Showing all newswire headlines

This year's linux.conf.au — which will, despite the name, be held in Wellington, New Zealand — is fast approaching. For those waiting to get in on the action up front, the time to act is now, because the early bird will soon have flown the coop. The annual linux.conf.au conference is the grandest Linux gathering of the Australasian year, and one of the crown jewels of Linux conventions worldwide. The schedule for this year's event includes a wide representation of the Open Source community, as always, including keynotes by Jonathan Corbet, Andrew Tridgell, Matthew Garrett, and Linux Journal's own Glyn Moody. The miniconf schedule — comprising the conference's first two days — boasts sessions on the business of Open Source, cloud computing, Arduino, system administration, a distro summit, and Wave development, among others.

What does this have to do with Linux, you ask? Windows 7 ain't Linux, that's what. Yesterday was Microsoft's big day. Windows 7 was released. Did you go buy your copy already? Are you waiting? Whether you have or haven't doesn't really matter but I'm going to give you my five reasons why you should switch to Windows 7 and five more why you shouldn't. Both are compelling and perhaps might change your mind one way or another.

The top topic in the computer world this week is Windows 7. The following information is gained from tech reports and manuals. As far as I am aware, the following information is reliably accurate.

Yesterday, as anyone involved in computing knows, Windows 7 was released by Microsoft with much marketing hype and fanfare... Hewlett-Packard also did something yesterday, albeit very quietly. HP removed Linux entirely from the part of their website where the sell netbooks. The day Windows 7 became available the HP Mi interface appears to have died a quiet death. A visit to the HP Mini pages reveals that HP is only offering "genuine" Windows 7 and "genuine" Windows XP.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced a two day, hands-on course that acquaints atendees with Linux kernel documentation, kernel configuration, kernel debugging, kernel measurement and other tools. This course trains developers in effective debugging and performance measurement and improvement techniques for Linux kernel. This class is scheduled for October 29th - October 30th, 2009.

The CentOS project, which has apparently settled a dispute that threatened to lead to a fork, released CentOS 5.4. Reflecting changes made to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, CentOS 5.4 upgrades 266 packages, adds 27, and implements preview versions of the ext4 file-system and KVM hypervisor.

Mozilla Labs developers have revealed project Raindrop, an approach to handling a large number of messages from email and RSS to YouTube and Twitter. Raindrop uses a mini web server to dig through messages from those sources and attempts to categorise them, pulling out important or personal messages and bringing them to the top of the user's view. Examples of this filtering include automatically detecting email from mailing lists, messages from friends or relatives or status messages from online retailers such as Amazon, and presenting them in context based on the preferences of the user.

There have been a few upgrades a day popping into the Update Manager on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, for those keeping score on the animal names) installation, and have you noticed what I've noticed? Those updates are downloading very, very slowly.

All the computing world hype this week has been about Windows 7: Cheap Windows 7; Microsoft's future rides on Windows 7; etc., etc. What what if you're not that excited about Windows 7? After all, it's still as insecure as ever, and upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major pain. So if you want, or are going to be forced by your aging PC, to move to another operating system, why not give Linux a try?

We all know we can use open source software without paying, but the real question is: what compels people to buy free stuff? Most widely used free and open source software can also be purchased. So what do you get for the money?

Microsoft has invited open source applications provides to run on Windows Azure, Microsoft's forthcoming Windows cloud platform. And some opens source specialists -- including SplendidCRM -- are accepting the invite.

Here’s how the software business really works: A software company charges your firm an enormous upfront licensing fee and locks you into escalating costs for decades to come, often using a set of hardball tactics.

Openoffice.org for kids or better say OOo4kids is a project that aims to provide a simplified version of openoffice.org for kids between 7-12 years .

The FSF is launching a new advocacy campaign, and we'd love to have you involved. One of the most important tasks for us at FSF is to help foster the understanding that free software is crucial to a free society, and that citizens should switch to free software at home and in their own work, for freedom's sake. But in many ways, most of this work has always been done by the millions of free software users around the world, telling others why they care about free software and what they use it for.

If you create user accounts on a server, and then allow people to log on to the ftp server under those accounts, there’s a chance that some hacker could find a way out of the chroot jail. That would allow him to access areas of the file system where he has no authorization, and possibly to plant Trojans or other malicious programs. You can increase your security using FTP by creating virtual users. These users can use FTP but they are limited in access to the system as a whole.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 11 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed "Spectra SDR" software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River's Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a "firewalled subsidiary" of Intel, committed to independence.

The history, status, and future of audio for Linux systems was the topic of two talks—coming at the theme from two different directions—at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Ardour and JACK developer Paul Davis looked at audio from mostly the professional audio perspective, while PulseAudio developer Lennart Poettering, unsurprisingly, discussed desktop audio. Davis's talk ranged over the full history of Linux audio and gave a look at where he'd like to see things go, while Poettering focused on the changes since last year's conference and "action items" for the coming year.

There is just one week left until Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be released, but is it worth the upgrade if you are running a netbook? From our testing of the development releases, it is most certainly worth the upgrade, especially when compared to Ubuntu 9.04 with its buggy Intel driver stack that caused many problems for Atom netbook users. Ubuntu 9.10 brings many usability improvements to the Linux desktop, various new packages, and the overall system performance has improved too. We have ran a set of benchmarks on both a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and Samsung NC10 under Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 to illustrate the performance gains along with a few regressions.

Suddenly I was surveying the market again for a good buy on a netbook preloaded with Linux. I found a wide variety of systems with Linux available from mainstream outlets and factory direct, at least here in the United States where I live. While I don't have updated market share figures it's clear, despite claims by Microsoft and their supporters, that Linux remains entrenched in the netbook market and is spreading out from there.