Showing all newswire headlines

Computer manufacturer ASUS has published the Linux source code for its Seashell line of netbooks. Previous to the companies Seashell line up, ASUS netbooks were often available with Linux as an option for the pre-installed operating system (OS), usually at a lower price. With the release of its current Seashell models, the 1008HA and the 1005HA, however, Windows XP has been and still is the only pre-installed OS option available.

The number of public administrations in Belgium that use the open source office productivity suite OpenOffice is rising steadily. And with it the use of the open document format ODF

I'm sure you've seen this is as often as I have, even from supposed Free Software advocates: "I can't switch completely to Linux now because I still need this $foo application. When a free alternative appears then I'll switch." They may or may not be sincere; they are certainly missing the point. Because it's not enough to just sit around and wait for the Magic Software Fairy to deliver your perfect applications with all the bells and whistles for free.

At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer. The improvements in KOffice have largely been in the libraries, on top of which a Maemo-specific GUI was written. KOffice became faster and more stable, and the various file import filters have been greatly improved. This includes the beginnings of MS Office 2007 import support. Thanks to this work the KOffice document viewer for Maemo will be able to properly read files created with a wider range of office applications, and all other users of KOffice 2.x will benefit.

The only thing changing faster than mobile devices is the business model for distributing your applications.

Canonical is touting private cloud capabilities in an upgrade to its Ubuntu Linux OS being announced on Tuesday. Available for free download on Oct. 29, Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition introduces UEC (Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud), an open-source cloud computing environment based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Businesses can take advantage of private clouds, Canonical said.

The World Wide Web is more like the Wild Wild West, and there are Linux programs to help parents steer their children away from the bad neighborhoods. Matt Hartley looks at a number of programs that put control in parent's hands.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala will both be released this month. We look at what the two new operating systems will offer.

Asterisk, the open source IP PBX, is turning 10 years old. And Digium, the fast-growing provider of commercial Asterisk solutions, is hosting the Astricon conference this week. All sounds well. But The VAR Guy will raise seven key questions when he speaks with Digium officials later today. Here they are.

andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7; 32-bit versions only). andLinux uses coLinux, a port of the Linux kernel to Windows which allows andLinux to run almost all Linux applications in Windows, without modifications and comes in two flavors: KDE and XFCE. Since andLinux installs a full operating system, you'll need to make sure you've got quite a bit of free space on your hard drive. The KDE version eats up more than 4GB of space while the XFCE version takes about 2GB. If all you want to do is run a single Linux application like Amarok, Ardour, or Cinelerra, you might be better off checking out KDE for Windows and waiting for the developers ro port your favorite applications. But if you want to be able to run any Linux application you like without rebooting, andLinux is worth checking out.

Open source software the key to cost-effective business phone systems, says Gavin Henry, saving tens of thousands of pounds at the outset Aberdeen-based Suretec Systems, the successful open source IT systems specialist, has launched a telecom business to meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses looking for cost-effective and highly featured telephone systems. Oil and gas sector companies, along with professional services, travel and public sector organisations, are all taking an interest in the huge cost savings that can be achieved with open source products – and now for their telecoms systems, too.

A preview of the Moblin v2.1 image is now available for download & testing. This tiny Linux edition is suitable for netbooks & nettops. This release includes many community & customer requested enhancements. Moblin images require an Intel Atom processor based netbook or nettop. The release target for Moblin v2.1 for netbooks and nettops is expected to release to the community in the 4th quarter of 2009.

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Fedora 11. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

Lindsay Tanner's Gov 2.0 Taskforce has spawned three hacker events in support of its Mashup Australia competition – including two hosted by Google Australia – as it seeks creative ways to use dormant public sector data. Set up by the Finance Minister in June, the Taskforce is now running at full tilt, with the Mashup Australia competition central to its program. The competition wants hackers to conceive and build new applications using public sector data sets released by Federal and state governments.

Prior to the Eleventh Real Time Linux Workshop in Dresden, Germany, a small group met to discuss the further development of the realtime preemption work for the Linux kernel. This "mini-summit" covered a wide range of topics, but was driven by a straightforward set of goals: the continuing improvement of realtime capabilities in Linux and the merging of the realtime preemption patches into the mainline.

In late September AMD had introduced the Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards as the successors to the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, respectively. These graphics cards, which are part of the Evergreen GPU family, have been performing quite nicely according to reports, but we have yet to test either of these Cypress graphics cards under Linux. Today though AMD is introducing the first midrange graphics cards in the Evergreen family. Under the Juniper codename, the Radeon HD 5750 and HD 5770 are being launched with both graphics cards being quite similar except for the ATI Radeon HD 5770 shipping with slightly higher core and memory clocks along with a different heatsink. In this review we have the first Linux-based benchmarks of these two new graphics cards, which are also the first publicized Linux benchmarks from any AMD Evergreen graphics processor.

I was thrilled when I saw that Mark Shuttleworth announced the election of Elizabeth Krumbach to the Ubuntu Community Council. Here is my “open memo” of congratulations to Elizabeth:..

If you are getting ready to build your own internal cloud-style virtual infrastructure, Canonical - the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distro of Linux - really wants you to think outside of the box and consider the forthcoming "Karmic Koala" Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition. Canonical is looking to build some excitement for Ubuntu 9.10, so it's announcing the new OS today even though the Server Edition will not be ready for download until October 29.

Generally with each major Phoronix Test Suite release there are three alpha and three beta releases prior to going gold, but for Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 "Bardu" this has been extended to four alpha releases. Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Alpha 4 carries a fair amount of changes -- in fact, nearly every test profile has received an update to take advantage of new pts-core features. This new development release also carries a few optimizations, regression fixes, Phodevi improvements, and faster XML parsing.

With Google and Verizon recently announcing that several Android phones will be coming out on their network, a Linux lover might have smartphones on the brain. Obviously, having Linux running on your phone is awesome, but which Linux OS should you choose? Android? WebOS? Maybe even Maemo (Nokia N900) or roll your own on a Neo Freerunner? This article will help you run two of these (Android and WebOS) as virtual appliances using VirtualBox. In the first part of the article I'll cover Android, in part two, later this week I'll cover WebOS.