Showing all newswire headlines

The battle between Linux and Windows will most likely rage on for years to come. I can foresee that even when all things migrate to the cloud,

MySQL use declining, PostgreSQL and MariaDB use rising and no majority support for any of the possible outcomes of the current European Commission investigation into Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems; these are some of the results of a survey, carried out by the 451 Group, of open source users show which shows they are split over the future of MySQL.

If browsing the featured workspaces teaches you anything, it's that a good scrubbing and a fresh coat of paint goes a long way towards making an office over. Check out the before and after pictures of today's total makeover. Lifehacker reader Vanderfleet-Martin had an office in serious need of some cleaning and some "spiffing up", so he designed a new layout in Google Sketchup. Over Thanksgiving weekend he hauled everything out, repainted the whole thing, brought in a new desk with support shelves, and remade the whole office into a colorful and well organized version of its former self.

Has the federal government overreached in tapping social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to investigate possible criminal activity? The non-profit civil liberties' group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) doesn't know, but it's filed suit to find out the scope of the government's investigations.

There are more options than ever for mobile Internet, from ubiquitous w-i-fi to purchasing your own personal MiFi to carrying all of Wikipedia with you. Paul Ferrill looks at some cool mobile gadgets for traveling Linux users.

When the graphical interface setup under openSUSE didn't work just right, one could always run SaX2 to correct it. Now Novell wants to retire the tool.

It has been a tough year for a lot of vendors in the IT space and for Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), it's been no exception. But even as it posts a widening quarterly loss, the company's executives aren't easing up on the pace going into 2010. Instead, they described plans to expand Novell's Linux business as well as a new strategy to cash in on what they see as enterprises' need to better manage their workloads across physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. "I believe there is a new market for solutions that address the risks and challenges for computing securely across multiple environments," Hovsepian said. "This need plays to the strengths of Novell -- identity and security, systems and resource management, and our new SUSE Appliance program."

Novell announced quarterly results on December 3. So how are the company’s individual solutions groups performing — particularly the SUSE Linux solutions group? And what’s the latest with Novell’s partner efforts? The VAR Guy got some perspectives from Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon. Here’s a recap.

ChromeOS Cherry(Diet Chromium OS) released with new Broadcom/Ralink support and many bugfixes! Broadcom WiFi works, but you need to wait about 5 minutes after booting to connect to a network.

John Masters is a Linux kernel hacker for almost 14 years, since he first attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Massachusetts, and works for an enterprise Linux vendor. He also writes a monthly column for Linux User & Developer…

Respected Free Software lawyer, Eben Moglen and the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Centre ) have sent a letter to the European Commission saying that it believes that the Commission has "underestimated the robustness the GPL has consistently demonstrated". The letter is a response to the concerns expressed in the Commission's Statement of Objections that the GNU Public Licence was insufficient protection against competition issues raised by the acquisition.

Another voice heard on the European Commission's objection to Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems. This time, Eben Moglen has weighed in with an analysis of the objections related to the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2). Moglen disagrees with the commission, and says that the GPLv2 is sufficient to protect the MySQL community apart from Oracle. According to the commission, the GPLv2 provides "inadequate protection" for third parties to work with MySQL if the deal goes through. This has been supported by Richard M. Stallman, who opposes the deal along with Knowledge Ecology International.

Linux is often overlooked when it comes to music production. For a long time, there were good reasons for that. The complicated sound system, lack of professional-quality software, and limited hardware compatibility have all contributed toward a bad reputation for Linux when it comes to quality audio tools. We here at MakeTechEasier thought it was time to take a look at where things stand when it comes to music production on Linux, particularly for guitarists. In this article, we’ll cover some things like tab/notation software, audio editing, and multitrack recording.

Forget about the software, this is one bit of hardware I want! Anyone got a few million dollars to help me get my back bedroom green data center off the ground? :)

Installing OpenVPN is easy and platform independent. Modern Linux systems, such as SuSE, Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu, provide sophisticated installation and package management systems, and still offer other ways to install the software. In this two-part article we will install OpenVPN on different Linux versions and FreeBSD.

The configuration of OpenLDAP got a bit (more) complicated. cn=config is still used, but when installing the packages from the repositories only a skeleton configuration of openldap is installed. You're not asked anymore to provide a password when the package is installed and issuing the "dpkg-reconfigure slapd" only resets openldap to the skeleton configuration. You will have to set up the openldap database, root dn and acl's yourself using the root account (or sudo) in order to configure openldap. Here is how I configured openldap in Karmic Koala, but I do not issue any guarantee that this setup will suit your needs or works for you as it worked for me.

Linux User & Developer magazine talks to the multitalented open source pioneer, Klaus Knopper, who once said that computers are stupid, ill-designed and incompatible…

It's a Bizarro-World indeed when Microsoft is held up by a judge in Europe as a paragon of openness, but that's apparently what happened in a law suit brought by Nintendo. The games console and software maker has lost its case against Divineo Group in a Paris suit to block the sale of Nintendo DS Flash cartridges in France. The judge dismissing Nintendo's case is reported to have said that by blocking non-Nintendo carts, the company is purposely locking out developers from their consoles.

As they plunged into a project on ancient Egypt this fall, Jay Martino's Cupertino Middle School students probably didn't realize they were on the front lines of a high-stakes battle between Google and Microsoft. But the sixth-graders, who did the entire research project on a "walled" network of student Web sites using document-sharing software and e-mail provided by Google for free, are among the thousands of students worldwide that Google and Microsoft are fighting over.

AMD and SiSoftware have teamed up to develop a benchmark testing suites for OpenCL. Released by SiSoftware, the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite is part of SiSoftware's Sandra 2010. OpenCL is an open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. SiSoftware's Sandra 2010 software provides remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks.