may drive a lot of traffic to a webpage. If that event occurs your server will be under real stress, and it is in that day when you want it to perform well, and survive the "attack". It is usually not possible to know how it will do that day, until the D. day arrives, but you can figure out how it will be. In this article you will find how to perform a simple test to have an idea of the health of your web server.

While Linux is a power to be reckoned with in the enterprise server room it continues to struggle for acceptance on the consumer desktop. On the desktop the most popular distributions, far and away, are Ubuntu and Fedora. Which one is more popular is an ongoing debate between the companies. However, when it comes to Linux media and the wider tech press there is no contest: Ubuntu has mindshare and gets the lion's share of media coverage. For Linux on the desktop Ubuntu is the de facto standard bearer. To whatever part of the general non-geek public is even aware of Linux the names "Linux" and "Ubuntu" are all but interchangeable. Over the past few years I've come to the conclusion that this state of affairs is, at best, unfortunate.

If you liked the script in our "What To Do After Installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx? Run This Script!" post, you'll be glad to know that version 0.2 is out. What's new in "Ubuntu 10.04 First time use script":

Generally, all Linux distributions needs a scheduled reboot once to stay up to date with important kernel security updates. RHN (or other distro vendors) provides Linux kernel security updates. You can apply kernel updates using yum command or apt-get command line options. After each upgrade you need to reboot the server. Ksplice service allows you to skip reboot step and apply hotfixes to kernel without rebooting the server.

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article (the first in a series) introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

Yesterday we delivered benchmarks showing how the open-source ATI Radeon graphics driver stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is comparing to older releases of the proprietary ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Sadly, the latest open-source ATI driver still is no match even for a two or four-year-old proprietary driver from ATI/AMD, but that is with the classic Mesa DRI driver. To yesterday's results we have now added in our results from ATI's Gallium3D (R300g) driver using a Mesa 7.9-devel Git snapshot from yesterday to see how this runs against the older Catalyst drivers.

In early March Stuart Jarvis wrote an article published here on the Dot which announced the winners of the poll results for suitable KDE software labels. Since then work has begun on coming up with suitable logos for these labels. This work is still underway and in need of volunteers if you have time and artistic skills.

TinyMe is a lightweight linux OS, it is aimed at making the computing experience as bloat- and lag-free as possible. It is well-suited to older computers, enthusiasts devoted to small/fast systems

Simple Invoices is a simple, lightweight web-based invoicing application. It’s an open source application that you have to install on a computer running a LAMP stack. Its hardware requirements are quite minimal, depending upon your level of usage. Simple Invoices opens in your web browser and has a simple, yet aesthetically pleasing user interface.

If you just want enough information to fix your problem quickly, you can read the How-To section of this post and skip the rest. I would highly recommend reading everything though, as a good understanding of the concepts and commands outlined here will serve you well in the future. We also have Video and Audio included with this post that may be a good quick reference for you. Don’t forget that the man and info pages of your Linux/Unix system can be an invaluable resource as well when you’re trying to solve problems.

ZaReason is a popular independent Linux computer company, founded by Cathy and Earl Malmrose. Cathy Malmrose tells the tale of how ZaReason came into existence thanks to chaos and Compiz Fusion.

Want to speed up your network and provide greater security in 15 minutes? You can do that with Squid Proxy Server on Ubuntu 10.04. The process is very easy and is an excellent way to save on network resources. Squid 2.7 has a focus on web performance.

The CodePlex Foundation is a non-profit designed to encourage and educate commercial software developers to start or improve their own open source projects. And, even though Microsoft is the first sponsor of the Foundation, all of the projects are "platform and technology agnostic," Hunter emphasized in a recent interview. That's likely a response to many critics of the CodePlex Foundation (CF), who think this is all an attempt by Microsoft to deal with open source solely on its own terms. The evidence is certainly strong. Besides being the founding sponsor, Microsoft currently holds two positions on the current five-person board.

Here's a paradox. Free software seems perfect for developing countries: it's free both to obtain and to share, runs well on low-spec machines and – an important aspect that is often overlooked – can be easily localised. And yet the uptake of free software in many such countries is poor, with Windows still dominating computing at all levels. How is this possible?