Linux News for Jun 30, 2010

• Billing's new face: High performance at a lower cost (Jun 30, 2010, 23:05)
  Connected Planet: "For operators having to upgrade billing systems, expensive hardware is often no longer an option, and for that reason they are looking to low-cost Linux-based systems that deliver more bang for the buck."


• 25 IT Job Sites and a Winning Formula (Jun 30, 2010, 22:35)
  Datamation: "Yes, the IT job market is tough these days. It's a far cry from the late nineties, when just showing up with a pulse earned you a signing bonus."


• Restart Windows Services from Your Linux PC (Jun 30, 2010, 22:05)
  Lifehacker: "If you've ever wanted to remotely restart a service on your Windows PC from your Linux machine, the Command-Line fu web site has you covered with the quick and easy command to use."


• Firefox Update Gives Flash 45 Seconds, Then Pulls the Plug (Jun 30, 2010, 21:35)
  Wired: "Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.6, an incremental update which tweaks the way the browser handles misbehaving plug-ins, giving Flash and other plug-ins 45 seconds to respond, or else get shut down."


• Cloud Computing: 10 Intriguing Things You Should Know About Google TV (Jun 30, 2010, 21:05)
  eWeek: "Google spawned more questions than it provided answers with its introduction of Google TV May 20 at Google I/O. The initial demo was a two-hour plus affair fraught with technical difficulties mostly as a result of dodgy Internet access."


• Webopedia term of the day: Phase Change Memory (PCM) (Jun 30, 2010, 20:35)
  Webopedia: "Abbreviated as PCM, phase change memory is a type of non-volatile memory that is much faster than the common flash memory, and it also uses up to one-half the power."


• Linux Consulting Dilemma (Jun 30, 2010, 20:05)
  Spidertools: "I live in mountainous Northwest Montana. I have always been intrigued by an attitude from my US Forrest Service friends who each summer tell me they are, "hoping there are lots of big forest fires this summer""


• Pay what you want for Kiddix OS (Jun 30, 2010, 19:35)
  CNet: "Kiddix might just be the answer: It's a Linux-based operating system with a child-friendly interface, software, and loads of parental controls."


• Nexus One gets Android 2.2 first (Jun 30, 2010, 19:05)
  Gemini: "Android 2.2, Google's operating system for mobile devices, is coming to the Nexus One smartphone via an over-the-air update. The new version codenamed Froyo is significantly faster and supports features like push-through notifications."


• MeeGo Handset Project Day 1 is Here (Jun 30, 2010, 18:51)
  MeeGo: "The MeeGo project is happy to announce "Day 1" of the MeeGo Handset user experience project...Today, the handset baseline source code is available to the development community."


• Yahoo Tightens Up Hadoop for Security, Workflow Management (Jun 30, 2010, 18:35)
  Developer.com: "Yahoo unveiled a new beta version of Hadoop, the open source, distributed filesystem that the Web giant created and has used internally for years to power its homepage and numerous other online assets."


• New project leader wears the Fedora (Jun 30, 2010, 18:05)
  The Register: "Paul Frields, who has been getting his paycheck from Red Hat to run the Fedora development Linux variant since 2008, is moving back inside the company to work on Enterprise Linux, and an outsider named Jared Smith is being brought in as the new Fedora Project Leader."


• K3b 2.0 released with Blu-ray support (Jun 30, 2010, 17:35)
  K3b: "Today the reformed K3b team within the KDE Community is proud to release the final 2.0 of the premier disk recording application, codenamed "Komeback". Although pre-release versions have already enjoyed widespread adoption, we'd like to recap some of the highlights of this release."


• FFmpeg gets its own implementation of Google's VP8 codec (Jun 30, 2010, 17:05)
  ars Technica: "Developers Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and Jason Garret-Glaser are creating a native VP8 video codec implementation for the open source FFmpeg project."


• How We Are Using Btrfs To Find Regressions Incredibly Fast (Jun 30, 2010, 16:35)
  Phoronix: "One of the features of Btrfs not found in other Linux file-systems (like EXT4) is support for copy-on-write snapshots / sub-volumes."


