Showing all newswire headlines

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

Linux converters sometimes quietly switch back to Windows, executive tells Microsoft partners.

Linux on a desktop? How about Linux on the notebook? HP has just released its first ever Linux notebook, the HP-Compaq nx5000, which will come pre-installed with Novell’s SuSE Linux and the OpenOffice software suite.

In reply to a patch submission on the lkml in the form of a link to an ftp site, Andrew Morton replied, "I *really* dislike receiving patches by going and getting them from internet servers. It breaks our commonly-used tools. It loses authorship info. It loses Signed-off-by: info. There is no changelog. All this means that your patch is more likely to be ignored by busy people. Please, just email the diffs."

The ccache tool improves the build performance by caching the incorporation of header files into source files and therefore speeds the build time by reducing the time required to add in header files with each compilation stage. In this article, learn how to build and install ccache, how to use it with your existing environment, and how to improve the build times in group development projects.

Will free software kill shareware? Every day we celebrate the victories of open source software against the big guns, enjoying each corporate and governmental adoption as it comes. We talk about how wonderful it is that open source software is taking part in a larger social and economic revolution and comment on how we're looking forward to the day when open source software will dominate the software industry. The little guys, the story will go, put together a series of tools that evolved into a complete operating system which ultimately took over and threw down the big monolithic software giants. And all along, we, the little guys, kept to our values and ideals, held strong in the face of corporate threats, and banded together to Fight the Good Fight. What started as a bunch of little guys turned into several companies, and these companies grew until they were big guys. Then we garnered the support of several large companies and flirted with even more. Until one day we looked around and realized we weren't the little guys anymore.

LinuxDevices presents this informative interview with Roger Kung, Chairman and CEO of E28, a Linux smartphone startup in Shanghai, China. E28 was the first company to ship a Linux smartphone, and could unveil a Linux smartphone for the US as early as the Boston LinuxWorld Expo.

Shortly after the release of the WordPerfect for Linux proof-of-concept product, Corel took it down from its Web site and put up a note saying that "This product is temporarily unavailable for purchase." Did it fail? Did WordPerfect for Linux fail to garner enough customer support and subsequently go quietly into the night? Corel says no.

Linux is no threat to Microsoft and any claims to the contrary are simply a misconception created by sensationalism and media hype, Microsoft Australia's platform strategy manager Paul Roworth said this week.

Open Source Development Labs, a Beaverton, Ore.-based consortium devoted to improving Linux, has hired an attorney to handle intellectual-property matters and has opened a branch office in Beijing, the group said this week.

If you look around the pews in your church next Sunday morning, you may see a few GNUs in the pews. They are software developers, system administrators, and church leaders. They believe in God. They believe in Jesus. And they believe in free and open source software.

California lawmakers and administrators got an earful on open-source software Friday: A state government panel considered proposals that would boost government use of Linux and other technologies.

California is trying to make Microsoft pay--again.

Two U.S. Department of Defense installations last week received 256-node Linux clusters from Linux Networx for work in battlefield simulations.

For the last 20 years, Unix has been the platform of choice for mission-critical applications. The OS has proven itself in telecommunications, banking, databases, and data warehousing, among others. But the recent emergence of Linux has prompted some press and industry analysts to predict the decline of Unix. According to IDC, Linux had a 16 percent market share in server OS shipments in 2003 and the number will rise to 27 percent in 2007.

In October 2003, Randy Lastinger, director of network operations for National Background Data, made himself so valuable to the company that it had to quit using Linux. That's right. His bosses hired Lastinger, a seasoned open source veteran, to rescue them from the typical security woes associated with Microsoft products. They wanted out of the closed source environment. Lastinger fixed them up -- but then the company realized that if Lastinger went away there was no one there who could do anything with the Linux configuration.

A recent disagreement on the linux-usb-devel mailing list ultimately led to the removal of the Philips webcam driver known as 'pwc'. The driver contains two modules, an open source module that has long been part of the mainline Linux kernel, and a closed source module which ships separately. Craig Rogers explained on the lkml that the closed source module ships in object format and "provides decompression services for proprietary codecs that are used for higher-resolution modes in some Web cameras based on this chip family." A hook in the open-source module allows the compression module to register with the kernel.