Showing all newswire headlines

I spent plenty of time running Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and other small live distros during my "early" days (2007-08) with free, open-source operating systems. In the past couple of years I've settled into the routine of using "big" OSes, meaning full-fledged distros/projects installed to the hard drive in the traditional way — you know, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I've been thinking about getting back to the small projects for some time. Today I burned a Slitaz disc. Couldn't get X to start. (And no, none of the vga=xxx boot codes would help.) So I turned to Tiny Core Linux.

In the last three years, Microsoft claims to have entered into over 600 licensing agreements with companies small and large over alleged patent violations in "Linux".

We've spent some time talking with Dave Burke. Dave is the originating author of Osmos. As we announced albeit a bit late Osmos is now ported to Linux and it's quite an entertaining game. Dave speaks with us about some of his history in gaming and why he ported it to Linux. And possibly why others do or will not.

Having covered what script links and space handlers are in the previous article, we will take the discussion further on how Python can be used in Blender. Although softbody and cloth simulators that are available in Blender do an excellent job in many situations, sometimes you want to have more control over the way a mesh is deformed or simulate some specific behavior that is not quite covered by Blender's built-in simulators. This article shows how to calculate the deformation of a mesh that is touched, but not penetrated by another mesh.

Elizabeth shares what she learned at the 4th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and the Open Source Business Conference about emerging best practices for contributing to FOSS. Namely, openly engage and work with the community.

Last week we delivered the first of our Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks to much anticipation, but now we have the results for Apple's Mac OS X 10.6.3 operating system to tack in too. In the first part of that Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance examination, we looked closely at the OpenGL gaming performance across six different systems and a whole slew of tests. More articles are on the way looking at the performance and later in the week we already delivered some initial disk benchmarks. However, now it is time to see how Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and Apple Mac OS X 10.6.3 compete with one another.

Not sure if this is an issue with the Lynx or with the fact that it's a VM (VMware Workstation 7). I've noticed over the past few days that networking's been spotty at best. Web pages take forever to load or the pages don't load and the connection times out. Same for twitter in twittergadget and Gwibber. Tried both the Firefox and Chromium browsers thinking it would make a difference but nada, tostada.

If you have been wondering: What's all the fuss about VistA? Where can I learn more about VistA? Who is the VistA Community? Can I use VistA in my hospital, clinic etc? How can I contribute to the improvement of VistA? Then plan on attending the 21st VistA Community Meeting, June 8 to 11, 2010 at George Mason University, Fairfax Virgina.

In the beginning, there was word processing. Then, simply, Word. Spreadsheets became Excel. Presentation software, if it was ever known by such a name, was simply PowerPoint. Long before Google's preeminence in search, Microsoft dominated business and personal software with a suite known as Office. The company launches its latest version, Office 2010, on Wednesday in New York — and the stakes couldn't be higher. The lucrative franchise is threatened by a changing market spouting a four-letter word: free. The biggest threat comes from Google, specifically Google Docs, Web applications accessible from any computer. Because of Google, Microsoft has been forced to make a free ad-supported version called Office Web Apps.

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects). But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager. What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

Zabbix is a network management system application designed to monitor and track the status of various network services, servers, and other network hardware. It uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite or Oracle to store data

Game engines offer huge benefits to game developers. The main functionality they provide is the library of core functions used in a computer game. This often includes a realtime rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, physics engine with collision detection, a character animation system, scene graph, sound, artificial intelligence, threading, networking, input, streaming localization support, debugging tools, integration with languages, and the provision of performance monitoring and optimization tools.

If you are looking for a Linux toy that really rocks, your search ends here. This is a stringless digital guitar and it's powered by Linux This is what is called a "digital guitar" by it's designer. So it's not a electrical guitar but a device for creating digital music.

Here's the bug I filed in Launchpad for the misbehaving Me Menu in Ubuntu Lucid: Social bar in Me Menu only shows up when I add an account to Gwibber, the next day it doesn't appear (The Me Menu Bugs — Bug #576688)

Open-source software veteran Paula Hunter has one of the more interesting jobs in the industry, as the executive director of the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit, open-source organization that was established with Microsoft as its founding sponsor. On a visit the Seattle region this week, she sat down with us to discuss the CodePlex Foundation and its future, including its efforts to expand beyond that Microsoft investment and diversify the open-source software projects that it supports as part of its portfolio.

LinuxExchange is "StackOverflow for Linux and Open Source" and is built on the StackExchange platform. That means it’s a collaboratively edited question and answer site about Linux and Open Source with a workflow somewhere between the forums of LinuxQuestions.org and the Mediawiki-based LQ Wiki. After a BETA launch last month, the site is now out of bootstrap mode and is production ready. Visit LinuxExchange.org.

This tutorial shows how to prepare an Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND or MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

The Mozilla Foundation has released an early test version of Fennec, the mobile Firefox browser. Fennec, the mobile version of the Firefox web browser is now in testing for Android devices. The Mozilla Foundation, which controls the Firefox browser, has released a "pre-alpha" version of Fennec for Google's operating system.

Linux users are starved for quality games. Bring up the topic of a Linux port you will see responses about market share or that Linux users are cheap. This is simply semantics and I'll tell you why.

Wine 1.2 release plans were sent to the wine-devel mailing list from Alexandre Julliard the Wine project leader. Here is the release plans and Alexandres email to wine-devel.