Showing all newswire headlines

I couldn't get PulseAudio to work on one of my computers no matter what I do. But removing PulseAudio can be tricky and besides, there is a very easy way to "fix" it (if you're using GStreamer as a backend for music and videos). This is very useful for applications which use GStreamer but do not let you select the sound output module like: Rhythmbox, Totem and so on.

According to the peekabot project's Web site: "peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Here's a big win for open source: an Italian court has approved a law in Piedmont giving preference to open source, ruling that it is not anti-competitive. That's great for Italy, but also sets a useful precedent for other countries.

Making music on Linux used to be something for masochists. Luckily this is long something of the past, as nowadays lot's of cool Linux software and compatible hardware is available to musicians.

While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it can sometimes be slow and get bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result (and just because it’s fun), some people have started to search for alternatives to Firefox on Linux. Thankfully, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.

Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced on Monday. The beta version of REV 2.2 will include a number of new programs that will allows customers to run a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI). "It will allow you to deploy a RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] desktop, or Windows XP, or Windows 7, on a secure high-performance hypervisor platform," said Andrew Cathrow, who is a Red Hat senior product marketing manager. "By using a VDI, you are moving the [operating system] from the end user's device into the data center, where it is easier to manage and maintain."

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Mandriva 2010.0 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

Security expert Andreas Bogk warns that, despite recent PHP improvements, the session IDs of users who are logged into PHP applications remain guessable. Upon close examination, the alleged improvements display frightening weaknesses.

I work on a project on which I regularly want to grep the directory tree for a particular word but without including the cvs/ and doc/ directories. Happily, grep has an exclude-dir option to do just this..

I’m not suggesting that a blockbuster Canonical-Oracle relationship is set to emerge. But there are indications that Canonical continues to make some Ubuntu progress with MySQL — the open source database now owned by Oracle. Here are some details.

Since Mark Shuttleworth said that moving the Metacity window buttons to the left "opens up the space on the right nicely", lots of button ideas came out. The most controverted one is probably Esfera, an idea which Mark forwarded to the Ayatana mailing list. A recent idea by Izo makes a lot more sense than all the previous ideas. Have a look (it's called "The Workflow Button"):

Bash Shell scripting...every Linux admin needs it to save time. One aspect of shell scripting is writing functions. Creating functions in your scripts allows you to create containers of code that you can reuse in one script or multiple scripts. This tutorial, with examples, shows you how to create functions. The article is a part of a free shell scripting course.

Sony plan to drop the Install Other OS feature from the PlayStation 3 via a new Firmware update (3.21) due this Thursday. The ability to install Linux distro’s on the popular console is a key feature of interest from the Open Source community and the move has already caused uproar on the Official PlayStation blog which is filling with comments of outrage from its small, but vocal, Linux user base.

While we are just weeks away from delivering the most comprehensive Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks , and Apple is on the heels of releasing the major Mac OS X 10.6.3 update, for those impatient ones today we have published an extensive set of tests comparing the performance of Mac OS X 10.6.2 against a development build of Ubuntu 10.04. This is our first time exploring how Canonical's Lucid Lynx can compete with Apple's Snow Leopard.

There’s been a lot of confusion about exactly what Unity Linux is.

I thought I’d talk today a bit about that. I’d like to talk a bit about what Unity uses for it’s ‘guts’. I’d also like to dispel some myths surrounding Unity. Lastly, I’d like to talk briefly about how Unity is doing all it can to further Open Source and Linux by contributing to projects it is involved with.

Larry Ellison likes to buzz rotten fruit off some corporate type’s head. Over the years Microsoft, PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, SAP, and Red Hat have lined up to be been duly pelted during calls with Wall St or during Ellison's company's mega OpenWorld customer and partner conference.

Hello again to all the KDE people. We are here with a third interview. Last time we had Tobias König, a KDE PIM developer. Today it’s the turn of Aleix Pol, a contributor to KDE EDU and KDevelop. As usual, there is also the original interview in Italian if you prefer to read that.

The PlayStation 3 Sony launched has very little in common with the system you can buy now. The PS3 launched when rumble was a last-generation feature, backwards compatibility was a core part of the hardware strategy, and the ability to install Linux on the hardware was attractive for those who liked to tinker with their hardware. So what happened?

Lightweight desktops have a multitude of uses, on netbooks, for mobile devices, for older hardware, for users with limited requirements of their systems, for connecting to applications in the cloud, and for bare knuckled programmers who prefer to work closer to the metal.

While there are quite a few services that offer free blog hosting, there are situations when you’d want to run a blog on your own server. This approach has its advantages, but setting up a server and then installing and configuring a blog system can be a daunting proposition – unless you choose to use Tonido, that is.