Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Users of Compiz, a window manager that provides pretty visual effects, know that a lot of those effects are just for fun. Things like drawing fire on the screen or folding up windows like a paper airplane to close them look cool but have little real value. Personally, I am most concerned with the Compiz plugins that add functionality to my desktop. There are plenty of those too. I am going to outline some of my favorites and most useful.

Linux is beginning to find its legs as the foundation in many different technologies and in the process is fueling a feedback loop that is helping accelerate the operating system's popularity. As more and more people contribute from areas such as mobile, data center power management, and real-time technologies, innovations are coming rapid fire and when folded into the Linux kernel provide benefits across a wide spectrum.

If you ever: needed to access your ext3, reiserfs or XFS partitions from Windows, wanted to use one of your favorite file systems via FUSE, or had an idea to mount an image of your hard drive, then this article is for you. This is a how-to, describing what to do, if you want Windows to handle file systems in a similar way as Linux does.

Some days ago, I wrote a post about 30 gnome themes to enhance your Ubuntu desktop. In order to make one more step in Linux desktop customization, here is a list of 10 very cool icons sets for your Linux desktop.

Several open-source providers are in the running for a new Becta framework covering the supply of software licences to the education sector. Novell, Sirius Corporation and LinuxIT are thought to be among 21 firms invited to tender for the approved supplier catalogue, worth a potential £80m over four years. Submissions for the final round have to be in before 13 August. The final list of up to 10 suppliers will be unveiled in October. It is the first time education technology agency Becta has broadened its list of approved suppliers to include open-source specialists, as it moves to put pressure on Microsoft.

In a recent article, Ryan Cartwright argued that free software isn't playing the "same game" as proprietary software is. He's right--but that begs the question: what game is GNU/Linux playing? Thirty years of proprietary software thinking have conditioned us to think that marketshare is a critical measure of success, and so we've convinced ourselves that we have to "win" against Windows in order to "succeed". But this is simply not true. GNU/Linux can be a very great success even if it never achieves more than 1% of the installations in the world. The reason is the difference between "power" and "freedom".

I've been using GNU Parted to slice and dice my disk in preference to the fdisk for almost as long as I've been using Linux. We all fill up our hard-drives from time to time, but thanks to Gnome GParted, rearranging disk partitions isn't as terrifying as it used to be. In fact, armed with a GParted Live CD, there's a swathe of disk space fiddling jobs I can tackle without gnawing my fingers to the bone.

One of the best ways to speed up your Linux desktop is to utilize an ultra-lightweight window manager. To all speed-conscious techies, minimalist lovers, and to those who are still hoping to revive their ageing computer hardware, let me introduce you to the 20 most nimble and simple X window managers for Linux.

Yes, you read that right: Microsoft was a major sponsor of the conference, and its logo appeared prominently on the conference program, as well as on the T-shirts that were distributed to each attendee. There was even a very well-attended session at which a Microsoft manager (Amir Shevat) tried to convince the crowd that the war is over, and that it's worth trying to find ways in which Microsoft and the open-source community can work together.

It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So

Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. Why not combine both LAMP and FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server? In this article I assume FreeBSD is already installed. If not, make sure you download the latest stable production version of FreeBSD and run the installer. I recommend choosing the MINIMUM option at the installer screen to quickly install only the most basic and necessary things.

The open source community has been awash with announcements recently, including a host of announcements at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). At OSCON, Sun Microsystems on July 23 announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, an integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris and Linux operating systems. Sun also announced that it is open sourcing the core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Web Proxy technologies. Meanwhile, Sun and Joyent Inc. announced a collaboration aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial environments. On the open source desktop front, on July 29, the KDE Community released KDE 4.1, the second feature release of the KDE 4 series.

Red Hat's new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky. The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority. Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure. "The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst said in an interview.

At the OSCON open source convention in Portland last week, Neuros CEO Joe Born explained how Linux-based embedded devices will bring open source to the set-top market and the consumer electronics space. He also demonstrated how to build applications for the Neuros OSD, his company's programmable DVR product.

What would your favorite small open source project do with a sudden influx of money? Imagine you donated $5000 to a project, where would the money go? Less scrupulous developers might spend the money on Mountain Dew and Twinkies, but more likely the money would just sit, doing nothing. Why? Because it takes time to spend money, and in the open source world time is in short supply.

Launchy and GNOME Do are both two launcher programs that are designed to let you quickly open applications and files and perform tasks you want done quickly, with just the tapping of a few keys. Previously, Launchy had been an open source solution, albeit for Windows only, and GNOME Do was the Linux solution. Launchy is now available for Linux too, so I thought I would do a brief side-by-side compare of the two programs.

Likewise Software has released a new, open-source version of its eponymous AD (Active Directory) program for integrating Linux, Unix and Mac systems into AD. Likewise Fall includes two main features. The most important, LWIS (Likewise Identity Services) enables you to use Active Directory Authentication for your Linux, Unix and Mac PCs. In addition, the program comes with the LAC Likewise Administrative Console. This enables administrators to manage AD users, computers and access rights from Linux.

Now that I've got your attention, don't worry too much: Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the popular World of Warcraft online game, isn't trying to shut down open source software entirely. But in a recent legal filing (reported by the Virtually Blind weblog), they are asking a judge to take an unusual move: prohibiting a developer from releasing a particular bit of code as open source.

When you, Joe or Mary user, buy a computer at Best Buy or Computer Village or order a computer from Dell or Gateway, you get a computer with a system already installed. Do you think they had any trouble installing that system on that computer? Do you think that if Dell sells Mary a computer with Windows installed and they sell Joe a computer with Linux installed, that Dell had a differentially hard time installing one of those systems compared to the other? Think about it.

El Tunes is a GStreamer plugin that allows Linux users to play all music they have purchased from the iTunes Music Store. With El Tunes installed (Ubuntu .debs available), your GStreamer-based players (such as Rhythmbox, Totem the Movie Player, Banshee, etc.) can play DRM'ed music purchased from the Apple iTunes store. Apple is refusing to make an iTunes for Linux, and it seems they aren't content with their music being played on it, either.