Showing headlines posted by wjl

Debian GNU/Linux 4.0, codenamed “Etch”, was released on April 8th, 2007. Debian GNU/Linux 4.0r1, codenamed “Etch” was released on August 15th, 2007. And as usual, the media distributed these news around the globe. It is so unimportant an event, that no experienced Debian user or even developer would care less about it.

My brother Willi isn't a frequent blogger. But what he is, is a teacher/instructor for M$ OS and office software. Now he explains - in German - his experiences with Vista, compares it with Linux, and comes to the conclusion that everything looks pretty 'stolen' from a user's point of view. He is using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on his Biostar barebone machine, and recently bought a HP laptop with Vista and Office.

[wjl was kind enough to translate the post for us. Check the "read more" link for the english translation. — Sander]

Why are Intel the market leader in graphics chips, tho they don't even make separate cards? And why will they continue to be leaders, and be stronger than ever? Easy answer: they are the ones who support Linux.

If you run a modern Linux distribution, chances are that you already have all the necessary tools to run other distributions or even proprietary operating systems as well, all at the same time. You don’t have to be a kernel hacker to do this - just follow some simple steps explained here to get going.

Today - after a long time without running any proprietary software - I decided to go and install Windows once more. Why? I just wanted to see our own web pages in Internet Explorer. And what did IE show me right after it started? Nothing less than Heidi Klum naked!

David Scharf and the University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg, Germany, have published an impressive short animated movie about stopping the big brother state under a CC-nc-sampling+ license. I point to the place where I found it, and to the original site, where you can download it in different formats, and explain why this is important.

I’m still kind of “watching” the market. And though I would like to have a PC with Intel’s open-sourced integrated graphics, but Intel processors are still only a second choice. Why? AMD chips on the other hand have still the lower wattage on idle (a mode which most of our computers are in most of their time), and they are more than good enough for anything you want or need to do. I have set up a sheet with comparable machines, one AMD (powerful) system, one Intel, and one with a focus of real low power demand (also AMD based). The comments are in German, but you should get the idea.

Warren Guy, a sysadmin from Perth, Western Australia, just set up a great resource for sysadmins: Planet SysAdmin

That is the result of a study from TNS Infratest, paid by German Microsoft CEO Achim Berg (43), and published in the German BILD am Sonntag.

Two days ago, Sun announced their latest processor, called “UltraSparc T2“, or - for the rest of us - “Niagara 2″. While the chip itself is pretty interesting - with its 8 cores, which can handle 64 threads simultaneously - the real highlight is that the company will open-source its design, like they did with the predecessor of that CPU, the UltraSparc T1 already.

Today at 11:04am (GMT, or Greenwich Time), Debian developer Erich Schubert reported about a bug in Serendipity. According to his blog, it took him 10 minutes to close it, and he reported it to the guys over at Serendipity.

If you followed the news, then you may have seen that yesterday, lots of European sites were full of praise for Dell, who announced that they will offer preinstalled Linux systems here in Europe as well.

Have you also experienced an ever-growing number of those ‘greeting card’ messages and emails? You’d better not open them, especially if you run that old-fashioned proprietary (read: business) operating system from Redmond, also known as ‘Vista’, or any of its predecessors.

Die deutsche Ausgabe von Tom's Hardware Guide stellt einen in Eigenregie aufgebauten Stromspar-PC vor, der inklusive Display weniger als 60W Strom verbraucht. Die Solaranlage bauten sie gleich mit.

In one of the most significant transformations of its worldwide data centers in a generation, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it will consolidate about 3,900 computer servers onto about 30 System z mainframes running the Linux operating system. The company anticipates that the new server environment will consume approximately 80 percent less energy than the current set up and expects significant savings over five years in energy, software and system support costs.

Five days ago, the guys at 64 Studio released their official 2.0 'Electric' version. With a realtime 2.6.21 kernel and lots of preconfigured audio/video productivity applications, it's well worth a look.

Whoever runs a version 9 of BIND (more than 50% of the internet is using it as their DNS) in a configuration as a caching name server should read CVE-2007-2925, Trusteer, or the Internet Storm Center, and upgrade their systems.

James Burgett is a great guy. He is collecting old computers from companies and individuals, checks and in some cases repairs them, and then gives them away to those who cannot afford to buy. He does it since 12 years, and each system is delivered with a free OS.

A few days ago, I got the new ‘icedove’ package, which succeeds the not-so-free Mozilla® Thunderbird® in Debian. What was still missing was the integration with / the packaging of a new Enigmail package for encryption. Now that step is done as well.

Ok - now it’s-a-happenin’. There’s a new bird in town. Or so. With updating/dist-upgrading Etch as of today, the icedove package landed on my machine, successfully replacing Thunderbird®.