Recently, Gmail added IMAP support, giving the powerhouse email host the ability to interact better with third-party clients. And Google, being the friendly neighborhood do-gooder that it is, provided instructions on how to use IMAP with a variety of third-party clients. However, it forgot one popular client: KMail, the email portion of the KDE Kontact personal information management suite. Google also neglected to mention that several of its other services, such as Google Calendar and Google Reader, can work well with Kontact. Here’s how you can integrate them.
Category Archives: news
Nokia recently announced its Linux-based N810 tablet, and although the device is not yet widely available, the accompanying software is. The new operating system, designated Internet Tablet OS2008, is available as a free download for owners of the previous N800 model. In that rarest of all outcomes, the new release actually improves the older tablet — it is faster, improves battery life, and should make it easier for developers to port applications over from desktop Linux.
The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) resembles a classic Unix project — it’s partly constructed out of pre-existing programs, its emphasis is on speed, and its configuration requires taking time in a text editor. Even the relatively low quality of fonts on the desktop makes it feel like a vintage program. The result is a desktop environment that is short on innovation, but performs well on low-end machines, and blazingly fast on recent ones.
No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are you’ll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories, but if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Of course, you can always use the good old ftp command, but lftp takes the task of managing files and directories using the FTP protocol to a new level. To see what I mean, let’s use lftp to write a script that creates a local backup copy of a Web site.
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“Well, all the core members of the team are OK with Open Sourcing it. Now we are checking to see if the community likes the idea and see if we can grow support for it. We want to be sure quality software, however, not have a bin-patch-mania of pieces of our hard work by other people. We are sure that Open Source people will submit their stuff to the tree so the software gets better. It open a lot of possibilities for the future and anyone will be able to participate with quality code.”
Gizmodo reports that the creators of iPhone unlocking app AnySIM have considered open-sourcing their application to spread their code far and wide, hopefully picking up many new coders and eyeballs in the process. They’ve apparently floated the idea about for a while, and found that no one objected to the deal. They then put the idea to the community at hackint0sh, a popular iPhone hacking forum and AnySIM’s main site. Reading from the threads on hackint0sh, it appears that initially most folks advocate keeping the source closed; if you’d rather read a more open-source friendly version of the same discussion there’s always slashdot.
When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.
Linux divides its physical RAM (random access memory) into chucks of memory called pages. Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available.
Swapping is necessary for two important reasons. First, when the system requires more memory than is physically available, the kernel swaps out less used pages and gives memory to the current application (process) that needs the memory immediately. Second, a significant number of the pages used by an application during its startup phase may only be used for initialization and then never used again. The system can swap out those pages and free the memory for other applications or even for the disk cache.
Several months ago Novell started the project named Banter. It’s being called the next generation collaboration client. Think of it as software that combines all of your online “Web 2.0″ services along with chat, video, and voice into your contact management system.
Banter’s focus is on collaboration with people. One method of collaboration is IM. Banter will initially be focused on the big three: Video, Audio, and Text chats. Banter’s user experience will be around people (not buddies from specific services) and all the ways you work with them. Future collaboration methods may include email, blogs, photo sharing, whiteboarding, teaming, web conferencing, etc. Banter’s goal is not to implement all of these services and technologies, but bring them together so the data around the people you collaborate with is all brought together.
The chat window can handle text, audio, and video chat. Text chat is always available so you can send links or information while having and audio or video chat. Audio and Video can be started and stopped at any time during a chat. The project is focused on providing a simple quality experience for the end user. Banter is built on the telepathy project, and thus is not trying to re-invent the wheel but provide collaborative user experience on existing frameworks.
Banter is available on the openSUSE build service and is currently in alpha, the latest release being 0.1.10 with GTalk support. This project is being done in the open from the very beginning. In fact, if you want to see what we are doing, you can visit the Banter wiki at http://banter-project.org.
Banter in openSUSE 10.3 Â | Â Â Packages on the build server
A handful of Red Hat engineers are excited about a new tool they’ve developed called Func, short for Fedora Unified Network Controller. They’re pretty sure that once the rest of the community catches on to just how useful Func is, they’ll be singing its praises too. Red Hat Community Development Manager Greg DeKoenigsberg says, "This is the kind of idea where everyone kind of nods and says, ‘I meant to write that.’"
When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.
Linux.com ran an article headlined GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement on November 23. Jeff Waugh, the press officer on the GNOME Foundation Board, was prominently mentioned in that article and in several others to which it links. So was Roy Schestowitz, who wrote a post titled Anti-symbiosis: ODF, OOXML, Mono, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org on the Boycott Novell site, where he is a regular contributor. We thought getting them together might be illuminating.