Showing all newswire headlines

Firefox 3.6—the latest version of the popular open source Web browser—was officially released in January, but there are still many users who have not yet updated. In an effort to increase awareness about the availability of version 3.6, Mozilla announced today that it will start rolling out upgrade notifications to its users through the browser's built-in update system. According to Mozilla's statistics, the new version has already been downloaded over 100 million times since its release in January. That doesn't include the significant number of existing users who have already migrated to 3.6 by using the browser's built-in upgrade system without being prompted to do so.

Today seems to be a very good day for GNOME photo managers. After Shotwell 0.5 release, gThumb got a really nice extension which many of you I'm sure have been waiting for. Read on!

After twitter, now is Digg who decided to replace MySQL and most of their infrastructure components and move away from LAMP to another architecture called NoSQL that is based in Casandra, an opensource project that develops a highly scalable second-generation distributed database.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking at a conference in Abu Dhabi this week, confirmed that the Chrome OS operating system is on track for delivery in the second half of this year. While we already know that it’s headed for netbooks, there are new reasons to believe that its brightest future may be as an adjunct OS on netbooks and tablets. Google is taking several big gambles with its upcoming OS, not the least of which is that it will require users to work with all data in the cloud. That will rule out countless applications and utilities that are, in some cases, beloved to users, and there is a good chance that Google’s cloud-only gamble could backfire. But what if Google adopts an “if you can’t beat them, join them” strategy with its Linux-based operating system, and oversees its shipment on netbooks and tablet devices alongside other OSes? If the idea sounds far-fetched, check out the video below from Mobile World Congress, in which Freescale shows a $199 tablet computer concept that runs Chromium OS (the open-source core of Chrome OS), Linux and Android.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC) allows you to log into a full desktop on a remote server (as opposed to just opening windows on your local machine, as with X11 over SSH). It can be very useful, and it's very fast to set up.

You can use a dedicated application like FBReader or Calibre to read and manage ebooks on your machine, or you can do it without leaving the convenience of the Firefox browser courtesy of the EPUBReader extension.

The Linux Foundation has announced sessions for its Collaboration Summit, scheduled for Apr. 14-16 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. This year's event features a full-day workgroup on MeeGo, as well as Linux sessions ranging from cloud computing to desktop distros to open source compliance.

Canonical is burying Ubuntu's traditional brown theme and is adopting a new visual style for version 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April. The new theme was revealed last week as part of Canonical's broader effort to overhaul Ubuntu's branding and visual identity. The new theme includes a richer color palette and a number of stylistic enhancements. The change that has generated the most controversy is the placement of the window management buttons in the left-hand side of the titlebar. In response to some of the concerns that have been raised by users, Canonical designer Ivanka Majic has written a blog entry that describes the reasons behind the change. Majic is also seeking additional feedback from the Ubuntu community.

The CE Linux Forum (CELF) has opened registration and announced speakers for its Embedded Linux Conference on Apr. 12-14 in San Francisco. The event will feature keynote speakers Greg Kroah-Hartman and Matt Asay, and offer over 50 sessions on embedded Linux topics including flash file-systems, RT-Preempt, security, Moorestown, and Android.

As Phyllis Diller would attest, a face lift isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most things — legalese included — can use a good going over from time to time, and that's just what the good people at Mozilla will be doing this year. The face being lifted, as it were, is the well-known Mozilla Public License, the legal agreement that covers use of the organization's many software projects. The original MPL, version 1.0, was released some twelve years ago, the result of what Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker describes as "frantic drafting." A second version (1.1) followed, and continues to be the license in force for Mozilla users everywhere.

In this article by Andrew Schwabe, we will learn how to setup the basic structure of a website using CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language), and adding the capability to render any page as a PDF dynamically using Railo open source.

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on a CentOS 5.4 server. From the Suhosin project page: "Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections."

There's a lot Linux can not do(yet) but you'll be suprised what it's already being used for. Look at this: a microwave running Linux (yes we can!) and a washing machine also.

Previews of Firefox 3.7, which will in time become 4.0, are now available. The Firefox developers have released a new preview version of Firefox 3.7 which includes many of the features planned for Firefox 4.0. The preview release includes special protection against rogue third-party processes that could crash the browser.

Elliott Associates, the hedge fund that’s seeking to acquire Novell and SUSE Linux, is denying a report that it plans to break up Novell and sell off the pieces. Hmmm… But I still wonder: Will Novell and Elliott Associates reach a buyout agreement in time for Novell BrainShare? Here's some speculation.

How to install FreeNX server and client in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). FreeNX is a system that allows you to access your desktop from another machine over the Internet. You can use this to login graphically to your desktop from a remote location. One example of its use would be to have a FreeNX server set up on your home computer, and graphically logging in to the home computer from your work computer, using a FreeNX client.

Today I thought I would show everyone just how easy it is to install and use Microsoft Office 2007 on OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2010.03 with Bordeaux for Solaris. I have installed Office 2007 on both OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2010.03 build 134 the screenshots below are from 2009.06 running in Virtual Box.

Following the release of Fedora 13 Alpha this week we delivered Intel graphics benchmarks looking at the performance of an Intel Atom Netbook using the very latest kernel, DRM, and Mesa packages that Fedora is known for carrying. There are regressions in the Intel stack worth noting, but in this article, we are continuing in our Fedora 13 benchmarking by looking at the general system performance of the Linux desktop.

In February 2010, the International Intellectual Property Association (IIPA) asked the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to put Indonesia, Brazil, India, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam on its "Special 301" watch list in part because of their policies encouraging the adoption of open source software (OSS) by government agencies. Open Source for America (OSFA) believes the IIPA's request to be both irresponsible and misleading in its characterization of OSS. OSFA strongly urges the USTR, and all government agencies, to firmly reject such unfounded pressure to blacklist or penalize any country for policies allowing or encouraging the use of OSS.

Former Sun chief open source officer Simon Phipps is joining the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board effective April 1st. Let's hope Phipps can shake the organization up a bit. I'd hazard a guess that many newcomers to the open source community are partially or even wholly unaware of the OSI and what it's meant to do, because the OSI has not been a terribly dynamic organization over the past few years. The OSI is considered the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), and is the body that approves new open source licenses. But its influence has been considerably on the wane for some time now.