I work in a small mom and pop computer store. I fix up older systems and install linux, then resell. I’ve put quite a few people on the path to open software and the freedoms of linux.
Pogoplugs are great little storage devices, but they can do more than they let on. Let's take a look at how you can hack a Pogoplug into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web server.
This is a fun little project, but it does take some time and patience. Be sure to set aside a few hours this weekend to get it up and running. That said, let's get started!
Org-mode is for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, doing project planning, and authoring with a fast and effective plain-text system.
Guest: Carsten Dominik for Org-mode
This week, on KDE and the Masters of the Universe, Kolab Groupware pusher, Paul Adams.
I must say I am slightly torn, do I snatch up a single GPU nVidia system now - before I can no longer find them, do I wait and see if nVidia releases optimus technology for Linux, or should I just boycott the nVidia cooperation all together since they see Linux as a second class operating system?
Fglrx was updated yesterday in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and what's special about this is that it finally supports Xorg 1.9 and 2.6.35 kernel. Up until now, ATI users who've tried to install Fglrx or upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 would get a blank screen. So if you have an ATI graphics card and want to use Fglrx, you can finally install / upgrade to the latest Ubuntu 10.10.
Thanks to kernel mode-setting and other improvements to the X.Org Server, we are basically there, but it's something that has been said for over a year. Moblin though has been running the X.Org Server as a user since their Moblin 2.0 release and now with the MeeGo operating system while others are now looking to get in on the root-free action.
With Mesa 7.9 just around the corner and it sporting a new GLSL compiler, support for new OpenGL extensions, and months worth of other changes to core Mesa and its drivers, we decided to run some benchmarks of the latest Intel Arrandale graphics processor with the past few Mesa releases to see how the performance compares. We also have ATI and Nouveau Mesa benchmarks on the way.
DeaDBeeF is an audio player for GNU/Linux systems with X11.It is mainly written by Alexey Yakovenko, with contributions from a lot of different people (see about box in the player for more details).
Pithos is a free download for Linux systems only, and requires a free Pandora account to use.
Ubuntu’s default music player Rhythmbox comes with a host of handy plug-ins either enabled by default or waiting to be enabled via the ‘Edit > Plugins’ menu, but if the default selection leaves you wanting you can easily add more
Avant Window Navigator(AWN) is an awesome dock application for Linux. Over the years, AWN has evolved a lot and is now the almost-perfect dock application for Ubuntu/Linux users.
Minimum Profit is a curses/GTK text editor for programmers.
System Administrators (SAs) need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments*. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have proven track records and have stood the test of time in the data center.
PlayOnLinux 3.8.3 has been released, it was a silent release and no changelog has been provided by the PlayOnLinux team.
As we see Linux get further penetration on the desktop, we see more Wine compliance, more native titles and traditional Windows packages having a Linux version too (I only need cite Utorrent producing a Linux version of their Windows software due to popular demand)
The official page for Urban Terror is rather professional looking and there’s nothing to suggest that this is a free title as opposed to one for sale on your console.
Eduke32 is awesome first person shooter game and a cross-platform Duke3D (Duke Nukem 3D) port which provides many new features for mod authors, including an enhanced scripting system and OpenGL renderer. It offers countless platforms on which to build and improve on and with no shortage of Duke Nukem enthusiasts it can only get better, Thanx to Eduke32's creators we are able to match memory and relive our gaming youth with much greater graphics.
Clementine is a port to KDE4 of one of the most beloved music players on Linux, Amarok 1.4. The latest release brings several new features, including iPod, MTP and USB mass storage disks support, queue manager, support for Wii Remote to control it, and numerous bug fixes to already existing features.
We all need a bit of a change now and again, right? Especially in the desktop department, us Linux people are always changing things around. And we like to shake things up a bit. So here , for your eye candy pleasure, we have hand-selected fifteen KDE-themed wallpapers for you to check out. Since the theme this time around was KDE, you'll see some iteration of KDE branding in each of these desktop wallpapers. So let us present them now, for you, dear reader, and your downloading pleasure.
Recently I did an introductory “walk around” GNOME (see “A walk around the GNOME desktop“) which offered the new users to Linux a look from the ground level at one of the most popular of the Linux desktops. This time around, I will do the same service to the KDE desktop. I will focus on KDE 4.5 (since that is the most recent release) with the goal of showing you just how user-friendly KDE makes the Linux desktop.
A couple guidelines:
* Screenshots must use the Clearlooks theme, a GNOME background / wallper and the default GNOME icons * The icon in the GNOME menu on the panel must show the GNOME foot, not a distribution logo * Your GNOME panel should be as clean as possible (If using Ubuntu, do not show the messaging menu in the panel) * If using openSUSE, your panel needs to be on the top * Your screenshots will be licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 license
Recently I had a reader request a bit of a “how to” on the GNOME desktop. After giving it some thought, and at first wondering why anyone would need a walk around for the GNOME desktop, I realized that some users simply don’t have the ability to look at the computer desktop from the same vantage point as those of us who “get it”. With that thought in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to give a sort of walk through of the GNOME desktop from the perspective of the new user.
I’ve mentioned a few candidates for the 150Mhz, 32Mb machine, which I keep on hand to deliberately confound with software written 14 years after its creation.
I don’t think I made any mention of it here, because if I search this site for “Feather Linux,” not much comes up. And to be honest, outside of this site, I don’t see much mention of it either.
Red Hat, the publicly traded software firm that had revenue of $748 million last year, is checking out Atlanta and other cities with strong local universities as it considers a potential move of its headquarters.
As always, we'll be testing a range of graphics driver functions, and we need as many people as possible to join in so we can evaluate the widest possible range of hardware and identify as many bugs as possible for the developers to fix. You can do all the testing from a live image - no need for an installed copy of Fedora 14, though you can test that way too if you like - and the testing is very easy, there are step-by-step instructions for each test and for entering your results. And of course, there'll be many people in IRC to help with testing and debugging.
As an end user you might not notice much difference between Fedora 13 and Fedora 14. You should notice an increase in speed overall, but from the perspective of the desktop — nothing much has changed. That doesn't mean users of Fedora should not be excited. Fedora 14 promises to bring a much improved over all experience for the Linux user. And improving on Fedora 13 only means that Fedora is once again a serious contender for that much beloved best Linux distribution title.
Although it seems 14 is targeted primary toward developers, it will prove to be a distribution that anyone can happily use. As of this writing, September 25, 2010, Fedora 14 is still in Alpha. The first beta is scheduled to hit the pipes September 28th, 2010. Fedora pre-release images can always be found on the pre-release page.
hen I patched them all. Some are Debian Lenny GNU/Linux and some are Squeeze. They both seem to work well. Squeeze had a ton of patches over the summer. I changed about 75% of the files on drives.
Freezes
A freeze is when a particular type of development must stop, typically ready for release. There are different type of freeze, such as UI Freeze (no more changes in user interface elements), string freeze (no more translations), and feature freeze (no more significant feature development).
Alphas
Throughout a release cycle we make a number of snapshot releases as the release develops. These alpha releases are sometimes incomplete and buggy (owing to their work-inprogress nature), but provide a good opportunity to target features to them.
Betas
Beta release are feature-complete releases that need a lot of testing. We often recommend the beta as a good time for testers to upgrade, stresstest Ubuntu and file bugs.
Release candidate
A release candidate comes just before the final version, and is released to spur on a final chunk of testing from the community. This six-month cycle and these different elements are present in every release, and the community is welcome to upgrade to a new development release as soon as it opens for work – though regular users may wish to wait until the later stages of development before they try the new version out.
Popular open source software is of very high quality, often, e.g. in the case of media player software, surpassing its closed competitors. If the publishers in the Store decided to sell open source software, they would rarely sell anything that wouldn’t be viewed as a donation to support the project. It is a vicious cycle, since Linux users rarely appreciate a closed development model – open sourcing an application on the other hand would effectively eliminate their sales by enabling people to download the source code and simply repackage and redistribute the program. Someone would do it.
* Command and Conquer. * How-To : Program in Python – Part 15, Virtualize Part 4 – FreeBSD, and Run A Business With Ubuntu. * Review – TuxGuitar. * Top 5 – Ways To Run Windows Apps. * plus: MOTU/Loco/Translation Interviews, Ubuntu Games, My Opinion, My Story, and much much more!
Close to the end of the Lucid release cycle, I posted an update of what’s been happening in the Edubuntu project. Now seems like a good time to do it again! This release wasn’t as big shake-up as the last one, but it’s still a very good release for Edubuntu that builds on the work we did in the previous release.
The computers — 8,080 in all, worth $1.8 million — were bought for schoolchildren in Babil, modern-day Babylon, a gift of the American taxpayers. Only they became mired for months in customs at the port, Umm Qasr, stalled by bureaucracy or venality, or some combination of the two. And then they were gone.
Open Source provides solutions at the lowest costs possible or at no cost at all while Proprietary Software promises the provision of the best-in-the-business solutions at a higher cost.
Perhaps it's not fair to make a judgement call so early given that this is OpenIndiana's first release and they're just getting started, but this initial offering felt more like an early beta than a final release. The system is stable and there are some good features in place. I liked the installer and the Device Driver Utility is a great point in the operating system's favour. Hardware support was a little better this time around than it was a year ago on OpenSolaris. But the heavy nature of the operating system combined with the fickle privilege escalation and small package repository makes OpenIndiana an unappealing choice right now for a desktop system. Hopefully these matters will get ironed out as the project matures.
There is one other thing I feel should be addressed. OpenIndiana seems to be lacking a focus. It has its roots in server technology, but it has become memory hungry, runs a desktop and uses a graphical installer. On the other hand it lacks the range of applications and drivers one might expect in a desktop system. Some people have told me it's more of a testing ground for people migrating, testing and developing across platforms, but if that's the case where are the great development tools and virtualization software?
The wonderful tools which were previously attracting people to OpenSolaris (ZFS, DTrace) have been ported to other operating systems. OpenIndiana doesn't showcase Sun/Oracle technology; all it really does is give people an open source version of Solaris. And, if you're into tweaking operating systems or you're considering a migration to Oracle solutions, then I suppose that's all OpenIndiana needs to be. As a former fan of Solaris, I was hoping to find something which stood out, something the operating system could hang its hat on, and I didn't find that. OpenIndiana isn't a bad system by any means, but I haven't found a reason, besides curiosity, to run it either.
People ask me why programmers write code and give it away “for free”. There are many reasons, but one I often give is that a programmer might end up at a conference and a grateful user of their code might “buy them a beer, or even a dinner.”
It was February or March of 1995, and the port of Linux to the Alpha processor was well underway. In talking with some of the developers over the Internet, I started to hear rumors that the Alpha port would not have “shared libraries”, but instead would have statically-linked binaries.
For those of you who do not understand the ramifications of statically linked binaries, it means that every program has all of the libraries it needs to run linked as one blob on the disk and even in the main memory of the computer with the rest of the code that the programmer wrote.
In the early days of programming this was not as horrible as it sounds, because few libraries existed that could really be “shared”, but as operating systems became more sophisticated and included math libraries, graphics libraries, security libraries and a variety of other functionality that could be shared between programs, the duplication of this code thousands of times on an individual system by linking it into every program took up huge amounts of disk space and additional memory space that became intolerable.
If you're looking for good open source developer tools, you literally have thousands to choose from. For this list, we focused on 60 of the best and most well known. Rather than trying to rank them, we've arranged them into categories and listed them in alphabetical order.
That said, we're sure to have left off a few (or perhaps even a few dozen) that deserve to be included. Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.
One quick note about operating systems: Many of these open source developer tools run on a wide range of OSes. In some cases, they support more than a hundred different platforms.
For the sake of keeping the list short and readable, we noted whether each developer tool supports the big three – Windows, Linux and OS X. If you want to know whether a particular tool will run on Solaris or FreeBSD or another platform, you can click the link to check its Web site.
Google's browser tells Google's Analytics package that it's a lot more popular than it actually is?
Internet Browser Votes Mozilla Firefox 128 Google Chrome 49 Opera 35 Chromium 30 SwiftFox 6 SeaMonkey 6 IE through WINE 4 Epiphany 4 Konqueror 3
We have featured a number of mobile phone concepts before, Nokia Morph Concept Phone for example. But Seabird concept phone from Mozilla is in a league of its own. Seabird is a community driven mobile phone concept that debuted at Mozilla Labs 'Concepts'.
The community’s response to our release has been amazing. Within the first week of releasing code to developers, Diaspora is the 10th most popular project on Github with over 2500+ watchers. We’ve had 412 forks of Diaspora to date, and about a half a million views of the code as well. Many people have gotten the alpha running on their own machines, and have provided countless bug reports and feature requests.
StatusNet is a free software, aka “open source”, microblogging platform (e.g. Twitter). It successfully federates, and better yet, Diaspora has promised to implement OStatus, the same set of standards used by StatusNet so that if and when Diaspora goes public, users on each will be able to connect with each other seamlessly. Diaspora also promised to be free software under the GNU AGPL, same as StatusNet.[10] The most popular public instance is Identi.ca and you can sign up to try it for yourself. StatusNet alone may be a suitable replacement for Twitter, but by itself it doesn’t provide the same functionality as Facebook.
