Showing all newswire headlines

The Ubuntu Developers Summit (UDS), held November 16-20 in Dallas, while kicking off the development cycle for the next Ubuntu release, "Lucid Lynx", had a surprising amount to interest a kernel hacker with embedded tendencies. The Summit covered a wide range of topics from low level kernel details, to best community practices, but the ARM netbook support sessions were particularly interesting. At this UDS, the Ubuntu ARM developers set out to enable support for many ARM machines in a single distribution, a difficult task due to the lack of a standard firmware interface on ARM systems; a familiar problem to embedded developers. This report covers the solutions debated at UDS — including Kexec bootloaders and the flattened device tree — and the choices made for the next Ubuntu release.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about Ubuntu to like — a lot I like — but I tend to write fairly critically about what seems to be the world's most popular free, open-source desktop operating system because not just I — but the rest of the user and developer communities — hold it up to a higher standard. And Ubuntu doesn't always measure up.

Ubuntu is more than a desktop operating system. That continues to be the message from Canonical, which is promoting another Ubuntu Server Edition user survey in a bid to better understand how customers are deploying the server operating system. Here’s the scoop.

My recent article about transitioning slide show backgrounds in GNOME garnered quite a bit of attention, so here's my first reminder of how to do the same thing in other desktop environments. This one will show you how to create a custom slide show backgrounds in KDE3.

After a long wait, Mozilla finally releases version 3.0 of Thunderbird. This latest version of Thunderbird brings much changes and makes it even more powerful than its ancestor. In this article, we take a look at the Thunderbird 3.0 and show you what you are going to expect in this great software.

For the past three years, Jono Bacon has worked as community manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest and most diverse projects in open source software. Consequently, when he recently published his thoughts on building and managing communities, people listen. More unusually, as I found out in a recent interview, when people like me critique his book, he listens, too, with a view to improving the second edition.

In order to appease European regulators, Oracle has made a number of commitments to the future of MySQL. According to a statement overnight (Australian time), Oracle has made a number of public commitments regarding MySQL in order to ease the concerns of European Union regulators investigating the proposed Oracle – Sun merger.

U.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years as the recession cut into budgets, and costs to protect inventions rose. The system is broken.. Pushing patents through the system is easier said than done: The decline in filings this year has brought to light a number of problems with the antiquated American patent system.

According to AndroLib, Google's Android Market has just crossed the 20,000 application milestone. The new milestone comes just over three months after reaching the 10,000 mark and shows strong application growth for the open source mobile operating system.

Downloading YouTube videos is among the first things you will look for once you get Ubuntu installed in your computer. Let me introduce you the easiest way to download(or save?) YouTube videos in your Ubuntu machine.

Oh dear, now I do not believe that was meant to happen. It appears that users of Office 2003 who also protect their documents with the Microsoft Rights Management Service (RMS) have found them so well protected that nobody can open them - not even the person who created the documents in the first place.

MEPIS Linux, the KDE based Linux distribution, released the beta1 of MEPIS 8.5. MEPIS Linux was one of the easy to use Linux distributions besides PCLinuxOS, before Ubuntu arrived. The users who wanted to use the latest Debian's snapshot, but afraid of all those text mode configuration tricks found MEPIS as the Debian for the masses

Android is maturing, both for developers and consumers. Will it dominate the mobile market? 2010 may bring the answer. Two years ago I began writing a book about writing applications for Android. Back then, most people had not heard of Android — in fact, unless you’re a phone-geek or a Linux fan, you may still not have heard of Android. When asked to describe my project, I simply described it as a book for folks like me who want to write software for the “Google Phone”. Of course, a “Google Phone” really didn’t exist at the time. But now, as 2010 approaches, rumors abound about the new phone built just for Google, named the “Nexus One”.

Ubuntu Software Center (initially Ubuntu Software Store) was released with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and it currently has only a few of the features it was designed for, being just stage 1 out of 4. The Ubuntu Software Center is a graphical utility for package management in Ubuntu. In version 1, it builds on the basic philosophy of Add/Remove Applications with an easier-to-use design. In version 2, the primary goals are to take the place of Synaptic and apturl, and to include ratings and reviews of software. Let's take a deeper look to what we'll have with Ubuntu Software center version 2 and more.

As the weaker forms of wireless encryption fail, migrating to stronger encryption protocols becomes more urgent. Eric Geier shows how to configure Linux clients to use strong encryption to connect to wireless networks.

I received an invitation to get Google Wave and, with serious intent, decided to give it a whirl. After all, I had initial misgivings about Facebook and twitter, but now you can't blow me off of either one with a stick of dynamite. I figured (reluctantly...how many ways to communicate do I really need?) that Wave would be the next big app in my life to consume what little time I don't have. I even wrote a review on Wave a few weeks ago, so I was on my way, right? Wrong. What happened?

Find out how to create, edit and manage important documents with Zimbra Collaboration Suite using Linux User & Developer's indispensable step-by-step guide…

Richard Stallman's strong position against proprietary applications is butting heads with some members of the GNOME Foundation. A call to split with Stallman's GNU Project is being considered.

KDE4 users know Gwenview the default image viewer for KDE, but may not know that Gwenview is one of the best image viewers ever existed. It is fast, quick, modern, shiny, particularly in full-screen mode, and has basic photo editing functions.

Last week, on my opendotdotdot blog, I was praising the Australian government for its moves to open up its data. I was rapidly – and rightly – taken to task in the comments for failing to mention that government's efforts to impose direct, low-level censorship on the country's Internet feed.