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We're tapping the Linux Mag hive-mind this week for Android-based apps that deserve an install. Share your favorites.

Though MeeGo shows a lot of promise, the project is not making the most of the open source developer community. Here's what's wrong, and what MeeGo needs to do better in 2011.

I've shelled out a lot of money over the years on software -- Windows and Mac OS upgrades, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office -- the list goes on and on. Some of it was necessary, but more often than not there are free alternatives out there that do the job just as well or better than the paid software -- someone just has to point you in the right direction. That's what I'll attempt to do here today. Behold, some of my favorite free programs and utilities that I guarantee will make your life easier:

The techies in Kerala have one more feather to add in their cap. India's first open source movie concept is getting ready under Chamba Swathanthra Movie Project, started in Kerala. Open source films (also known as open content films and free content films) are films which are produced and distributed using free and open source software methodologies.

At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin, security researcher Julia Wolf of US company FireEye pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe's PDF standard. For instance, a PDF can reportedly contain a database scanner that becomes active and scans a network when the document is printed on a network printer.

Sure, the webOS App Catalog lags behind the markets of other mobile OSes -- but the homebrew community continues porting apps to HP/Palm's platform. One of the more recent additions is mPlayer, the cross-platform open source media app.

While those using the NVIDIA binary display driver with any modern GeForce graphics processor have great accelerated video playback on the GPU right now via VDPAU, as a GPU-independent way to offload the video playback acceleration from the CPU there s Broadcom's Crystal HD adapter, which is backed by open-source Linux drivers. The Crystal HD has already been tapped by XBMC and other free software projects, but new patches are available to utilize this technology within MPlayer and FFmpeg...

Murach books are known for their large format trim size and one-to-one theory-practice "paired pages" approach. While a majority of their titles are Microsoft technology focused, they do offer titles on Java and other Oracle-based technologies. This latest title from Murach on PHP and MySQL expands their offerings even further. How does this title compare to other Murach and PHP/MySQL book alternatives? Read on to find out.

The window manager is the most important part of the Linux desktop environment. It defines how your windows look, how they behave, how applications are launched, and how they're closed. In many cases, window managers have evolved into complete desktop environments, helping with file management, configuration editing and computer management. They're at the very heart of your interaction with the system, but their best feature is that they're swappable, which sets Linux apart from both Windows and OS X.

Tsinghua University and Mozilla China have jointly developed a new Internet browser product that is specially designed for IPv6.

More details emerge around an Ubuntu based tablet out of China. Although a firm launch date has yet to be set the developers hope the Ubuntu powered tablet will launch early next year. Here’s what they had to say in an exclusive interview with Gizchina..

While there is now the Calligra Suite following an internal KOffice fork by its developers, having been released today is KOffice 2.3.0 that includes the work leading up the formation of Calligra. KOffice 2.3 features include Krita being certified as ready for use by professional artists, better support for reading Microsoft Office files, a new report engine in KPlato and Kexi, and much more...

Now, for those of you who are technologically advanced, here's a detailed powerpoint presentation made by Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut at Tuesday's Chaos Computer Club Congress. They showed how using a reprogrammed $15 cell phone and a laptop computer, they could find a specific phone user and intercept his or her phone calls. The process to intercept takes about 20 seconds, and once the call has been recorded, it takes about three minutes to decrypt the file into a voice conversation or a text message.

Motorola's first Android tablet will be called the Droid Xoom, and will ship in February with an external 4G LTE modem, say industry reports. Meanwhile, photos have leaked of a purported HTC Thunderbolt 4G phone due to be announced by Verizon next week at CES, and more evidence piles up for Honeycomb being Android 2.4 instead of 3.0....

Next week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is, as the name implies, targeted at consumers, yet there are plenty of products that will end up in enterprises as well. This enterprise-focused preview of CES includes everything from new HP laptops and touchscreen technology to Android tablet PCs from Cisco and Technicolor to iPont 3D TV technology....

New firmware allows Canon cameras to perform some neat tricks. Back in the day, hands-on photography required you to be closeted away in a darkened room, where you dunked sheets of paper into solutions of smelly chemicals. Now we manipulate photographs with software, a much less messy and oppressive process. But wouldn't it be great to have more control still—even before the photo is taken? Many cameras allow you to adjust their exposure settings manually, but that's about it. What if you could have full command of your camera's hardware? Such thoughts motivated an anonymous programmer going by the online name VitalyB to reverse engineer the firmware for Canon's PowerShot series of digital point-and-shoot cameras. (Editor's note: the CHDK is GPLv2 software)

THE GERMAN Federal Cartel Office is investigating claims by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) that Novell selling most of its patents to a cartel of IT firms is a bad idea.

IBM has delivered a series of predictions for technological innovations it says will have broad impact and change lives by 2015. They range from 3-D and holographic technology in cameras and cell phones, to batteries that will power devices by & breathing& air, to recycling the energy produced by the world's data centers....

Yum is the excellent package manager used on Red Hat, Fedora, and other related Linux distributions. Did you know you can extend its usefulness with plugins?

As some try to release Lebanon’s government from the clutches of political paralysis so it can start tackling economic policy, a small but mighty group of advocates say the solution to many of the country’s economic and social woes lies in free technologies... “Security would improve because the country will depend on itself [for its electronic security] instead of depending on others”