The new Skype Linux features are high quality video codec support, Skypes SILK audio codec support, PulseAudio compatibility, SMS sending support, chat messaging editing/removing capabilities, contact groups support, typing notification in chat, chat picture support, mood messages, video/mobile icons are now visible in the contact list along with bookmarked chats, and also added are contact labels/tags.
via Phoronix.
Linux just gets sexier and sexier, and Fedora 11 just joined Ubuntu 9.04 in the ranks of super modern Linux distros released this year. Fedora doesn’t have all the desktop refinements of Ubuntu, or the wild popularity, but it does act as the underpinnings of Intel’s Moblin, and the Sugar OS, and doesn’t shy away from the future. Fedora 11 makes the bleeding edge ext4 filesystem the default for installs, which speeds performance and improves data integrity
via Engadget.
Open source has become big business suggests an article in the Investors Business Daily but it has done so by becoming more like the proprietary-software world it purports to leave behind. The article cites recent research from IDC indicating that CIOs allocated up to 24 percent of their budgets to open-source software in 2008 up from 10 percent in 2007–a finding that jibes with recent data from Forrester. This open-source growth is propelling Red Hat to grow “at two to three times the rate of the broader software industry over a multiyear horizon ” according to research from Piper Jaffray.
via CNET News.
NetApplications’ hitslink.com just releasted their april market share stats and linux passed 1% for the first time ever.
S.M.A.R.T. is a system in modern hard drives designed to report conditions that may indicate impending failure. smartmontools is a free software package that can monitor S.M.A.R.T. attributes and run hard drive self-tests. Although smartmontools runs on a number of platforms, I will only cover installing and configuring it on Linux.
via Random Bits.