LXer -- Linux and Open Source News

The annual Ohio LinuxFest is a genuine grass-roots community event. It is one of the most fun and most worthwhile Linux fests, and one of the most welcoming-- everyone from brand-new Linux users, people curious about Linux, to wizened gurus and everyone in between are welcome.

Clonezilla is a bootable CDROM designed for partition backup and restoration. Unlike SystemRescueCD, Clonezilla Live doesn't contain an array of utilities, rather it is a single, focused tool. However, if you're interested in simply backing up or restoring whole partitions to or from files, or copying one partition onto another, Clonezilla might be just what you're looking for.

Consortium says H.264 to be royalty free forever but it's not as free as it sounds. The battle for the future of web video has just heated up again. What started as a snub for Adobe's Flash technology when Apple announced it would not support Flash on its Internet-connected devices, has now turned into a fierce battle for dominance in web multimedia.

Ubuntu 10.10 has strived to build on the choices of Lucid, bringing bleeding edge versions of software whilst maintaining the stability that Lucid provided. Join Ubuntu developer, Dave Walker, as he takes an insiders look at Maverick Meerkat as it approaches completion…

Equinox GTK Theme + Faenza Icon Sets are probably the best combination of themes I have ever found for my Ubuntu. Last day, I was doing my regular repository update when I noticed some new Equinox packages. Two new themes were introduced by Equinox team and the whole package keeps getting better.

BitTorrent Inc. proudly announced a few hours ago the immediate availability for download of the first alpha version of uTorrent Server for Linux and UNIX-like operating systems!

A month ago we reported that the Amnesia game was getting ready for a Linux release and now the Swedish developers behind this game, known properly as "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" have released a demo of the game. Frictional Games has released this demo for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X gamers.

Via Planet Fedora I saw Fedora design guru Máirín Duffy's extensive post on the redesign of Fedoraproject.org, with the general idea being to let not just fanboys but the rest of the world know what the Fedora distribution of Linux can do.

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Ubuntu 10.04 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Ubuntu 10.04). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

Samsung Electronics announced its much-anticipated Android consumer tablet, due to ship in Europe in mid-September. The Samsung Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor, and offers a seven-inch, 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera, a front-facing videocam, 802.11n, GPS, Bluetooth 3.0, and 3G with voice telephony, says the company.

The next version of WriteType (1.0.98) is now available for download! WriteType is a word processor designed to make typing easier and more efficient for young students and students with disabilities.

As MP3 players and mobile devices become very common, more and more people are beginning to convert their audio CD collection to music files so they will listen to them while on the move. In Windows and Mac, the conversion can be done automatically with Windows Media Player or iTunes. What about Linux? Let’s take a look.

early four years after its launch, hackers have finally succeeded in jailbreaking the Playstation 3 (PS3) game console and circumventing its copy protection system. Just days after Sony obtained an injunction preventing the sale of a USB dongle for jailbreaking the PS3, hackers have now published source code under the name "PSGroove". This apparently allows a programmable USB development board with an AT90USB microcontroller to be used to circumvent the PS3's security systems and execute unsigned code. In contrast to the PS3 jailbreak, currently PSGroove can't be used to illegally copy PS3 games.

Nagios sent me a reminder yesterday, which I finally got around to reading today, to update to the latest version of Nagios Core, 3.2.2. We were running 3.2.0, so we were a couple versions behind, so after browsing through the list of fixed bugs I thought it would be good to go ahead and upgrade. I had a meeting in fifteen minutes, and Nagios was actively monitoring servers in production. I considered for a moment waiting till after the meeting. After all, what if something went wrong during the upgrade, what if there was some unforeseen problem that caused disastrous results and caused me to miss the meeting? And then I remembered, this is Nagios. I did the upgrade, and made the meeting in time to get a cup of coffee on the way. This is how upgrades should work for everything.

My guide on how to make a webcam server has had a lot of feedback and so I decided to give two other methods to achieve it with two different software webcam-server and ZoneMinder Webcam-server is absolutely the easiest way to show on the net what is seen from your webcam, the software is very stable (I’ve just installed Ubuntu, and shows the date 2004) is based on Java and to make it work is enough to give these commands: #> aptitude install webcam-server #> export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so #> webcam-server Now point your browser at localhost:8888 and see a snapshot of that seen from the webcam.

ApacheCon 2010 is now open for registration. The three-day convention takes place in Atlanta at the Westin Peachtree hotel. Lots of speakers and informative sessions. There will be professional training sessions during the two days prior to the conference. Early bird special runs now to September 10.

As you might know Medfloss.org (formerly medfoss.apfelkraut.org) tries to provide a comprehensive and structured overview of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects for the health care domain. After the initial launch 6 months ago it recently welcomed the 200th project in its repository: the GPL-licensed iDART software - iDART is the abbreviation of "Intelligent Dispensing of Antiretroviral Treatment" and according to its authors addresses many of the challenges faced by public ART dispensing pharmacies in developing countries.

It was bound to happen. Google is now roping in the power of hardware acceleration to boost the performance of its Chrome browser. In a post on the Chromium blog late last week the Chromium developers announced that they would add GPU (graphics processing unit) support to future editions of the Chrome browser, bringing Google's application in line with other major browsers.

(São Paulo, Brazil: September 2, 2010) - The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced an upcoming blog to report on wider activities within the LPI community of Linux professionals, affiliates and training partners. The blog--"Community Corner"(http://www.lpi.org/communitycorner)--will feature commentary and regular contributions from Jon "maddog" Hall, a widely recognized mentor and leader in the programming community and a longtime and respected champion of Free and Open Source Software. Mr. Hall is also Executive Director of Linux International (http://www.li.org/).

Your editor was recently amused to encounter this ZDNet article on "Android's dirty little secret." According to that article, the openness of Android has led to an increase in the control held by handset manufacturers and wireless carriers and the fragmentation of the platform. The Open Handset Alliance is in a "shambles," and Android phones have undone all the gains won by that great standard bearer for openness and freedom - the iPhone. One might easily conclude that Android is just business as usual for the mobile telephony industry, but there are a few things worth contemplating here.