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One of the greatest things about the open source philosophy is that its principles can be applied to projects that help mankind. Content management systems, media apps, and gaming software all have their place in the FOSS ecosystem, but when projects like the Pink Army Cooperative come along, it reminds people of just how powerful the open source doctrine really is. Founded in March of this year, Canadian-based Pink Army Cooperative is using open source synthetic biology to create better drugs to fight breast cancer. The organization is comprised of members who pay $21 CDN to join the cooperative and, in turn, receive a small economic stake in the co-op.

A boot time test as a rule brings more criticism than praise for the tester, seeing that the tests are usually considered flawed. TuxRadar has fixed all that.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Leslie Stahl's complete ignorance about peer to peer networking and its role in content distribution was on full display on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

According to one leading security research lab, Windows 7 is vulnerable to an astonishing 8 out of 10 viruses it was exposed to during testing. But wait a minute, just how astonishing is this, really?

MySQL Cluster has come a long way in the 4 years since I experimented with it. Compared to when I first got the cluster working on my home computer, I didn't have to change much get the latest version up and running. So, what is MySQL Cluster? It is a database solution which tries to solve high availability issues by using multiple synchronous masters (for the lack of a better phrase) in a shared-nothing environment. In order to solve a lot of the latency issues associated with multiple masters, it keeps all the indexed data in memory to enable fast processing of the data.

For a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players. Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be thinking...

When you're running a machine with Intel video, a Linux upgrade can be fraught with peril. Follow along on my roller-coaster ride from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 in parts 1, 2 and 3 of my little opera titled "Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10."

This three-part series is your starting point for tuning your system for power efficiency. In Part 3, the author compares the performance of the five in-kernel governors in both tuned and untuned states to show you how to optimize a Linux-based System x server.

It has been a few months since Novell launched the SUSE Appliance program. The early returns look promising: More than 43,000 users have embraced Novell's Linux software appliance effort. Here's the scoop.

Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums.

The very popular Skype VoIP service has provided a Linux client for some years now, but it's not nearly as full-featured as its Windows counterpart, and right now it's a binary-only application. However, things may be partially changing at this company that's in the process of being spun off from eBay.

When Google released Picasa 3.5 for Windows, leaving Linux users behind with the older 3.0 release, I decided that it was time to move on. After testing different photo editing and management applications for Linux, I settled for digiKam.

On October 29th the NLUUG held their second conference this year (the first, held in the spring, focused on file systems). With over 200 visitors and talks by 19 speakers, all prominent in their respective fields, this conference was of particularly high quality. This is surely emphasized by the location and surroundings and the excellent organization. Read on for a short impression on the conference, which was attended by several KDE community members.

The Ubuntu Linux menagerie has birthed a new creature, the Karmic Koala, with the release last week of Ubuntu Linux 9.10. The successor to the release code named Jaunty Jackalope (aka version 9.04) boasts a herd of changes and enhancements that are so far making testers smile. [This review appeared in Canada's National Newspaper - Barbara]

Aberdeen-based Suretec Telecom is in the business of supporting a company that makes holiday dreams come true. Specialising in tailor-made holidays, luxury hotels, unique tours and cruises, DreamTicket luxury holidays is a niche holiday provider to the UK travel market, and it prides itself on operating cost-effectively without ‘middle-men’ so it can keep its prices keen. And it’s based in Surrey. Dreamticket contacted Suretec to discuss possibly installing an open source call recording system, that is, using software that does not entail hefty license fees. Such ‘open source’ software is fast being adopted by companies and local authorities alike, as there is greater choice and flexibility, increased security, greater reliability and stability, lower technology costs - and the use of open standards means vendor independence. Dreamticket is now working with Suretec to replace its current call centre phone system to a 100% Asterisk based system.

Mobile specialist Palm strengthens its team by hiring Matthew Tippett, the Linux graphic driver developer since 2003 at ATI, to be in charge of Linux kernel development.

Developer Nanni Bassetti has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Computer Aided INvestigative Environment (CAINE) Linux live distribution. CAINE and NetBookCAINE (NBCAINE) provide a complete digital forensic environment that's organised to integrate existing software tools as software modules and to provide a simple graphical user interface (GUI).

Keeping any computer system running can be some work. It would be nice if we never had to do any type of maintenance or troubleshooting, but no operating system has reached that point. Many desktop Linux users have server administration experience and are quite comfortable dropping to the command line and tinkering with their system. Not only do they know how to do this, it is the method that makes them comfortable. For those users who use a desktop operating system and expect a graphical experience, opening a terminal window is not a normal thing to do. That does not mean they are incapable of learning it. They are just more comfortable with a visual interface. There are many control panel tools and settings dialogs in KDE that make it easier for graphical-minded users to get things done. Here are five stand-alone applications that will help you stay informed about your computer’s status and health.

WINE is basically a windows emulator for Linux operating systems. WINE allows you to run some applications on Linux that does not have Linux support or installers ie: Office 2007, World of Warcraft and many others. This is not a how-to but more a idea of what is going around and what its all about. WINE is the underlying technology for all the above applications.