Showing all newswire headlines

There are hundreds (at least!) of different Linux-based operating systems. Most people will be familiar with some of the big names — distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Mandriva. Most of the well-known Linux distributions are designed to be used as general purpose desktop operating systems or installed on servers. Here are some of the more unusual distros.

Paul Frields, who has been getting his paycheck from Red Hat to run the Fedora development Linux variant since 2008, is moving back inside the company to work on Enterprise Linux, and an outsider named Jared Smith is being brought in as the new Fedora Project Leader. Frields joined Red Hat in February 2008, replacing Max Spevack, another Red Hat employee who ran the open source Linux development product from February 2006 until Frields took over. Smith will take over the FPL position (which is a full-time job with a Red Hat paycheck) to steer the development of Fedora 14, something that Frields already got the ball rolling on.

Red Flag Software has demonstrated a 10.1-inch tablet running its new MeeGo Linux version of Midinux 3.0 on an Intel Moorestown Z6xx processor, says Tech.qq. Equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G, the NPad tablet will go on sale in the third quarter, says the report.

Sugar desktop environment was originally conceptualized to become the default desktop for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Sugar desktop is designed with the goal of being used by children for learning. The original Sugar desktop environment was repackaged and remixed for Ubuntu and it was called Ubuntu Sugar Remix.

When Red Hat, Synnex and a dozen major open source application providers launched the Open Source Channel Alliance in April 2009, it appeared to be a watershed event. But fast forward to mid-2010, and the Open Source Channel Alliance has been largely silent in recent months. Here’s the update.

If making money from open source was hard, extracting it from clouds might prove to be even more difficult. Particularly when your main rival on the x64 server is none other than Microsoft. Red Hat got its start as Linux magazine publisher that tucked a Linux CD in the back, and then evolved into the largest commercial Linux distributor in the world. The company added middleware from JBoss and created other middleware, such as its Enterprise MRG messaging, grid and realtime Linux variant, and virtualization software for desktops and servers. And now it has to position itself as an alternative to Microsoft as the platform upon which customers can build x64-based clouds.

As a homeschooling parent, I'm a big fan of educational software and I've written quite about about various programs in the past. But, as a programmer, I'm also a big fan of any program that makes computer programming more approachable by younger children. So, when I heard about Scratch, I was pretty enthusiastic.

The grep command is a hugely powerful way to search through files. Like many command line utilities, once you're comfortable using it, you will discover that it is surprisingly fast and accurate. However, many Linux users only bother to learn one or two grep options and then use them as a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to searching. A little time spent learning what grep can do will pay dividends – and there's nothing more satisfying than knowing exactly how to use a command to find something in a jiffy.

Desktop applications for 'Information Management' that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain.

We have to face it. Linux isn’t going to win the desktop war any time soon, but perhaps we don’t need to. With products like MeeGo and Android, Linux is going to complete its domination of the embedded space, and find itself in every single home.

A few of us here at MTE have a bit of a crush on Chrome OS. It’s not just the system itself, it’s the fact that someone is finally taking the concept of an operating system in a new direction. We wrote a brief synopsis of Chrome OS shortly after the first announcement that showed how things stood at the very beginning, then more recently did a manual build guide. Building Chrome OS from source code can take several hours, and can be a somewhat challenging process even for an experienced Linux user. To help solve that problem, some developers have begun releasing custom Chrome OS builds with included installers and software tweaks. This guide will show you where to find the images and how to get the latest Hexxeh release, Flow, on to your netbook or VM from a Linux host.

In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook.

Oh the Cloud OS which ever so beautifully floats above the heads of corporate America as the ultimate dream of power and money. It's a chance to truly run the show from entertainment to business and personal information while still being able to advertise whatever they want at their own freewill since we have so eagerly sacrificed our own for what appears to be convenience and mobility of programs and files; All being hosted and housed by our ever so friendly, understanding and ethical corporate entities that we are all familiar with today.

For many enterprises, the server OS presents a quagmire: They don't want to pay too much for the server OS on which they rely, but at the same time, they don't want their server OS makers going out of business. The big question is whether there's enough money in open source software to build strong and stable enterprise OS makers. If you run your business using Microsoft's Windows server OSes, then you really don't have to worry. The Redmond giant is rolling in cash thanks in no small part to the high prices it charges for its desktop and server OSes and the client access licenses it requires to connect one to the other.

In creating Ubuntu Linux, Canonical has focused on ease of use, and this extends to the install procedure. To this end, Ubuntu eschewed many of the detailed questions that had discouraged potential Linux users of an earlier era. However, despite relative improvements in that area, the installation is still peppered with questions. This means that an admin tasked with the deployment of more than three or four computers is doomed to spend an entire morning dashing around, typing in responses to the same questions over and over again.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database that Postfix uses.

An update in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat today brings a changed look for the main Ubuntu Software Center panel. The main view was completely redesigned: the category buttons are now smaller, the Featured category was moved to the bottom and it doesn't have the next/previous buttons anymore. Also, a new category called "What's New" was created - this will be the category where the new applications from the extras.ubuntu.com repository we were telling you about will be available.

Two months ago we published our initial benchmarks of LLVMpipe, the Gallium3D driver that accelerated commands on the CPU rather than any GPU and unlike other Linux software rasterizers is much faster due to leveraging LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) on the back-end. Since then we have published new ATI Gallium3D driver benchmarks and yesterday put out Nouveau Gallium3D driver benchmarks, so today we are providing updated LLVMpipe driver results to show how well Gallium3D's LLVMpipe driver can accelerate your OpenGL games with a modern processor.

First came Android, the mobile OS. Then came the first Android phone, the G1. Then came the Nexus One, the first true gPhone — Google top to bottom. And it just kept going from there. Today, not yet three years into development, Android is available on dozens of devices, from phones to e-readers to netbooks and more. It's taken the #2 spot in the mobile OS world — well ahead of the "unkillable" iPhone — and reportedly is slated to take on Apple's other hot toy of the moment. Given the explosive growth and variety of devices sporting the OS, it comes as little surprise when a manufacturer announces they have a new Android offering in the works. Unless, that is, if the manufacturer is a networking giant and the announcement comes out of nowhere.

As we reported last week, Red hat has just reported another robust financial quarter--one of many achieved in a row. Earnings came in at 15 cents a share, or $24.1 million, compared to 12 cents a share expected by analysts, on total revenue of $209.1 million. Once again, Red Hat not only maintained its key subscribers but grew subscriptions and renewals.