Showing all newswire headlines

With Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2 having made it out yesterday, we couldn't resist but to run some new benchmarks of the Lucid Lynx after our original tests last month found Ubuntu 10.04 was off to a poor performance start. In some areas the performance of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 remains lower than in Ubuntu 9.10 -- largely due to performance regressions upstream in the Linux kernel -- but we have also included some very early performance numbers from Fedora 13.

Interestingly, the latest build of KDE 4 (4.3.90 aka 4.4 RC1) no longer supports the underscore character in host names.

I have a portable USB drive that has an ext3 Linux partition and a FAT Windows partition. The drive is a bit flaky due, I'm pretty sure, inadequate power from the USB connection. My solution in the next few paragraphs is less than ideal, and I've since found a better way to make my drive work.

Ted T'so, the chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation, has moved on to start a new career at Google. T'so had been the CTO at the Linux Foundation for the past two years and as such, the move was not unexpected.

Open source appliance maker Vyatta has unveiled the 3500 networking appliance family, which combines routing, firewall and VPN functionality. Vyatta claims it costs 1/20th the price of rival Cisco gear. But are partners and customers listening?

I've been using Parted Magic to work on my disks, and after recently replacing my old 1.x live Parted Magic CD with 4.6, I'm enjoying the little things that PM brings to the project.

For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption. As the project has run out of money, my involvement is at an end, so it’s a good time to reflect on what the project has achieved so far.

Ahn Seung-kwon, president of LG's mobile communications division, said the world's third-biggest handset vendor after Nokia and Samsung, however, will heavily bet on phones with Google's Android operating system. "MS Windows Mobile operating system is rather unqualified in mobile interfaces. Despite such worries, the partnership with Microsoft is still safe,"

Santa didn't bring you any calendars this year? Feeling a creative urge? Try Photo Calendar for creating and printing your own beautiful custom calendars.

In spite of a reported record number of Beta downloads, I'm wondering what would compel anyone to buy Office 2010 with a growing number of free or low cost alternatives such as Google Docs and OpenOffice available.

Announced today the release of Openoffice3.2 RC2, the new release comes with new features and improvements. Note that the final release of Openoffice 3.2 is planned for XX January 2010.

In this article by Reynante Martinez, we’ll cover everything from modeling a tin can from scratch, giving it some basic shading, adding appropriate textures, finalizing the lighting schemes for the scene to lastly compositing it for a better feel.

AImagendrew Lake, the main developer of Bangarang, has announced the release of Bangarang 1.0 “The Basics”. Bangarang is a media player for KDE. The name comes from the Jamaican word for noisy, chaos or disorder. Bangarang is a simple and stylish media player. The version 1.0 of Bangarang aims to introduce a basic functionality feature set.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) to one large storage server (distributed storage) with GlusterFS. 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.

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.0 is released. With this tool it's possible to tweak various settings of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

This all started a couple of weeks ago when I finally got around to putting the tv capture card I had picked up a year or two ago into my computer. Happily like most things in Linux, it just worked, that was a great plus. Sadly the software packages in existence that I ran across were either too much or too little, nothing was just right.

Here we are, at the front of a new year and decade. For open source software, the refined fuel that has enabled many of the incredible information technology happenings of the previous decade, the future is, well, wide open. The rising tide of cloud computing combined with shifting strategies in the enterprise space will surely bring much excitement to the open source arena and the players within. Rather than reflect, or predict on the future state of open source, I'd like to take an opportunity to make a few requests to maintain the success of open source.

I was all chuffed with myself for participating in the Ubuntu process through commenting on bugs in Launchpad. Then the e-mail started to annoy me. I unsubscribed to the bugs. The mail kept coming.

The major Linux distribution providers — Red Hat, Novell and Canonical — are preparing to attend IBM’s Lotusphere 2010 conference (Orlando, January 17-21). The VAR Guy is keeping a particularly close eye on Canonical, backer of Ubuntu. Here’s why.

Lots of fascinating new devices were showcased during past week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. In addition to marketing new products events like the CES serve as an opportunity to demonstrate what technology can do. Naturally, some of those feats may not prove particularly useful, but they are fun to watch anyway. Even more fun if the underlying software is built on top of Linux, as is the case for the following special devices found at CES 2010.