Showing all newswire headlines

Although Ubuntu is generally regarded as a desktop Linux distribution, the sever variant is becoming increasingly popular in the cloud. It is silently infiltrating server rooms and gaining traction in enterprise environments. A recent survey published by Canonical provides some insight into adoption trends of Ubuntu on production servers.

"Yesterday I was warning about the threat that the super-troll Intellectual Ventures represents. To provide some balance, here's a surprisingly upbeat piece from Samba creator Andrew Tridgell on how to read software patents..."

For years the free and open source software people would say that the number one enemy, the devil on earth, the only factor blocking us from flooding the mass market with gnomes, mice and strange k-prefixed creatures is the company from Redmond. Is is still the case?

"Source Size: 273.3 Megabytes Compiled Size: 84.9 Megabytes" ... "`Single Window` mode in the current development version of GIMP is so named because it allows you to attach GIMP's docks to the main window. It does not force you to have one singular window" ... "Lately, people have been speaking highly of Adobe Photoshop over this video showing what Bryan O'Neil Hughes calls "Content-Aware Fill" which is a technique for synthesizing texture."

...it leads to dangerously skewed values. I don't need to remind anyone of all the abuses perpetrated in the name of chasing the dollar, do I? Or rant against idiotic billionaire worship? Whether it's a Gates or a Shuttleworth, admiring someone because they are able to amass a huge fortune is the dopiest form of idolatry.

Most of us have experienced the need to disinfect a virus-laden system — though a near-total immunity is one of the many benefits of being a Linux user. If public health officials in northern England are to be believed, though, the term "computer virus" may be in for a new meaning. Social networking can do many things for users: help them kill vast amounts of time, expose career-ending after-hours antics, and sometimes even connect them to new and interesting people. According to the Teesside (UK) Director of Public Health Prof. Peter Kelly, they can also help users catch VD.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

If you decide, for any number of reasons, not to get an iPhone then there are numerous choices available

The Mozilla Foundation has stopped development of a mobile version of its Firefox web browser for Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. The reason for the decision is that Windows Mobile 7 doesn't support native applications. Until this decision Windows Mobile was one of just two platforms that were supported by Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox. But, with the launch of Windows Mobile 7, Microsoft closed down the option to create native applications for the platform.

Red Hat announced fourth-quarter financial results showing a 15 percent increase in revenues year-over-year. In other news, the company announced new JBOSS and SOA tools, tipped a collaboration with IBM on cloud technology, and revealed customer wins with the Symbian Foundation and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr is now officially closed for further submissions and the shortlisting process is already underway. More than 1000 odd submissions were made and that itself speaks volumes about the resounding success of this novel idea of engaging with the community.

Fermi is a high school that isn't afraid of experiments. This year, besides a project to build a mini-rocket to be launched in 2011 and setting up a photovoltaic lab, they're trying to solve with open licenses a problem that costs every italian students from 300 to 500 Euros each year, the cost of textbooks, and are inviting other schools to participate.

Mark Shuttleworth posted a suggestion he got from Pablo Quirós for the free space on the top right window corner (now that the button(s) will be placed on the left side of the Metacity), on the Ayatana mailing list. The proposal is a new UI element for the windows in Ubuntu called Esfera which should be placed in the free space on the top-right of the windows. The button will basically support gestures which you can perform on that window, like a joystick.

Is HTML5 going to put the hurt on Flash? Rumors of Flash’s demise may be greatly exaggerated, but the long term prospects for Adobe Flash seem pretty dim indeed.

The final target of this post is to demonstrate how flexible is Ubuntu Karmic Koala Server environment. Build Xen 4.0-rc8 and the most recent stable pvops kernel 2.6.32.10 ( with DRM support). Loading Xen Instance followed by install Ubuntu’s Libvirt environment, providing utility virt-install for creating PV and HVM DomUs, virt-manager completely functional to manage any DomU been built via virt-install

The best, refined blend of GNU/Linux, coming with bleeding edge edges is eventually here! Say hello to Sabayon Five-point-Twoh, available in both GNOME and KDE editions! Dedicated to those who like cutting edge stability, out of the box experience, outstanding Desktop performance, clean and beauty.

NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property. However, NVIDIA has decided to deprecate this open-source driver of theirs. No, NVIDIA is not working on a new driver. No, NVIDIA is not going to support the Nouveau project. Instead, NVIDIA now just recommends its users use the X.Org VESA driver to get to NVIDIA.com when installing Linux so they can install their proprietary driver.

New Mozilla survey found that the chief reason for Firefox's popularity as a developer tool is its large ecosystem of Web development add-ons. Almost 90 percent of those polled cited Firefox's developer-centric add-ons as being central to their Web development efforts

"John Nack posted a “sneak peek” of an upcoming Photoshop feature called Content-Aware Fill. There’s an impressive video as well. Users are predictably drooling; some can’t even believe such a wonder is possible."

"Apart from many performance improvements, the highly experimental JaegerMonkey javascript engine, and an official 64bit version, "Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 Pre" doesn't have many new features that 3.6 doesn't already have. There's now support for mapping JavaScript to OpenGL" ...