• Three plus one: disk usage meters (Jun 30, 2010, 16:05)
  Motho ke motho ka botho: "I keep ncdu installed as a matter of course. It's one of those tools that I wish I could use more often, because what it does is very cool and very useful … just not very frequently."


• Like Experimenting With Your Desktop? Try Ubuntu Sugar Remix (Jun 30, 2010, 15:35)
  Tech Drive-in: "Sugar desktop is designed with the goal of being used by children for learning. The original Sugar desktop environment was repackaged for Ubuntu and it was called Ubuntu Sugar Remix."


• Use Your Smartphone for GPS (Jun 30, 2010, 15:17)
  Datamation: "With the news that earlier this month that the Air Force launched a new GPS satellite that can resolve your location down to a few feet, a growing number of location-based services are getting lots of attention for their ability to create new social opportunities."


• Funky, Futuristic XO Classrooms on YouTube Cannal Ceibal (Jun 30, 2010, 15:05)
  OLPC News: "Did you know that the OLPC classrooms in Uruguay were futuristic designs from the 1970's? Talk a look at this video and check out the fly cribs for these kids:"


• Open Source Needs To Have An Unfair Advantage To Succeed (Jun 30, 2010, 14:35)
  Computerworld UK: "Mickos argues that "for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition"."


• The 11 Most Useful Linux Commands in the World Ever (Jun 30, 2010, 14:05)
  gnuru.org: "kill -9 -- Die, die, die the process that is eating all my memor"


• Things I can do before Windows Boots (Jun 30, 2010, 13:35)
  The Linux Blog: "After a recent power outage, I needed to boot both machines this morning. So, I thought I'd document what I did before Windows booted."


• Five best free Linux games of 2010 (Jun 30, 2010, 13:05)
  Dedoimedo: "Best is subjective. My best may not be your best. Still, I wanted to share with you my perception of the best Linux games you can have installed on your machine, in year 2010, Gregorian Calendar."


• Browser Speed Tests: Safari 5, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 6, and Opera 10.6 Beta (Jun 30, 2010, 12:35)
  Lifehacker: "Apple's stepped up with Safari 5, Firefox has brought forth a more crash-proof 3.6, and Opera's continuing to push forward in betas. Let's break out the timer and testing software to see how the latest browsers run on real hardware"


• LLVMpipe Still Is Slow At Running OpenGL On The CPU (Jun 30, 2010, 12:05)
  Phoronix: "Two months ago we published our initial benchmarks of LLVMpipe, the Gallium3D driver that accelerated commands on the CPU rather than any GPU and unlike other Linux software rasterizers is much faster due to leveraging LLVM (the Low-Level Virtual Machine) on the back-end."


• Easy Linux backups with Lucky Backup (Jun 30, 2010, 10:35)
  Linux.com: "We would all like to think that, since we are using Linux, we will never really need a backup of our data. Now, let's look at this realistically."


• Stayin' alive: Ten years of Linux on the mainframe (Jun 30, 2010, 08:35)
  The Register: "It would be hard to find two technologies that would seem to be more diametrically opposed in the data center than the IBM mainframe and the open source Linux operating system."


• Review: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 (Jun 30, 2010, 06:35)
  IT World: "Novell announced their first service pack release for SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES), and if you like virtualization, this is a very strong platform from which you can get started."


• Knowledge: A Different Approach to a Database on the Desktop (Jun 30, 2010, 04:35)
  KDE.news: "Desktop applications for 'Information Management' that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain."


• First Look: GIMP 2.7.1 on Ubuntu 10.04 (Jun 30, 2010, 02:35)
  Softpedia: "The GIMP development team has unleashed today (not yet on the official website) another development release of their popular image manipulation software. The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) 2.7.1 comes with lots of improvements..."


• A Linux Home Entertainment Center (Jun 30, 2010, 00:35)
  Linux Journal: "As I mentioned in an earlier Linux Journal article, I decided to cut the apron strings with my television provider over a year ago. Bye bye, DISH Satelite TV!"