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File under: what the bloody hell is that all about then? It would seem that the silly season is upon us already as we hear of a Texas teacher with her knickers in a twist over Linux in the classroom.

YouTube has a rather frivolous reputation, the sort of site you might visit to see a video of snowboarding hamsters or jetpacking gerbils. It wasn’t until I started re-learning the guitar, learning to play the piano too and sight reading sheet music that I began to realize that YouTube was a great source of online tutorials. The quality varies from the execrable to the sublime, but I found sufficient quality material to start wondering how I might best use YouTube to organize my digital music lessons. As a committed GNU/Linux user I wondered how to make the most of my distro’s ability to manage my viewing and download experience. Unixland is a free country full of choice and here are the choicest tips, tools, tricks and applications to get the best out of YouTube. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Nepal's first FOSS Training and Research Center is opened at Brihaspati Vidyasadan School (BVS) at Naxal, Kathmandu, Nepal. This Center has been made possible by the financial help from Help Nepal Network and BVS Alumni and technical help from FOSS Nepal, the community involved in spreading free and open source technologies in Nepal.

ubuntu-system-panel is a simple launcher for the GNOME desktop, providing easy access to Places, Applications and common configuration items for your computer. This guide shows how to install and configure it on an Ubuntu 8.10 desktop.

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric. This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

[Too much cool stuff on this list! - Scott]

Linux has been doing pretty well in China, with recent year-on-year sales going through the roof. However, there can be no escaping the global economic crisis, not even for Chinese Linux.

A month ago NVIDIA had introduced the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) that brought PureVideo-like features to Linux. Our initial benchmarks of this video decoding API within NVIDIA's binary driver were quite favorable as it was able to dramatically cut down on the CPU usage when playing H.264 video files. To see how well NVIDIA's VDPAU really is though, we have carried out some more thorough testing now and our hardware consists of a CPU we purchased for $20 USD and a NVIDIA GeForce graphics card that retails for just $30. Can this very low-end hardware manage to play high definition videos under Linux?

GameLayers' Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), which allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual world of adventures, challenges, and intrigue, has been picking up traction thanks in part to its robust open source framework. Underpinning the popular online game is Ruby on Rails, a full-stack framework for developing database-backed Web applications that works with a variety of Web servers and databases.

Last year, when Australia went to the polls, one of the major promises held out by the Labor Party - which ultimately returned to government after 11 years - was the provision of computers to school-children, one for each child in grades 9 to 12. A year has gone by and it has become apparent that the costing of this programme wasn't exactly spot on. The projected support costs and the electricity costs are prohibitive, to the extent that some states are reluctant to join the programme. And as with any delayed initiative, the cost has blown out, some say by as much as two-thirds. The original estimate was that it would cost $A1.2 billion.

How does traceroute work? After a lengthy rant on knowledge and intelligence, we'll figure it all out ;) Today we're going to start a new random thread of posts dealing with common commands and how they work. The meat of today's post is near the end, as the explanation, when I get around to it, is fairly simple and easy to both convey and understand. The majority of this page will be an introduction to this series of posts, with some philosophy mixed in (which may upset certain people) and a brief discourse on knowledge (what it means to have it and why it's probably the worst measure of a person you could ever use).

The latest version of Fedora, the Linux-based operating system, gives users a peek at what they can expect to see in future Linux distributions from Red Hat and other vendors. Fedora 10 offers a broad security framework and new audit capabilities, and gives Linux enthusiasts a good way to upgrade from Fedora 9. However, those who use the Linux-based OS shouldn't expect any support from Red Hat.

And it seems as if another minor, barely-alive operating system will become encumbered by legal bickering between two small companies. The RISC OS scene, which is already a tangled and complicated mess of companies, version number teasing and incompatible versions, might be torn apart even further because RISCOS Ltd might take legal action trying to prevent RISC OS Open Ltd from releasing a RiscPC compatible ROM from the RISC OS 5 shared source project. Should you feel confused, you needn't worry: so does everyone else.

There is a great deal of activity around Linux filesystems currently. Of the many ongoing efforts, two receive the most attention: ext4, the extension of ext3 expected to keep that filesystem design going for a few more years, and btrfs, which is seen by many as the long-term filesystem of the future. But there is another project out there which is moving quickly and is worth a look: Daniel Phillips's Tux3 filesystem.

Slackware 12.2 has been released.

While you won't find any Firefox extensions designed specifically for mobile users, there are a few add-ons you might find particularly useful when you are on the move. Here are five of them.

KDE4Daily is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry for people who would like to test KDE trunk in the run-up to 4.2, consisting of a Qemu VM image containing a Kubuntu 8.10 base and a comprehensive set of a self-compiled KDE4 modules from KDE trunk (all at r888587, initially), along with an updater system inside the VM itself. After an unusually rocky round of development, it is time to (finally!) announce the release of KDE4Daily 4.2!

