For this testing of the latest Snow Leopard and Lucid Lynx operating systems we used one of our newer Apple Mac Mini systems that had an Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 clocked at 2.00GHz, an Apple Mac-F22C86C8 motherboard with NVIDIA MCP79 Chipset, 1GB of DDR3-1067MHz system memory, a120GB Fujitsu MHZ2120B SATA HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics. Mac OS X 10.6.2 uses the 10.2.0 kernel, X.Org Server 1.4.2-apple45, GCC 4.2.1, and a Journaled HFS+ file-system. With Ubuntu 10.04 LTS not being officially released for a few weeks we used a daily snapshot from 2010-03-28 with the Linux 2.6.32-17-generic 64-bit kernel, GNOME 2.29.92, X.Org Server 1.7.6, NVIDIA 195.36.15 graphics driver with OpenGL 3.2.0, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. Both the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems were left with their defaults.
Available with Linux and IPv6, the EDS1100/2100 provides simple-to-configure, enterprise-level protection of electronic data using security protocols such as Secure Shell and Secure Sockets Layer.
€· Announced Distro: Parted Magic 4.9 Comes with GParted 0.5.2 and Parted 2.2 €· Announced Distro: Tiny Core 2.10 Comes with Some New Art €· Announced Distro: Trisquel 3.5 Released €· Announced Distro: openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4 Switches to Upstart €· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 5.2 with KDE 4.4.1 and GNOME 2.28 €· Announced Distro: SliTaz GNU/Linux 3.0 Has Arrived
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Product engineering and enterprise solutions company Calsoft, a 100-per cent subsidiary of the US -based Calsoftlabs, today announced its entry into the digital home market.
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The company said it would target services towards software platforms based on Linux, Windows and Android.
5. My budget is $1400
What? That low a budget for a new, and surprisingly beefy laptop? Sure! Why not? I know this is doable. Granted, it isn’t doable with a vendor like Emperor Linux — as a matter of fact it flatly rules them completely out — but it leaves in plenty of other options for me.
Canonical has definitely made some ISV progress in recent months, working more closely with companies like Groundwork Open Source. Still, Canonical insiders starting around September 2009 because to focus quite heavily on even better ISV support heading into the Ubuntu 10.04 launch. ISV support is particularly critical as Canonical strives to compete more effectively against Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux on servers.
IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) celebrated a decade of Linux on its System Z mainframe by recognizing the top winners, one of whom is Canadian, of the annual Master the Mainframe Contest.
Over the years the number of customers, vendors and use cases for running Linux alongside z/OS have grown, said Tom Rosamilia, general manager for IBM's System Z division, during a presentation at the company's Poughkeepsie plant and the focal point of much of the development and manufacturing of mainframes.
The default image viewer in Ubuntu, Eye of GNOME, now offers up a helpful dialogue when viewing a picture that has been set as your desktop wallpaper.
All in all, we see Quanta Plus as a web development tool that’s almost there. Given some more time and a steady growth to its user base, this software can become the best free alternative to the IDEs that cost hundreds of dollars.
Debreate is a graphical utility to aid in the creation of Debian packages. It automates packaging, so there is no need to create a build tree, Debreate will automatically construct one and build the .deb.
Huzzah! New version of Rhythmbox is released with lots of bug fixes and other goodies!
Rhythmbox holds a special place in my heart: not only is it the best Linux audio player I’ve ever used (and I’ve tried every one I’ve ever ran across), but it’s one of those driving forces that keep me motivated.
I have been following the WINE project for quite a few years. These guys are doing an incredibly hard job in trying to keep up with a moving target and basically re-writing an operating system to run natively on top of another operating system.
Many people think of the WINE project as an emulator for windows yet the very name of the project explains that it is not true. The name WINE is, as you most probably know, a typical open source acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. The very goal of the project is to recreate, without breaking any law, the functional equivalent of the windows operating systems libraries so programs written for windows can run natively under Linux.
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When there is equivalent Linux functionality for any available windows program out there, why would people still want to use windows programs? If you must use a windows program, then pay the piper and buy yourself a copy of the operating system. Or even better, learn how to effectively use the equivalent Linux program and wean yourself off of the nipple and be a big boy for a change.
Back in November there was an official announcement from Skype concerning an open-source Linux client. Details since then have been scarce on what exactly Skype plans to provide as open-source software, with some speculating just the user-interface/front-end side will be opened up.
A few weeks ago we looked at some of the GNU utilities that you can use to work with files, check MD5/SHA1 sums and check your disk usage. This time around I want to cover some of the utilities that you'll use for working with text files.
While there are quite a few services that offer free blog hosting, there are situations when you’d want to run a blog on your own server. This approach has its advantages, but setting up a server and then installing and configuring a blog system can be a daunting proposition – unless you choose to use Tonido, that is. This solution offers everything you need in one neat , easy-to-install package.
