Archive for July, 2007

Access (K)ubuntu console with a single key

Saturday, July 28th, 2007

Yakuake is a Quake-style terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole technology which makes the console more user friendly. If you need the ability to quickly pull down a console to run a few commands with a keystroke, and then make the console disappear again with another quick keystroke. YaKuake is exactly what you are looking for.

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How to set up surround 5.1 audio in Linux with Alsa

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

The main problem I had with the sound setup in linux was getting it to work so that i can use all my speakers. After a few hours of searching the web and trial and error I finally figured out how to do it. I have put together this tutorial hoping to help other people in a similar situation.
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Open Source is about Trust

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

“In highly sensitive operations such as banking, military or government - but also our certification authority** - source code of the operating system and programs which run on those servers and computers is essential. Because without being able to read, verify, control and modify the programs in its source form, one can’t know what’s under the hood.” Complete Story

NVIDIA GeForce 8: Linux vs. Windows

Friday, July 20th, 2007

“When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that’s able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it’s not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD).

However, with the GeForce 8 series we have come across some unusual issues that are limiting the performance of the GeForce 8 series under Linux and Solaris. In this article, we have additional information on these austere performance problems along with benchmarks showing the frame-rate differences between Windows XP and Linux…”

Complete Story

What’s the Story Behind Apache?

Friday, July 20th, 2007

“Most people in the free software world know two things about Apache. The first is that its name derives from the fact that it was a ‘a patchy server,’ built out of patches to the earlier NCSA HTTPd Web server. The other is that in terms of market share, Apache knocks Microsoft’s IIS into a cocked hat. Unfortunately, neither of these statements is true.

“Here’s what Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache project, and the person who came up with the name, told me a few years ago…”

Complete Story

Linux Device Offers Free Phone Calls for Life

Friday, July 20th, 2007

“A startup is readying an interesting new Linux-based device promising to deliver free domestic calls (in the U.S.) for life, with no ongoing charges. Ooma’s hub uses P2P networking, with each user’s landline serving as a potential local termination point for all other users.

“In a podcast interview with eWEEK’s Jim Rapoza, Ooma CEO Andrew Frame said the company has the same investors as Skype, and works like a hardware version of Skype that’s more suitable for mainstream consumers. ‘Skype is usable on the road. We’re serving the user’s home, not their laptop or PC,’ he said…”

Complete Story

Nokia N800 Gains a Mozilla-Based Browser

Friday, July 20th, 2007

“A Mozilla-based web browser is available for Nokia’s Linux-based N800 Internet tablet. The ‘MicroB’ browser was released last night, by the Nokia-sponsored Maemo community that maintains open source software stacks for Nokia’s tablets.

“The MicroB browser is based on Gecko 1.9, the same fairly hefty rendering engine that will power Firefox 3.0, when it is released. Thus, MicroB could work with some complex web page features that the lightweight Opera browser does not support–Google maps, for example, according to the project’s website…”

Complete Story

Now available: Free-software-only Ubuntu version

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Canonical has released its first test version of Gobuntu, a variant of the Ubuntu Linux software that’s devoid of proprietary software. (more…)

Ubuntu Tricks - How to mount your Windows partition and make it read/writable with NTFS-3G

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

Now we’re going to look at what may be a better way to do it. It’s certainly easier and from reports, NTFS-3G is a bit more stable as well. This Howto is written specifically for and from Ubuntu 6.10 - Edgy Eft but should work on any Debian based distro.

Read more here

DIY Linux cellphone components available

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

A vendor of tiny, Linux-based SBCs (single-board computers) will soon begin accepting pre-orders for cellular networking and GPS daughtercards. Gumstix said its “Goliath” daughtercards target remote data applications such as fleet tracking, as well as “hobbyists who want to build their own phone.” (more…)