Showing all newswire headlines

This is the first chapter in my new cybersecurity eBook in which...

Slackware is the most stripped down and UNIX-like of Linux distributions and is designed to be a workhorse for developers or sysadmins, who do not want "to be met with GUI greeters, setup wizards, beginner-oriented defaults, and enabled-by-default automatic updates."

Via Technologies announced a 2.36 x 2.36-inch computer-on-module (COM) based on its new Mobile-ITX form factor. The Via Epia-T700 is built around a 1GHz Via Eden ULV processor with 512MB soldered DDR2 memory, and supports the development of ultra-compact embedded devices in medical, military, and in-vehicle applications, says the company.

Disney has announced that it has released the Ptex "Per-Face Texture Mapping" library as open source under a BSD license. The code, which was used for "virtually ever surface" on the animated feature film Bolt, has been integrated into Pixar's RenderMan Pro server. Ptex's major feature is that it removes the need to carry out manual assignment when "UV mapping" textures to remove seams and joins, a process which is often regarded as one of the more tedious parts of creating 3D animation.

Firefox has dropped version 3.7 from its roadmap and will roll out new features in the next few weeks together with 3.6.

Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and various Tier 1 vendors have extensive server product lines mostly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Enterprise Linux. There are more OEM options than ever; here is roundup of 5 distinctly different OEM Linux servers.

Alot of people ask me the easiest way to record their experiences while using Ubuntu. You can do this several ways but using an application named recordMyDesktop seems to be the most popular method. This video tutorial will show you how to install recordMyDesktop, create a video in .ogv format, and convert it to an .avi.

ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Ubuntu 9.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Over the past week there has been a lot of talk about the EXT4 file-system following the announcement that Google is migrating their EXT2 file-systems to EXT4. Their reasons for this transition to EXT4 are attributed to the easy migration process and Google engineers are pleased with this file-system's performance. However, as we mentioned in that news post last week and in many other articles over the past weeks and months, EXT4 is not as great of a contender as it was in the past, well, for some tests at least. The performance of the EXT4 file-system commonly goes down with new kernel releases and not up, as kernel developers continue to introduce new safeguards to address potential data loss problems that initially plagued some EXT4 users. For our latest EXT4 benchmarks we have numbers that show this file-system's performance using a vanilla 2.6.28 kernel (when EXT4 was marked as stable) and then every major kernel release up through the latest Linux 2.6.33 release candidate.

Moonlight was written in three weeks in June of 2007 by a group of Mono developers working round the clock to fulfil a promise made by Miguel de Icaza. Despite such heroics Moonlight continues to face resistance from the wider developer community...

The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0, is finally out, but only one operating system has native support for it: Linux.

In a official post on the Ubuntu Forums, user Matthew (a official Canonical employee?) asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in the upcoming versions of Ubuntu.

How do you deal with an entrenched content industry that tries to pump its twisted values down your throat with ludicrously illogical emotional appeals? Well, one way is to fight fire with fire by making your own emotional appeals, and trust to the viral amplification of free culture distribution to get the message out. This is the essence of the “minute meme” idea from Question Copyright, and animator Nina Paley has fired the first volley with her one-minute animation “Copying Is Not Theft.” Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

I compiled a VMware image of Chromium OS Zero for testing out in your virtual machine environment, this is a Chromium OS Zero image converted to VMware .vmdk file. Find also our first screenshots of Chromium OS Zero.

Linux’s main merit, as a kernel and an ecosystem, is its open source nature. That means the software that runs on it has little choice but to be open source. This doesn’t mean closed-source software is unavailable on Linux—just that it’s got the deck stacked strongly against it. Because of this, software companies who don’t primarily deal in open source have shunned Linux. It’s something of a chicken-and-egg argument to say who shunned whom first. And perhaps it’s academic: does it matter who took the first step away from the table? Still, here’s the key problem: There’ll always be a big gap between Linux advocacy and Linux reality as long as it remains biased toward the near-complete exclusion of binary-only / closed-source / proprietary software on Linux.

Does GNOME 3.0 necessarily need 3D acceleration? Do GNOME 2.0 apps run under 3.0? A website tries to provide answers to some unsettling questions.

The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd. KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth.

LXer Feature: 18-Jan-2010

According to Reuters, MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius is now looking to China and Russia for help in his campaign objecting to the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Previously, Widenius appealed to the European Commission (EC), which initially objected to the takeover, in order to prevent the deal from going through, however, Widenieus believes it now seems clear that the EC will approve the deal. He points to the petition on helpmysql.org, a campaign site set up by Widenius, which he says has over 30,000 "signatures" from MySQL users from around the world.