Eugenia Loli Archive

1 Month On: Mandriva 2007 Spring – Toshiba Laptop

Submitted by AdamW 2007-05-24 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 22 Comments

A review of one month's use of Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring on a Toshiba Satellite 2410, by Sam Bailey: "For the last month (and a bit) I’ve been running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring PowerPack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410. To avoid people having to skip to the conclusion, I’m sticking with Mandriva Linux Spring on my laptop permanently!"

The Top 10 Dead (or Dying) Computer Skills

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-24 OS News 99 Comments

"Those in search of eternal life need look no further than the computer industry. Here, last gasps are rarely taken, as aging systems crank away in back rooms across the U.S., not unlike 1970s reruns on Nickelodeon's TV Land. So while it may not be exactly easy for Novell NetWare engineers and OS/2 administrators to find employers who require their services, it's very difficult to declare these skills -- or any computer skill, really -- dead." My Take: "C" dying should have been "x86 Assembly".

Book Review: Foundations of GTK+ Development

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-23 GTK+ 25 Comments

Often I complain that GTK+ documentation (non-reference) is non-existent. The few GTK+ books that were ever written are now old and most of their included source code does not even compile anymore. All hail "Foundations of GTK+ Development" by Andrew Krause.

Insecure Passwords on Gaim/Pidgin

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-23 Privacy, Security 106 Comments

Today, while I was trying to create a SIP Presence account for VoIPBuster, Pidgin kept crashing. I had to find its settings in my personal folder in order to manually edit the accounts.xml file and remove the entry (so Pidgin could start up again normally instead of keep crashing on load). When I opened the accounts.xml file with a plain text editor, all the passwords of all my accounts were listed out in the open in plain text. This is not a new issue, it was discussed many times before, but it can still be a surprise for most users.

A Day Without X

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-22 Unix 98 Comments

Would you be able to survive one full day without using the X server? Linux offers us a wide assortment of CLI based tools which use curses and/or framebuffer for functional user interfaces. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able look up stuff online, read your email, look at pictures, watch movies and listen to music as you are trying to configure X.

Five Things the Linux Community Doesn’t Get About Joe User

Submitted by Jon Dough 2007-05-22 Linux 212 Comments

Why is it that the average computer user still chooses to spend hundreds of dollars on Windows or Mac when there are countless Linux alternatives that they could download, install and make use of completely free of charge? Some answers here.

Mobile Linux UI Gains Fancy Visual Effects

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-18 Wireless 15 Comments

Mizi Research has updated its graphical user interface framework for consumer electronic devices like mobile phones. Prizm 3.0 has switched to Python as its main application programming language (from Qt), and has gained modern visual effects such as "dragging, sliding, fading and accelerated smart scrolling," the company said. Their devices usually sell in Korea in Samsung touchscreen phones.

Review: ANYCOM EDR-AP Bluetooth Access Point

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-18 Internet 7 Comments

Most of my readers know that I love cellphones, PDAs and gadgets. Many of these gadgets do not have WiFi in them, but they do support the PAN-client Bluetooth profile which allows them to get wireless internet connectivity (e.g. the Palm Treo). To achieve this, you need to have a PAN-server. And this what Anycom's EDR-AP Bluetooth Access Point is all about.

How to Make Apple’s Tiger OS Roar Like a Leopard

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-18 macOS 20 Comments

Tired of waiting for Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard'? Make the wait easier with tools that add power, pizazz and some Leopard-like features to OS X 10.4 'Tiger' in this 4-page article at ComputerWorld.

Tuning Your Memory Settings, Part 1

Submitted by BlueVoodoo 2007-05-18 Unix 3 Comments

Changing some memory parameters on your system can increase performance dramatically, particularly when these parameters are not optimized for the environment which you are running. Part 1 of this series provides an overview of memory on AIX, including a discussion of virtual memory and the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM).

GCC 4.2 Released

Submitted by diegocg 2007-05-16 General Development 27 Comments

GCC 4.2 has been released. The biggest feature in this release is OpenMP support in C, C++ and Fortran. See the changes page for more details.

Firefox May Scuttle Support for Older Linux

Submitted by rx182 2007-05-16 Mozilla, Gecko 68 Comments

Mozilla's Firefox browser will probably abandon support for older distributions of Linux, a company executive has said. Mike Conner, director of Firefox development, has proposed that the browser's next edition work only with more-or-less current Linux runtimes, rather than support aged versions.

Gentoo 2007.0 Review

Submitted by Deathspawner 2007-05-13 Gentoo 26 Comments

Techgage has taken a hard look at the latest release from Gentoo, particularly its installation process. Although there is a revamped installer, using it proved to be a less than perfect experience: "This installer does not function like the previous ones. Before, the installer would wait until you made changes to the last option before it began installing. Now, everything is installed along the way."

After 9 Years, Bugzilla Moves Up to 3.0

Submitted by FreeRhino 2007-05-13 Mozilla, Gecko 7 Comments

Mozilla has released Bugzilla 3.0, with many new features and code improvements. According to the release announcement, some of the new features in this version include custom fields, support for the Apache mod_perl module, per-product permissions, an XML-RPC interface, and the ability to create and edit bugs via email.

Intel Announces the PowerTOP Utility for Linux

Submitted by Luis 2007-05-13 Intel 23 Comments

What's eating the battery life of my Linux laptop? Which software component causes the most power to be consumed? These are important questions without a good answer... until now. Intel announced the PowerTOP tool, a program that collects the various pieces of information from your system and presents an overview of how well your laptop is doing in terms of power savings. A number of apps, like Firefox, Evolution and Gaim have been modified by Intel to help consume less power and hopefully these patches will be integrated to their main trees or by distros.

Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition (2007.1) Review

Submitted by luna6 2007-05-10 Mandriva, Mandrake, Lycoris 29 Comments

Review of the new Mandriva 2007 Spring Edition. We downloaded and installed three different versions of Mandriva 2007.1 and there was one version that come out head and shoulders above the rest.

Visopsys 0.68 Released

Submitted by andymc 2007-05-10 OS News 6 Comments

The 0.68 release of the Visopsys OS went live today. It's a maintenance release with the usual array of tweaks and bug fixes, plus a focus on disk I/O performance; the software disk caching was re-written, and lookahead/write caching were added to the IDE driver. Another new feature is secure deletion (shredding) of files, partitions, and disks. Change log here and downloads here.

Red Hat Shows Its Global Desktop Cards

Submitted by editingwhiz 2007-05-10 Red Hat 53 Comments

Red Hat announced a new client product, Red Hat Global Desktop, at its annual Red Hat Summit tradeshow in San Diego. This move is designed, in part, to compete with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop, which has achieved success in business desktop markets, and with Ubuntu 7.04, which will soon appear on Dell PCs. Some reporting about this can also be found at the company's magazine. Update: Elsewhere, talking security with Red Hat's Mark Cox.

‘The State of Ubuntu 7.04 Is Strong’

Eugenia Loli 2007-05-09 Ubuntu 95 Comments

Ubuntu 7.04 - also known as Feisty Fawn - shines for its excellent software management tools and large catalog of ready-to-install free software applications. Read more at eWeek.

Fedora 7: What, When, and Why

Submitted by Rahul 2007-05-09 Fedora Core 39 Comments

Max Spevack, Fedora Project leader posted a outline and expected impact of the Fedora 7 release: "One of the Fedora Project's success metrics is building and running itself in a way such that no single entity can completely control Fedora's fate. Fedora 7 gets us there, insofar as there is no "secret sauce" in the ability to spin a Fedora distribution. Nothing is hidden."