While budgetary constraints and increasing commercial competition has clearly taken its toll on NASA, one area where the iconic government institution has unquestionably made headway is the implementation of open source.

ROSA Labs has forked the Mandriva distribution, creating a distribution that, while still resembling Mandriva 2011 at first glance, actually has gone its own way in many important respects. The first post-Mandriva release, ROSA 2012 Marathon, was officially unveiled last Monday. This is also the first ROSA LTS (long term support) release, offering security and software updates for five years.

The last time Twitter makes Opens Source community happy by intending new tools and Open Sourcing it. And a few days ago they had open sourced a Ruby on Rails gem that provides reputation system, to integrate in your application.

Claire Lotion This week we heard about the death of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. People within the KDE Community were shocked and upset by this tragedy.

Installing the latest VMware Player in Sabayon 8 with the 3.2 Linux kernel was an absolute pain. There are positively NO recent resources on how to get VMware Player working in Sabayon. So in this article I'm going to share with you how I got VMware Player 4.0.3 working in Sabayon 8.

The troubled GNU/Linux distribution Mandriva, which continue to survice despite all odds has announced that the development of the once most popular distribution is going back to the community. Mandriva is controlled and developed by Mandriva SA, a French company, just the way Ubuntu is funded and developed by Canonical.

Anyone who knows the world Linux will surely heard of Ubuntu. A distribution that has done so much for Linux and the Open Source world itself! In fact, thanks to the hard work of Canonical, Ubuntu is one of the first user-friendly distributions that have brought many people in the Linux world. Especially those most skeptical! But if Ubuntu is a distribution that has done so much in the past, now we must curb our enthusiasm. In fact, for some time now, this same distribution is becoming a lot more criticized by veterans of the Linux world. According to these, in fact, the distribution of Canonical is becoming more and more into a sort of Windows operating system. Of course, always free, but very similar for both choices regarding the publicity of the Operating system that the choices for the operating system itself. If these choices, however, are much discussed at the same time they are having a big success ! And for this reason that doubts arise and that the same Canonical is criticized by the loyal fans of the penguin!

While Adobe has abandoned Linux Flash Player support, the open-source Lightspark Flash Player alternative continues to inch forward...

The purpose of this article is to identify insightful and well written Linux books that can be downloaded without charge. The majority of the books featured in this article are themselves released under an open source license. All of the books featured here are written in English.

Shell prompt fans! here’s a microblogging client for Twitter and identi.ca you can use through the command line interface. Twidge allows you to view the recent tweets, add a new tweet, view messages, replies, retweets by those you follow and many other features.

Backups are usually made in one of two ways - either file-based which means that single files are backed up, often via synchronization and on an external disk, or image-based which means that a whole partition is stuffed into an image file that can be restored on the partition, containing everything there was on it. This tutorial covers image-based backups using Partimage from a live desktop environment.

With these commands you can analyze a text file. It will count all the occurrences of all words and put out the stats. It is usefull for song lyrics, books, notes and everything. It helps me analyze my writing style, which words do I use more often, where are my spelling errors and such. It is also nice to win an argument against someone over a dragonforce song. This example will use lyrics as example, but it is applicable to all text files. Examples included (A NaNoWriMo book by Fabian Scherschel from the Linux Outlaws)

Prozilla is a Fast and lightweight internet download accelerator apps ncurses based in ubuntu linux. it running in command line mode, support parallel download, pause and resume both HTTP and FTP protocol. prozilla has FTP search feature too which can search faster FTP server for the file you’re downloading.

It's about lowering the barrier to participation. It's about creating more opportunities to participate in a meaningful way; without having to become an expert in esoteric tools and technologies, or invest years before you can do anything.

On this tutorial, I will shows how to Install LAMP Server in Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS Precise pangolin. Below is a laundry list of commands to help you configure the perfect Install Lamp-Server on Ubuntu server 12.04 LTS, Let’s start it

Welcome to the 200th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

I read this article today by someone called Hoo-Ann and I was very disappointed by how short the article was. I have been using Ubuntu off and on since it was Breezy Badger and I can come up with a lot more to say about the advantages and disadvantages of using Ubuntu. So, as someone that believes if someone else can't do it "right" then you should it yourself, I'm going to list the (much longer) advantages and disadvantages I've personally found with using Ubuntu.

In our daily activities we may have to manage multiple files from different locations, from which, every now and then edit them. It can also arise the need to synchronize folders over the network and often we do not know how to do it, luckybackup may be the solution for you, a convenient graphical interface for a powerful command line tool like rsync.

This is the short linux and open-source news overview for week 20 of 2012. It features small articles bundeling (important) open source related news in one page. This week includes the Raspberry Pi, Debian, ROSA, EDE, Linux Mint, SolusOS, Bryan Lunduke's BLABA and Illumination Software Creator and more.

I have become a Linux user since 2008 and my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is currently the most popular Linux distribution and when somebody is talking about Linux, very likely that he is talking about Ubuntu. I personally have a very complicated opinion toward Ubuntu, I both love it and hate it. In this article, I will enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu to justify my love and hate for it.

Version 2.52 of Transmission, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, is now available for download.

SolusOS is a Debian stable based distribution that uses Gnome 2 as its desktop environment. It comes with plenty of applications installed by default.

On a vast scale, that's broadly what CERN's Large Hadron Collider does -- smashing particles together at a whisker short of the speed of light in order to minutely document the results. Running the supercooled magnets and four gigantic detection arrays -- each of which weighs in at tens of thousands of tons -- in place around the nearly 17-mile-long underground tunnel is, unsurprisingly, a fiendishly complex task.

According to Ehm, CERN began using open source message broker ActiveMQ as a way to transport data between the 85,000 machines and more than 2 million total endpoints at the facility in 2005.

I'm proud to announce the release of Dream Studio 12.04. This new version features many updates including GIMP 2.8, an Ubuntu 12.04 base, a new default wallpaper, and a handy introduction slideshow for new users. Dream Studio uses a lowlatency-pae linux kernel, supporting both x86 and amd64 systems with up to 64GB of RAM. Read the official release announcement here

Have a great weekend! Dick MacInnis

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply said, desktop that doesn't get on your way.

One of those applications, is the installer. While I will not necessarily describe it as an “excellent application”, it is one of the very few graphical installation programs with support for disk encryption, which is a very important feature to have and configure if you want to boost the physical security profile of your computer.

The US International Trade Commission today ordered an import ban on Motorola Mobility Android products, agreeing with Microsoft that the devices infringe a Microsoft patent on “generating meeting requests” from a mobile device.

The import ban stems from a December ruling that the Motorola Atrix, Droid, and Xoom (among 18 total devices) infringed the patent, which Microsoft says is related to Exchange ActiveSync technology. Today, the ITC said in a “final determination of violation” that “the appropriate form of relief in this investigation is a limited exclusion order prohibiting the unlicensed entry for consumption of mobile devices, associated software and components thereof covered by claims 1, 2, 5, or 6 of the United States Patent No. 6,370,566 and that are manufactured abroad by or on behalf of, or imported by or on behalf of, Motorola.”

Mandriva SA, the French company that used to control development of the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution, has become something of a joke.

Issue tracking systems cover a few different types of computer software applications which help to manage and maintain lists of issues in a number of ways. One of the most common types of an issue tracker is the bug tracking system.

When the going gets though, as the saying goes, the tough gets going. That is usually a test of character. When it comes to software companies in a financial mess, that old adage can be paraphrased as: When the going gets tough, we dump our software on the (open source) community.