This is where GNU Social comes in. GNU social aims to extend the StatusNet to provide the capabilities of a full social network. It will incorporate additional features for controlling privacy settings and sharing pictures or video, and it will display all of this in an interface that’s designed not for a microblogging site, but rather for a complete social networking site. The distinction between GNU social and StatusNet is a bit confusing as they has a unique relationship: when development on the original version of GNU social stalled, the developers looked for another codebase to work on. The result was the social/status alliance, between GNU social and StatusNet. Both projects are co-dependent and contain code from either other, thanks in no small part to the hard work of Craig Andrews of GNU social, and Evan Prodromou of StatusNet.
Microsoft's killing another me-too Web 2.0 service, sinking its fledgling Live Spaces blog network and shifting 30 million users to WordPress.
Good morning my relations. Today is not such a great day. In the United States the Obama administration is actively seeking a new law to legally mandate the forced introduction of insecure back doors and support for mass surveillance into all communication systems. Specifically targeted are Internet VoIP and messaging systems.
Speaking on behalf of the GNU Telephony project, we do intend to openly defy such a law should it actually come to pass, so I want to be very clear on this statement. It is not simply that we will choose to publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but that we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption that is made available directly to anyone worldwide. Clearly such software is especially needed in those places, such as in the United States, where basic human freedoms and dignity seem most threatened.
A hearty Happy 27th Birthday to the GNU Project! Here is a link to the original announcement of the GNU Project posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Without the GNU project FOSS as we know it today would not exist. Thank You to everyone who works and has worked on the GNU project over the last 27 years. You have helped make the world a better place. We at LXer take our hats off to you.
But then for any Linux user who already knows how good Linux/FOSS is, we have been saying this for years. Maybe the UK government could take the lead from the French who are already experiencing the benefits of migration?
What is this “Free Culture” thing? What is “Free Software”? And how do I get my work out there? If you’re looking to participate in the “Commons”, you’ll need to get comfortable with the idea of free, public licenses and how to use them for your works. This won’t be hard at all, especially with this short guide, but there are different traditions that have sprung up around different kinds of works.
Today, the Xiph.Org Foundation announced that they have released the first of a series of videos aimed at teaching us geeks what video is really all about. From the xiph.org site:
“The program offers a brief history of digital media, a quick summary of the sampling theorem, and myriad details of low level audio and video characterization and formatting. It’s intended for budding geeks looking to get into video coding, as well as the technically curious who want to know more about the media they wrangle for work or play.”
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of "scare quotes" to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research "challenges".
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
It's difficult to see how this is any different than foreign governments demanding access to others' communications as well. It's pretty ridiculous for President Obama to talk about open internet principles to the UN, while cooking this up at the same time. Pushing for this also means that the US will have no excuse when the governments of Iran, China and elsewhere also demand backdoors into all US-based communications.
And, really, that's the biggest problem with this law. Beyond the inevitable privacy violations by the feds, putting backdoors into communications technologies guarantees that those backdoors will be used by others (outside of the federal government) to snoop on communications. The FBI and the NSA (who are pushing for this) are being totally and completely naive if they think that they're the only ones who will use this. We've pointed out in the past how large scale surveillance systems mean large scale security risks, and this is no different. We showed how a similar surveillance system in Greece was hacked into to spy on government officials. US officials should be aware that they're opening themselves up to these same potential risks.
For a decade, the government backed off of attempts to force encryption developers to weaken their products and include back doors, and the crypto wars seemed to have been won. (Indeed, journalist Steven Levy declared victory for the civil libertarian side in 2001.) In the past ten years, even as the U.S. government has sought (or simply taken) vastly expanded surveillance powers, it never attempted to ban the development and use of secure encryption.
Now the government is again proposing to do so, following in the footsteps of regimes like the United Arab Emirates that have recently said some privacy tools are too secure and must be kept out of civilian hands.
Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein has shown up on Geithner's calendar at least 38 times through March 2010 since the Treasury Secretary took office in January 2009, three more entries than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 13 more than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly four times as many as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader John Boehner combined, according to a copy of Geithner's daily log recently published online by the Treasury Department. The imbalance is striking, considering that Geithner was heavily involved in financial regulatory reform legislation, which Congress was grappling with during the period covered by the calendar.
Privacy International has announced that it is planning legal action against a UK law firm for breaching the privacy of internet users after a security breach.
Nathan Evans - "DHT and routing in GNUnet"