Hello again to all the KDE people. We are here with a third interview. Last time we had Tobias König, a KDE PIM developer. Today it’s the turn of Aleix Pol, a contributor to KDE EDU and KDevelop. As usual, there is also the original interview in Italian if you prefer to read that.
SliTaz 3.0 (release announcement) is upon us and we decided to take this tiny distribution for a spin and see how well it caters to the minimalist crowd. This distribution weighs in at an incredible 30 meg download, but does it contain the applications one needs to have a functional machine? Let's take a look.
Element 1.1 is a distribution designed specifically for home theater or media center computers. This is obvious when you boot up Element 1.1 which brings users Firefox, Transmission, XBMC, Decibel Audio Player, VLC, and many other useful multimedia apps together on this customized version of the XFCE desktop.
Unity Linux is not a conventional distribution of Linux. It’s a core on which developers can build their own distribution of Linux. We’ve set out from the start to provide an excellent minimum graphical environment that gave developers “just enough graphics” for them to create something. The smaller, the better. We elected to go with Openbox because of it’s size and stability. We selected using Mandriva as our base because of the number of packages they provide and the quality of those packages. We pushed lxpanel as a minimal panel because it provides just enough functionality for distro developers to see what they’ve installed after they’ve installed it…it also is familiar to most people whereas Openbox right click menu’s may not be. All in all, our target for the core release is developers. We’re not designing this basic desktop to be used by end users. We’re not trying to win any awards with our awesome minimalistic desktop skills. Why would we do this? To answer this, you have to take a look at our developers.
Developer Steven Shiau has announced the release of version 1.2.4-28 of Clonezilla Live. Clonezilla is an open source clone system with features similar to Symantec Ghost Corporate Ed and Partimage.
One of the reasons why I said PCLinuxOS is "A real distro-hopper-stopper is its ability to auto detect your devices. I have read elsewhere that mostly, only branded tvturner cards can work with linux. To my surprise, this is not the case with tvtime, the native tvturner software in PCLinuxOS and I guess it is available out-of-the-box on every versions of PCLOS (excellent job guys!).
This software (tvtime) is so easy to use. Just right click on it and a menu will pop out for you to select a task. To get your tvturner working, simply click on "channel management" then "scan for signal" and start watching your favorite tv show!
Looking to dress up your PCLinuxOS desktop? Check out these nice PCLinuxOS wallpapers created by sakasa.
Red Hat's commercial implementation of its open-source KVM hypervisor, Enterprise Virtualization 2.1 (RHEV) is just four months old, but changes in server hardware and end users' desire to run fatter virtual machines has compelled Red Hat to kick out another release.
The beta testing program for RHEV 2.2 opened up Monday, and with the next release, Red Hat is doubling up the number of virtual CPUs that a virtual machine can employ to 16 and is quadrupling the main memory that can be addressed by a VM to 256GB.
Red Hat launched Enterprise Virtualization Nov. 3 based on yet another hypervisor, KVM. Red Hat had arrived on the scene late, what with VMware, Citrix and Microsoft already partying like it was 1999 all over again. I wondered how long it would take for Red Hat to be able to demonstrate some uptake of KVM.
Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) today announced the beta availability of its next virtualization platform -- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 2.2.
The RHEV 2.2 release is the first public announcement that Red Hat has made about the virtualization platform since its initial public release in November 2009. The RHEV solution suite includes a standalone KVM hypervisor as well as a server virtualization management product.
On the performance side, RHEV 2.2 can now support up to 256 GB of memory for a virtual machine, which is a four-fold increase over the 64 GB that RHEV supported in November. Additionally with the RHEV 2.2 beta, Red Hat is expanding the platform to support both desktop and server virtualization management.
Linux specialist Red Hat has announced the release of the first beta for version 2.2 of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product. The latest development release of its virtualisation solution adds several new features and capabilities, including support for both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2. Codenamed “Lucid Lynx”, 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
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Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment. It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.
Ubuntu 10.04 is now about five weeks away, which means the announcement of Lucid+1 (our vote is still for Manky Monkey) is around the corner. To kill the time between now and the announcement of what's to come in the next version, we decided to take a look at the keywords used to describe previous Ubuntu releases to see how priorities have changed over the years
Intrepid Ibex users are advised to upgrade to one of the current standard releases, Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) or version 9.10 (Karmic Koala), to continue receiving updates.
Here's what you need to know. End-of-life (EOL) is a normal part of the software lifecycle, whether it's an application or a full-blown operating system. Software doesn't actually die: once the EOL date passes, your application won't pop up a dialog box with a tombstone on it that says "so long, and thanks for all the data." In reality, it means that the developers who wrote the software and the community or vendor that supports it simply does not have the resources to keep providing support.
