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Mac OS X support has been added to magicJack. Could Linux compatibility be coming down the pipe? DB: Yes, and because the of the similarities between the Mac and Linux OSes, we should be able to support Linux fairly soon.

Chinese impose blackout over new Tibetan monk deaths Jane Macartney in Beijing Two monks at a monastery in western China were killed in a clash with paramilitary police last weekend, three Tibetan sources have told The Times. The monks, at a monastery in western Sichuan province, which borders Tibet, were killed in a clash on July 12. For monks of what are popularly known as the “red hat” sects, the date marks one of the most auspicious festivals of the year. It is the first report of the lethal use of gunfire against Tibetan protesters demanding the return of the...

The decision is in, and SCO has gone down in defeat. The U.S. District Court in Utah has ruled in favor of Novell in SCO vs. Novell, the keystone case in SCO’s long, and ultimately unsuccessful war against Linux. The foundation of Judge Dale Kimball’s decision, that Novell, and not SCO owns the IP (intellectual property) rights to Unix, remains as solid as ever. Instead of showing that Linux violated SCO IP rights to Unix, SCO’s actions has lead to the revelation that it never owned the IP rights to Unix in the first place.This, within the narrow confines of...

Michael Robertson, chairman of Linspire, said the assets of his company were sold to Xandros after "years of frustration in trying to achieve the goal of desktop Linux." < >"Trying to compete with Microsoft on the desktop has been a futile effort. What the last 20 years has shown is that the Microsoft ecosystem goes far beyond Windows" into thousands of drivers for PC devices and applications to run on end-user machines. For Linux to match that may be impossible, he said.

I have an older computer that I have cleaned out of W2000 Pro. I tried loading a version of XP Pro that I have on this machine. MS wants $269 for an additional key. I am not willing to pay that. I am currently downloading Ubuntu and would like to put Linux on this box. It has an Athlon XP with a gig of memory and no video card. I don't plan on any gaming or high end computing. Just photo editing, video editing and web surfing. Do I need Ubuntu or is there something else smaller and simpler I...

Three strategic virtualization initiatives were the stars of the show as Linux powerhouse Red Hat opened its Red Hat Summit today in Boston. What do the Red Hat moves mean to you? More options in open source virtualization tools and a new open source effort around virtualization security, for starters. The Red Hat move that will catch the eye of most users is the Embedded Linux Hypervisor, oVirt. This is a lightweight, embeddable hypervisor that currently lets you run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows VMs (virtual machines) on Linux. What makes this more interesting than just another virtualization...

And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd... Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP. Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft's heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don't have...

I really, really need some help here. Long story short, I've lost two old computers in the last few months and now have a box that is running on Linux with Ubuntu and Firefox. As far as I can tell, Firefox does not allow me to just copy and paste the LOLCat pictures... There goes my entertainment! I have no connectivity problems, but I think I'm showing my age. I 'grew up' with DOS based apps and I can't find anything! I have printer software that I need to install, and can't find the right way to do it. Cry...

Quite a few reviews of new Linux releases these days try to determine if a distribution is "ready for the desktop." I myself have probably been guilty of using that phrase, but I think it's time we officially retire this criterion. What defines an operating system as being ready for the desktop? Surely everyone has a different opinion on the actual definition. While my search for an official definition or list of guidelines has failed, to me this phrase means that the OS is usable by everyone, meets everyone's needs, and is able to do everything that everyone wants it...

RECOMMENDATIONS WANTED FOR REBUILDING MY COMPUTERI built this system 7 years ago and it has performed well until now.  The motherboard won't post, so I have decided to upgrade but would like to use as much of the legacy devices that I have as possible.  Here's the main specs on the system I want to upgrade: Motherboard (non-posting now): Soyo SY-KT333 Dragon Ultra Platinum (ATX form factor - Soyo no longer makes motherboards) Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2100 (socket A) Video card: BioStar GeForce 6800 (128mb, AGP) Ram: Corsair DDR 3 1024gb dram sticks   HHD: 2 Maxtor 80gb ATA...

The largest stock exchange on Earth is a Linux shop. NYSE Euronext has chosen Red Hat's Linux offerings to power the critical financial trading platform that services approximately $141 billion in daily trading volume. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time. The stock exchange win is a dramatic victory for Red Hat and for Linux as the NYSE and its family of exchanges will be migrating from HP UX, IBM AIX, and SUN Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) operates multiple exchanges including, the New York Stock Exchange, Euronext, Liffe,...

Reality, as good writers know, is sometimes stranger than fiction. SCO's recent performance in the U.S. District Court in Utah is a perfect example. With years to prepare, SCO executives made some remarkable statements in their attempt to show that SCO, not Novell, owns Unix's copyright. While this case is not about SCO's claims that IBM and other companies placed Unix IP (intellectual property) into Linux, Novell's attorneys decided that they would address this issue as well. One presumes that, since this may be their one and only chance to attack SCO's Linux claims in a courtroom -- what with...

Excerpt - Linux visionary Hans Reiser has been convicted of first-degree murder for killing his estranged wife in 2006 and faces life imprisonment. Reiser, founder of Namesys which develops the Linux-based Reiser file systems, was charged with the deliberate and premeditated murder of Nina Reiser by an Oakland, California courthouse after an almost six-month trial. The fate of the troubled ReiserFS and Reiser4 file systems may be sealed, following media reports that Namesys has ceased commercial activity and the rapid loss of support for the latter system in the open source community. ReiserFS was the first journaling file system included...

A reinvigorated SCO Group Inc. goes to trial Tuesday to once again defend its claims to a widely used computer software code against Novell Inc. Although what's at stake in the scheduled four-day trial pales in comparison to the unresolved major claims in the case that have rattled parts of the software community for the past five years, millions of dollars are on the table in a legal battle that has been widely watched. In play in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball is as much as $37 million that Novell claims it is owed in the dispute...

Novell Inc. and Microsoft Corp., trying to expand the reach of their unusual alliance, say they plan to put a bigger emphasis on the Chinese market. The companies say they will make an extra investment to sell more support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system in China. The idea is to court companies currently using Linux without any software support, often for free. China is "quite a large and growing market in terms of Linux," said Susan Heystee, Novell's vice president and general manager of global strategic alliances. There is "a very large nonpaid Linux market" in...

Greetings.I'm interested in installing Linux on an empty partition as a dual boot with XP Pro.There seem to be many flavors of Linux available. Does anyone have a suggestion for the best version to try,Or have any experience with dual booting with XP pro?Many, many thanks in advance.

Some people are still under the delusion that Linux is written by unwashed hackers living in their parents' basements whose only social life is playing D&D and having flame wars over IRC (Internet Relay Chat) about whether vi or EMACS better and debating Picard versus Kirk. Nothing, nothing could be further from the truth. The LF (Linux Foundation) has just released a new report, "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It." This comprehensive study of the last three years of Linux kernel development, from version 2.6.11...

The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference. Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A US$20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.

The National Security Agency has released a new version of Security Enhanced Linux (SElinux), NSA program manager Stephen Smalley announced on the software's mailing list last week. This new version, build R080305, is the first update of the software since last September.New features in the update include improved error reporting, reduced memory usage, some new policy capabilities and additions to the library. SELinux is a patch for the Linux operating system kernel that provides mandatory access control, one that uses NSA's Flask MAC architecture. MAC confines each process executed on the machine according to predefined security policies set by the...

For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it's also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads into Windows' once unchallenged market share. The Mac numbers are especially revealing. NPD, a global market research company, has revealed that Apple's share of the U.S. computer market jumped to 14 percent in February 2008. This was up from 9 percent in February 2007. In...