Showing all newswire headlines

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Debian Lenny. I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

TSO helps in reducing cpu workload of packet cutting in 1500 byte and subsequently asking hardware to perform the same functionality. This features is enabled along with hardware support only.

When the only connections to a Linux system are the power cord and the Ethernet cable, sending the console output to another host on the local Ethernet is a great way to observe boot-time behavior, including any panics that hang the system.

Google's purchase of DocVerse March 5 validates the market for applications that bridge the gap between the Google Apps cloud computing suite and Microsoft's Office on-premise applications. Google will stitch this technology into Google Apps, appealing to customers who want to use Google Apps as their main collaboration suite, but still use the documents they created offline in Office without losing any of the data. The move comes as OffiSync is building its own suite of software that creates ties between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating. It turns out this potentially fatal bug is also present in their newest 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 Linux drivers.

There seems to be no respite from the predations of Microsoft FUD and the machinations of Big Business. Just when it seemed safe to come out of the closet and admit to being a user of free and open source software without being accused of being a Communist, it appears that we are now criminals too—even if we are not using pirated versions of proprietary software. The culprit this time is something called “Special 301”, an annual review of the status of foreign intellectual property laws carried out under the auspices of the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) which is an Executive Office of the President. It’s definition of criminal would make criminals of every single user of FOSS. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

One of the things that's been wandering around my mind lately (one of thousands) is the thought of the wild woods. In other words, places in the world that are away from civilization, away from the normal creature comforts of daily life, such as areas in Northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, sections of Africa, and others like that. Places where you have enough power to run a machine, but no internet connection, or if you do, it's sparing at best. Places like this sometimes have computers, and a reasonable amount of use for one, but they're way outside the normal network connected sphere of influence you see in the regular world. That then begs the question, how do we get Linux into areas like that?

For any one running a linux desktop/server , the amount of free memory available on the system is one of the critical parameters that deterimine the system response. We will look at some commands which give you information about memory usage

The Wine development release 1.1.40 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Her talk, Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%, looked at the goals that were set, the methods that were used, and the results.

Canonical is updating Ubuntu's look and feel with a new style that departs from the popular Linux distribution's traditional brown theming. The new theme, which was announced yesterday as part of an initiative to overhaul Ubuntu's branding and visual identity, will be used in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx. The design documents that Canonical published Wednesday left a lot of questions unanswered. Fortunately, the new themes were rolled out to Ubuntu 10.04 alpha testers today in the latest set of package updates. We used the Ubuntu alpha to conduct some hands-on testing so that we could see how the new theme looks with a number of popular applications.

For the tinkerers and testers, 2010 is shaping up to be a perfect year. Almost every desktop and application we can think of is going to have a major release, and while release dates and roadmaps always have to be taken with a pinch of salt, many of these projects have built technology and enhancements you can play with now. We've selected the few we think are worth keeping an eye on and that can be installed easily, but Linux is littered with applications that are evolving all the time, so we've also tried to guess what the next big things might be.

For quite some time I’ve been intrigued by Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix (UNR), but I’ve never given it a shot up until now. Being a KDE guy, I usually lean toward applications based on the Qt toolkit and I’ve never really liked GNOME much. For some reason though, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been lingering in my mind for a potential review, and now I’ve finally been able to give it a shot. I’ve actually been using UNR for a couple of months now. When I first started playing with it, I didn’t even own a Netbook, so instead I tried it out on a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop. About a month later, I was gifted a Dell Mini 10 netbook, which afforded me the opportunity to try UNR in it’s intended environment.

The Free Software Foundation is gearing up for a big event March 19th through 21st to be held in Cambridge, Mass. at Harvard's University Science Center. LibrePlanet 2010 is a three day event with workshops on using free software for everything from Web development to video editing and graphics. This year's LibrePlanet is going to feature a new "Women's Caucus," a day-long track on Sunday to boost participation by women in free software projects. There's no shortage of events focused on free and open source software. You can't swing a penguin without hitting a conference these days, so we interviewed FSF membership coordinator Deborah Nicholson to find out what makes LibrePlanet different from some of the other events going on this Spring.

The Elive team has released a long-awaited upgrade to its Debian-based, live CD-ready distro. The New Stable version of Elive 2.0, code-named Topaz, is equipped with the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, but now offers an alternative Compaz desktop, plus new autolaunchers, system-recovery tools, and "configurators."

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says. The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org. This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers. Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Bruce Byfield is already grumpy from the Olympics invasion of his hometown, and now KDE and GNOME are causing vexation. They both have many wonderful abilities, but some things leave users scratching their heads and wondering "why."

lsof is used to LiSt Open Files, hence the command’s name. It’s a handy tool normally used to list the open files on a system along with the associated processes or users, and can also be used to gather information on your system’s network connections. When run without options, lsof lists all open files along with all of the active processes that have them open. To get a full and accurate view of what files are open by what processes, make sure that you run the lsof command with root privileges.

I find it interesting that the idea of Linux on the desktop is responded to by either yawns or derision. I think it depends on whether you see Linux as a powerful operating system built by a million-man army, or one filled with bugs and missing the cool stuff like speech recognition.

I was posed with a challenge yesterday and fortunately, the challenge was cancelled. At my day job, my boss wanted me to convert a document produced in LaTeX to a Word document. I work with LaTeX in Kile and this isn't an option that seems available. The native output of my little set up is PDF but the PDF to Word doc options didn't look promising either.