Empathy is an open source instant messaging client that is built on top of the Telepathy framework. Empathy became a part of the GNOME desktop environment in 2008 with the release of GNOME 2.24 and is gradually gaining acceptance as the default instant messaging client in a number of mainstream Linux distributions.
Although it has the potential to bring a lot of value to the GNOME desktop, Empathy still suffers from some limitations and lacks several key features that can be found in alternatives like Pidgin. For example, it doesn't support metacontacts or message formatting. It also hasn't traditionally offered a whole lot of compelling GNOME integration to make it a must-have. The program is maturing, however, and will soon offer some impressive new features.
USB 3.0 promises up to 5 Gbit data transfers. Manufacturer Lindy now brings two SATA hard drive enclosures and a hard drive docking/cloning station with USB 3.0 to the marketplace.
Zerion Software is collaborating with SDG Systems to provide ruggedized Android solutions to the mobile workforce. Together, the two companies are working to build a field data-collection solution running the offline capable exZact mobile platform on rugged Google Android computers. Both firms see a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace for such a ruggedized solution to be used for Field Service, Task Management, and Work Order Management.
Why is Android getting such traction? For a couple of reasons, but mainly because it is free. Google is offering Android as free open source software optimized for communications. That combined with an growing library of applications and capabilities makes Android reasonably attractive as an embedded operating system.
Zerion Software is collaborating with SDG Systems to provide ruggedized Android solutions to the mobile workforce. Together, the two companies are working to build a field data-collection solution running the offline capable exZact mobile platform on rugged Google Android computers. Both firms see a tremendous opportunity in the marketplace for such a ruggedized solution to be used for Field Service, Task Management, and Work Order Management.
The JooJoo, originally called the Crunchpad, has a 12.l-inch capacitive touchscreen, Wi-Fi, a 4 GB solid-state drive and built-in Webcam and microphone for video chat. The device is powered by a proprietary, Web-centric version of Linux that boots in less than 10 seconds, the company says.
Italy-based Ekoore is shipping a tablet PC that runs Ubuntu Linux or Windows on an Intel Atom N270. The Ekoore ET10TA10 offers a 10.2-inch, 1024 x 600 backlit touchscreen, as well as 1GB of RAM, flash expansion, a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD), and WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and USB connections, says Ekoore.
'Year of Linux on the Tablet'
LXer contributor H.Kwint dug deeper into the specifics, even putting together a handy table that compares some of the contenders, including Notion Ink's Adam Tablet and Always Innovating's Touchbook.
"It's safe to say 2010 is the year of Linux on the tablet," Kwint went so far as to say.
A first version of an open source tool to help manage electronic petitions has been published on the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) for European public administrations.
IELO, Mandriva, Nexedi and TioLive join forces to create the Free Cloud Alliance (FCA), an alliance of Free / Open Source Software publishers which provides 100% Open Source solutions for the fast growing market of Enterprise Cloud Computing. The Free Cloud Alliance (freecloudalliance.org) is the first Open Source Cloud Computing Stack which covers both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) with a consistent set of technologies targetted at high performance and mission critical applications.
The Midgard Project has released the eighth maintenance release of Midgard 8.09 Ragnaroek LTS. Ragnaroek LTS is a Long Term Support version of the free software Content Management Framework.
He had ported his software to Digital's Unix system, and now the workstation hardware only cost 50,000 to run it, so the TCO had been reduced from 2.5 million dollars to 550,000 dollars, and was really only taking twice as long to run on the workstation than it had been running on the mainframe, but at one-fifth the cost. He was selling a lot more copies of his software, and of course he was also selling quite a few of our workstations. That was why Digital had invited him to our booth.
Despite all that, the FOSS law community is still growing- which is a testament to the power of the collaborative model. To me, the heart of the test for 'are people a community' is 'can I call on a known group of people for help in a pinch, and would they feel comfortable doing the same of me.' In this informal, unstructured way, there is definitely a growing FOSS legal community of shared interests and relationships. When Mozilla started the MPL process I could list at least a half-dozen people who I knew would want to be involved and would give of their time. A few months in to the process, and the list is now much longer. This informal community- a diverse group including partners at high-profile law firms, counsels at FOSS-using companies, individual practitioners, and others like SFLC- was very helpful in laying the early groundwork for the MPL process, and has continued to be helpful as we've gotten further into it.
What can I say? These regional Ruby conferences, they’re all good, based on my experience. This one was only weakly regional; about half the attendees were Scottish, others from all over Europe, and with a strong faction of Americans whom I presume were thinking about the Ruby-and-Whisky combination. If you haven’t been to a Ruby conference, you should go sometime.
Interested in working with EFF or Tor, and getting paid for it by Google? If you are a student and a coder, then we have good news for you: A few of our projects have been accepted for Google's Summer Of Code 2010.
