Fedora 15 has been officially released and becomes the first major distribution to use the GNOME 3 Desktop by default. Fedora is a leading edge, free and open source operating system that continues to deliver innovative features to many users, with a new release about every six months. New Features GNOME 3 Desktop – GNOME 3 is the next generation of GNOME with a brand new user interface. It provides a completely new and modern desktop that has been designed for today’s users and technologies. Fedora 15 is the first major distribution to include GNOME 3 by default. GNOME 3 is being developed with extensive upstream…
Author: Ryan
FreeNAS 8.0 has been officially released after being in beta for the last few months. For those of you that are unfamilliar, FreeNAS is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) server OS based on FreeBSD 8.0 supporting wide range of technologies. This releases is the first major release since development of the project was taken over by iXsystems. While this version adds support for BSD 8.0 and newer hardware, it takes a step back in the feature department. From the official press release: The release of FreeNAS 8 includes major architectural optimizations, a django-driven user interface, and ZFS – lending us…
In an unforeseen move Microsoft announced that it will officially buy Skype for $8.5 billion in cash. Skype will now form the new “Skype Microsoft Division”, with Skype CEO as its as president. As the dust settles from this announcement many questions remain unanswered. What are their intentions? What is their business plan? And most importantly for us, what does this mean for Linux and Android support? Steve Ballmer seemed to address this in the press conference: “Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms” “We will continue to support non-Microsoft platforms, because it’s fundamental…
ASCII is a 7-bit character set containing 128 characters and stands for the “American Standard Code for Information Interchange”. It was designed in the early 1960’s as a standard character set for computers and hardware devices. It contains the numbers from 0-9, the uppercase and lowercase English letters from A to Z, and some special characters. ASCII HTML Code Reference Chart ASCII Character HTML Code Description   space ! ! exclamation mark " " quotation mark # # number sign $ $ dollar sign % % percent sign & & ampersand ‘ ' apostrophe ( ( left parenthesis )…
Intel announced a very important piece of semiconductor news in many years: the tri-gate transistor. The redesign of the 2D planar to the 3D tri-gate transistor is a fundamental change and will bring about big savings in efficiency and power consumption. The tri-gate transistor is being produced starting at the 22nm manufacturing node and will be introduced with the upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs. Intel will eventually include this technology in it’s entire processor portfolio from mobile to server. The problem with the current planar transistors is that as they get smaller less current can squeeze through it. As the transistors…
Google Chrome is an awesome browser and there are a few tricks that you should learn that make it that much better. Some of the coolest and simplest are text highlight for searching and navigation. Both of these tricks will save you an unbelievable amount of time, and they are only but a couple of examples of what makes Chrome shine. Highlight Searching Highlight a word or phrase and right click on it. You will be given the option to search Google for that phrase in a new tab. Pretty slick. Highlight Navigation Highlight a URL and right click. You…
The iPod shuffle is a great little device but unfortunately it is buit to work with iTunes and comes with an almost undecipherable file system and database. Apple’s motives are clear here, buy a Mac and use iTunes. Fortunately for us you can save your money as there are a variety of ways to sync your Shuffle using some common Linux utilities. Now it’s not all rosy, for some reason the iPod Shuffle support on Linux is shaky compared to other iPod models. This guide will walk you though all these problems and get your iPod Shuffle playing nice with…
Canonical has released its latest version of Ubuntu today. Under the hood 11.04 Natty has made many controversial changes, first and foremost the addition of Unity which replaces the standard GNOME desktop. The new desktop was originally designed for the Ubuntu Netbook Edition but has now made its way to the standard version. Beyond the introduction of the new Unity shell, there have been several other additions. The Gtk+ theme has a new slim scrollbar style, and the default music player in Ubuntu changed from Rhythmbox to Banshee. The Ubuntu Software Center has finally included support for posting ratings and…
According to the YouTube official blog post. All new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. To put that in perspective, nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day. So far they have already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on their site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. From the offical blog post: To that end, all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and…
If you have been using GNOME 3 and the GNOME Shell desktop then you will undoubtedly find this cheat sheet handy. Finding your way around the desktop without the help of a task bar can be tricky at first. While it is possible to use the mouse for each of these actions, GNOME Shell is tuned for fast keyboard navigation. Learning these keyboard shortcuts will make your transition to the GNOME Shell much easier. GNOME Shell Keybindings System (Windows) key: Switch between Activities overview and desktop Alt+F1: Switch between Activities overview and desktop Alt+F2: Pop up command dialog Alt+Tab: Application…