Novell and Hewlett-Packard have introduced a SUSE Linux desktop PC, and the companies are also promoting specific Linux applications to school administrators and students. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Though the majority of companies have policies pertaining to responding to speculation, sometimes it just gets to a point they have to. For instance, say a rumor makes the rounds (with at least some supporting evidence) that Google has something up its sleeve that might possibly have to do with an operating system. Google can keep mum for a while, but it obviously has to be formally addressed, sooner or later.

Linux Defender includes facilities for peer-to-peer patent review, post patent review as well as defensive publications for patents. With Microsoft alleging, or just hinting strongly in some cases, that open source technologies infringe on over 200 Microsoft patents , the new effort might potentially help open source and Linux vendors to defend themselves should the need arise.

Two Oregon educators who founded the K12Linux project seven years ago are glad that they have been able to hand that project over to Fedora, the home they always meant for K12Linux to have. Paul Nelson and Eric Harrison met online when Nelson, a classroom teacher and technology director at a small school in Portland's Riverdale School District, went looking for Linux help. "We were doing everything on the back end with Linux, but I was spending a lot of time keeping the Windows desktops running. I thought how nice it would be to use Linux on the front end too. I posted a notice on the local user group mailing list." Harrison, then a Multnomah County IT Services support tech, befriended Nelson, and the two had an idea: make a specialized Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) distribution that would allow schools to use thin clients running Linux on old, inexpensive hardware.

After two years of intense development, Amarok 2 has become a reality! Some of the highlights that are included in the 2.0 release are a completely redesigned user interface, tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast. There is an overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok. Much of the work has gone into migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework using core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma. Read more about the new release in the release announcement and start Amaroking!

For years now, HP has been slowly edging towards releasing a pre-installed Linux for general users. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that today, December 10th, HP finally took the big plunge.

Want something cool for Christmas that runs on Linux? Got a geek to buy for? Here's 10 cool gadgets that run Linux.

Every day people rely on search engines to find specific content in the many terabytes of data that exist on the Internet, but have you ever wondered how this search is actually performed? One approach is Apache's Hadoop, which is a software framework that enables distributed manipulation of vast amounts of data. One application of Hadoop is parallel indexing of Internet Web pages. Hadoop is an Apache project with support from Yahoo!, Google, IBM, and others. This article introduces the Hadoop framework and shows you why it's one of the most important Linux-based distributed computing frameworks.

Only around five percent of Lifehacker's visitors are using the open-source Linux operating system when they stop by, according to our traffic charts, and only one of our editors (ahem) is regularly using it every day. Having said that, when we get to write about great Linux-based tweaks or downloads, we get pretty excited—and, apparently, so do our readers and visitors linked in from across the web. Today we're looking back at the Linux-related posts that got the most attention in 2008, so read on to see what you might have missed, and what the open-source crowd is down with. Photo by Ypsy.

Well, it may be December, but it is time for the OpenSolaris 2008.11 update, the second tweak of the open source variant of the Solaris Unix platform. With the new release today, it's getting some interesting storage enhancements as well as the usual update additions. The OpenSolaris project launched its first pseudo-commercial release, code-named Project Indiana, in May, with the goal of getting the open source variant of Solaris humming along in binary form and being used by the development community and other cheapskates who like to play with operating systems but who don't want to pay for them.

The FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force and GPL-Violations.org have jointly prepared a few guidelines on how to best report (and avoid) license violations. Some of the advice is common sense (suspected violations are best handled in private, reported only to the involved parties, and organizations such as GPL-Violations and the appropriate branch of the Free Software Foundation), but reminders are always useful, especially in the heat of the moment.

The Android Open Source Project continues to go from strength to strength as the Open Handset Alliance announces a batch of new members. Amongst the 14 new companies to sign up and demonstrate support for Android as an open mobile platform, are Sony Ericsson and Vodafone.

Unison Technologies, with an assist from Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, says it is “launching a major threat to Microsoft Exchange” and Cisco PBXes. The effort involves free unified communications software running on Ubuntu. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

GNOME's Vala programming language lets you use the GLib2 object system at the heart of the GNOME desktop without having to do object-oriented programming in ANSI C. Unlike Mono or Java, a Vala program does not require any virtual machine or runtime libraries, so people who use your Vala objects don't even have to know they are not written in C.

Open Invention Network along with a series of powerful partners ranging from IBM to the Software Freedom Law Center to the Linux Foundation has unveiled Linux Defenders, a federated effort to shield the open source community from patent trolls. The program calls for open source developers large and small to contribute new open source software inventions to the group's attorneys and engineers so that they can help build moats to to keep out people pushing dubious patent infringement charges. Here's why this is a good idea, where the concept has worked very well before.

Previously, talking to Exchange without using Microsoft products was pretty much out of the question. The binary MAPI protocol is proprietary and poorly documented. Exchange supports IMAP and POP, but these protocols only give access to emails, not the calendar, address book, todo lists etc. But beginning with version 2007, Exchange now ships with a SOAP interface called Exchange Web Services, or EWS. This interface gives us access to the functions necessary to write clients in any programming language on any platform. This article describes a PHP program to look up, delete and insert items in an Exchange calendar.