Showing all newswire headlines

This week there was the release of QEMU 0.12.2 (and the subsequent release of KVM-QEMU 0.12.2) with support for block migration, but this point release was mostly made up of small fixes and tweaks. IBM's Anthony Liguori though has begun making plans for the next major release of this open-source processor emulator. QEMU 0.13 will be the next big release and Anthony is hoping it will be completed by June and boast a large number of new features.

Carla Schroder wrote an editorial piece this week on Linux Today (a website I enjoy and frequent daily via their RSS feeds) entitled Editor's Note: What is User-friendly, Really?. In it, Carla claims to be "90% satisfied" with KDE3 and "60% satisfied" with KDE SC 4.3. Why? "KDE 4 sacrifices customizability and efficiency for glitz. [...] There is a trend to dumb Linux down in a fruitless attempt to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. Which is wasted effort, because in doing so computer-savvy users are being ignored and frustrated, and Jane and Joe Sixpack don't care anyway."

Guess why Microsoft suddenly decided it wanted to be more interoperable? It's so it can get customers to quit using Linux and switch to Windows & .NET. Remember when Microsoft told us it was interested in greater interoperability with Linux because their customers were demanding it? That part is true, as I'll show you. But the purpose of developing greater interoperability at the request of Intel, according to this exhibit, was so that Microsoft could get Intel to switch its development environment from Linux to Windows. Intel's Paul Otellini had reportedly asked his people to figure out how to do that.

["..and at Intel, the developer crowd was raised on Unix/Linux. They just don’t WANT to move."..I Love It! - Scott]

Continuing the theme of "KDE Everywhere", recently it was announced by the folks over at TiltOS that KDE applications are now available for download and use. TiltOS provides a repository and an easy to use application manager for the Haiku operating system, which is in turn aims to be an open source implementation of the BeOS operating system.

The second alpha of Lubuntu Lucid Lynx has been released. Based on Ubuntu Lucid alpha, it is of course not stable, but everyone willing to test it can download the new Lubuntu Alpha 2 .iso. In case you don't know, Lubuntu uses LXDE, a very lightweight and minimal desktop environment using the openbox window manager, the PcManFM file manager, and a very select list of default applications. It is compatible with basic freedesktop standards and all needed parts are already packaged in Ubuntu today.

For most users, Firefox doesn't use an abnormally large amount of memory. For others, however, Firefox's memory consumption is a major problem, in some cases memory usage in Firefox is due to other sources, like number of plug-ins, themes and extensions

Window List is a Gnome Panel applet - the default way to view the list of all windows that are currently running in Gnome. Here is a package which will modify this and will add a behavior similar to the Google Chrome "Pin Tab" feature (which is also available as an extension for Firefox by the way), meaning that the "pinned" windows are all grouped to the left and only their icons are displayed, while the unpinned windows are displayed on the right of the pinned windows, and both the icon and the window title are displayed:

Happy new year, everyone. I'm happy to announce Nmap 5.20--our first stable Nmap release since 5.00 last July! It offers more than 150 significant improvements.

For those interested in the next major update to the GIMP graphics editing application (GIMP 2.8), it now has a tentative release date. GIMP's Martin Nordholts has announced on his blog that GIMP 2.8 is scheduled for release on the 27th of December of this year...

Finally it is possible to watch youtube videos in html 5 format instead of the flash player. And I have found an easy way to take advantage of this new feature.

My feelings for Ubuntu have run hot and cold since I first discovered the "Linux for human beings"-nicknamed reimagination of Debian during the Dapper (6.06) era. I've had Ubuntu be the best distro on a given computer, sometimes it won't even boot, I've had terrible trouble with Intel video, and upgrade-delivered changes have forced me to rewrite scripts on the fly. OK, it's mostly Intel video, which for any user of Xorg over the past 2+ years has been an absolute nightmare.

t was a busy week as controversy continued to rage over the Google-China dust-up and Mozilla released a solid new version of Firefox. But first, Google. Ars sat down with the engineering director of Google's Chrome OS project to talk about the past, present, and future of the project. There's a lot of good detail about the relationship between Chrome and Android, the genesis of Chrome OS, and much more.

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Debian Lenny as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Debian Lenny). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

his week's news on The H was dominated by repercussions of the targeted attacks on US companies and reports on the holes in Microsoft software that the attackers exploited. Final efforts were made by the 'free MySQL' campaign as the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems approached its conclusion.

Reading between the lines of this article I found it saying was that the traditional OS is not dead and probably never will be. Regardless how much the industry wants to kill independent computing its users behaviors refuse them to do so. Google announced its decision because it realized that people want to listen to music, read documents and watch movies even when they are not online. Really? That would have never crossed my mind. :)

Android users often ask if there is an iTunes like app for synching their music to their Android phone. The answer is yes, and, on Linux, Banshee is the best choice.

I just saw the news that Debian Etch will no longer receive updates from the Debian Security Team as of Feb. 15, 2010. As you may or may not know, the current Stable version of Debian is Lenny, which received that "Stable" designation on Feb. 15, 2009. See the pattern? In the world of Debian, once a release is declared Stable, the previous release moves from Stable to what the project calls Old Stable, at which time it receives security patches for an additional year. That gives users a full year during which to upgrade to the current Stable distribution, which in case you haven't been reading closely is Lenny.

Over the past few years more of the Linux graphics stack has moved within the Linux kernel so that there is finally a proper kernel memory management solution for the open-source graphics drivers and to also provide kernel mode-setting. Moving more of the GPU driver code into the kernel DRM results in a more secure environment as the X Server can now run without root access, the start-up process is cleaner and faster with KMS, the performance will ultimately be better with a memory manager, there's more reliable and faster VT switching, suspend and resume is better, and the list of benefits just goes on.

Linux is more than ready for the average user to be using, but just like any operating system it may be a bit much for the average user to get it setup and thats just fine if you ask me.

Your editor has just completed an important transition: moving his Internet connectivity from one evil branch of the local telecom duopoly to the other, equally evil branch. This change required the acquisition of a new router; that, in turn, provided the opportunity to play with Linux-based router software, and Tomato in particular. Read on for your editor's impressions of this impressive bit of (mostly) free software.