The rise of ODF and demand on the part of governments for “openness” in formats and interoperability of applications has coincided – not coincidentally in my view – with a surge in offerings (desktop, web-based, mobile) in the office productivity space, providing the public sector for the first time in recent memory with greater choice and potential cost savings. It is no wonder that more governments are jumping on the ODF bandwagon.
I think something becomes inevitable when the positive aspects are overwhelming. Consider Marion Marchich’s points in favor of ODF:
* Avoiding lock-in * Thinking beyond the desktop * Ensuring long-term access * Saving money * Creating meaningful documents * Enabling interoperability
Not only are these all things that users want, but they are things that are inherent in an open format, and which incur additional effort to achieve (if they are even posssible) in a closed proprietary format!
I don’t know about you, but the presentations I create today are much simpler in design than those I created ten years ago. For example, I now never create presentations that include
* animation and builds * slide transitions * sound * video
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So just how much is really needed to create and represent presentations like those above? For the representation question, an appropriate query would be “what subset of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is necessary to include all the information necessary, and nothing more?’.
The creation side can vary quite a bit. Assuming you are using ODF, it would be possible though tedious to use a text editor and command line tools to create a file. I wouldn’t want to do that and would expect something with a better user interface to make slide creation and reuse easy.
With BIS 3.0, your BlackBerry now supports the following: OpenDocument presentations (.odp), OpenDocument spreadsheets (.ods), OpenDocument text (.odt), OpenDocument text templates (.ott) and Windows Media Audio (.wma).
A recent campaign to add more videos to Wikipedia is being used to try and push the advantages of the open source Theora video format over those encumbered by patents. For our imminent podcast, we're asking whether you think this campaign will work despite poor results in a recent quality comparison, or whether this issue is less about quality and more about freedom.
Without significant political changes, none of which appear likely, the United States is going to collapse. When and how it happens is hard to say, but the U.S. government’s spending is fiscally unsustainable, as the Government Accountability Office has been warning since 1992. As one such report said, that which is unsustainable will not be sustained.
Internet cafe users in the British capital may want to watch what they download. Scotland Yard is advising administrators of public Web spaces to periodically poke through their customers' files and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.
Greenpeace activists unfurled banners of every size today outside the offices of Dell in Bangalore, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen, just as Dell executives meet to discuss a roadmap to finally remove the worst toxic chemicals from their electronics. The message around the world to Dell's founder and CEO: "Michael Dell: Drop the Toxics!"
Billionaire tycoon David Koch likes to joke that Koch Industries is, “The biggest company you’ve never heard of”. But the nearly US$50 million that he and his brother Charles quietly funneled to front groups which deny that climate change is a problem is no joking matter. Our new report shows how that cash, between 1997 and 2008, went to groups working to prevent action being taken against climate change.
In 2,615 pages of financial reform legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress, there are no rules to ensure that banks keep enough cash-like assets when credit disappears.
The Treasury Department announced Monday that it had selected Morgan Stanley to handle the sale of its massive stake in Citigroup, spurning an offer from Goldman Sachs, which was willing to do the job at virtually no cost to the federal government.
Indeed, the big Wall Street firm has held off on plans for a major publicity plan designed to change public opinion.
FOX Business Network's Charles Gasparino reported on Monday that Goldman Sachs' (NYSE: GS) weakened image may have kept the firm from being chosen to advise the massive government sale of its stake in Citigroup Inc. (NYSE: C).
They see it as counterproductive to issue bonds and then encourage institutions to trade against them, which in their minds might create some market pressure to tank the bonds. Goldman Sachs no doubt smelled some fat fees in the nascent market for CDSs on municipal bonds. In some ways, it was an ideal situation. Lots of hedging and speculative business to be had, and the bonds back then weren't seen as likely to go belly up. They may have found a way to lay off the risk. The state thinks Goldman should have at least informed it of its efforts to get people to bet against their bonds.
Goldman Sachs is no longer portrayed as an impeccable monetary binge, but as a greedy giant who continues the bonus party even after taxpayers helped them out of the financial crisis, the Norwegian newspaper observes, adding that the bank has become like a swear word among the bloggers by the name of “Goldman Sucks”.
Two women have filed complaints against Wall Street banks, claiming they were discriminated against in their jobs after taking time off to have children. They are both seeking financial compensation.
An auditor had raised red flags about Olson's dealings in the Congo and referred its findings to the U.S. Justice Department for potential anti-bribery-law violations. As troubling, Terralliance had yet to close its books on 2007. Two lead board members, Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins and Joe DiSabato of Goldman, informed Temasek's lead negotiator, Nagi Hamiyeh, that they intended to demote the charismatic but free-spending founder to chief scientist.
Facebook has once again decided to tweak its privacy policy, but this time the Mark Zuckerberg-run company has told its users to expect another overhaul ahead of making the changes - presumably in an effort to prevent the kind of protest the Web2.0rhea site suffered last year.