Showing all newswire headlines

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated with the project's ill-advised decision to allow any local user to install packages without the root password. That mistake is now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than this particular problem. In this article, your editor looks at the quality of the Fedora 12 release and ponders what Fedora 13 may bring.

Welcome to Lucid Lynx Alpha 1, which will in time become Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. New features: updated packages, Linux kernel 2.6.32, KDE 4.4 beta 1, HAL removal Alpha 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Lucid development cycle. Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 1 Screen Shots at SEO Expert Consultants Inc.

(Sacramento, USA: December 10, 2009) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced that it had expanded its training partner program to include 44 nations--up from 33 a year ago. In addition the organization has increased the number of LPI-Approved Training Partners (LPI-ATP) and LPI-Approved Academic Partners (LPI-AAP) to a total of 242 partners -- up 10% from this time last year.

Sugar Labs has announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick version 2, a major update of its Linux-based operating system for education that was originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. The new version introduces an ebook reader and a number of other important features.

Recently via email we were asked to run a comparison of the different anti-aliasing and image rendering options between the ATI/AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers and hardware. Well, we have now run a few quantitative and qualitative tests at different anti-aliasing levels under Linux. For those that want to run the tests themselves with their own drivers and hardware, we also have provided instructions on how you can easily do so using the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" development build -- it is irresistibly easy.

Red Hat has open sourced a virtual desktop protocol, called the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment (SPICE), in the hope of fostering its wider adoption.

Raptor is a cross platform chess interface and pgn viewer that currently supports FICS and BICS.

Canonical, and the Ubuntu developers, have announced the availability of the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named "Lucid Lynx". The first development milestone is the first of three planned alpha releases.

Red Hat actually opened up the SPICE protocol yesterday during their Virtual Experience 2009 event. Somehow I missed that. Have a look at the press release if you are interested... as well as their site to house the new open source project - spice-space.org. This seems to have caused some buzz in certain corners of the virtualization websphere (does anyone still use that word?) but so far no one has said what it could mean for us run-of-the-mill Linux users looking for a good, fast remote desktop protocol. I asked a couple of questions on the fedora-virt mailing list and received some informative replies.

You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we've been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.

Dell announced new Ubuntu Linux-ready OptiPlex desktops, including a power-efficient model claimed to be the "world's smallest fully-functional commercial desktop." In addition to the 9.4 x 2.6 x 9.3-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready OptiPlex 780 USFF desktop, Dell announced a 13-inch Vostro V13 laptop that also offers Ubuntu.

NiVi Games (www.nivigames.com) announced that BentBend is now available for Linux. BentBend is a new brain teaser puzzle game. Connect colored cubes two by two to get a rich bonus. Your connections must not cross. BentBend has good music and nice graphics letting you enjoy the game for hours. Go through all the 100 increasingly challenging levels, become a winner and set a new record at high scores.

I have been using GNU/Linux for two years so far, and I'm using Ubuntu (GNOME). Over this period, I have tested a lot of download manager applications; unfortunately, I can't find the one that suits best for me, because what I have in mind was a program which more or less is simple, lightweight and practical. I don't want a download manager which is crowded with features nor a primitive one and certainly I don't want one that works via a command line/terminal!

This tutorial shows how to set up a Mandriva 2010.0 Free (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box). This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of Mandriva 2010.0.

It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.

The computing world is always very unpredictable. That must be why there is a small number of people who make large amounts of money from it: they are in the right (unpredictable) place, at the right (unpredictable) time. Who would have ever guessed that Javascript, a simple scripting language initially thought as a simple means to make web pages “cooler”, would become… drum roll… the world’s new CPU? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Red Hat has long been the poster child of Linux and open source, the distribution that has been there since the beginning, grew up right, got all the luck, usually made the right decisions, and fetched up on top of the pile. Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt, the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source (in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many different companies.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny.

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT has decided to spend a lot of its citizens' tax money helping them recover from malware directed at Microsoft machines. Spiegel Online reports that the government wants to prop up another industry giant. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) plans to team up with Internet service providers (ISPs) to establish a call centre helping Windows users who have malware problems. Starting in 2010, ISPs will track down customers with infected PCs. These customers will then be directed to a special website offering advice on removing the malware. If this does not work there will be a call centre where a staff of about 40 will try to fix the problems. There is no indication about how much the German government intends to spend on the project.

I am very happy to announce that the Mono C# compiler is now C# 4.0 feature complete.