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I consider myself to be a FOSS proponent and there is only one thing that counts to me: great code. I don't care whether you are black or white, atheist or Christian, male or female. I don't check the "About" boxes before I give my judgment. Great code is just great code. It's what FOSS is all about: meritocracy. Because I'm convinced that is the real driving force of FOSS, not "sexism" as some are trying to make us believe.

Announced by UPR team the release of the second stable release of Ubuntu Privacy Remix 9.04. All software packages including the kernel were updated to their newest version to close security holes and fix bugs.

Surfing the net all this time on topics related to GNU/Linux, Free and Open Source Software, I came across various interesting, imaginative and some times funny advertisements and videos. Here are the top 12, in random order.

In this article we will describe how we can create a bootable Backtrack 4 USB Drive that will save all the changes we make on the USB itself. In this scenario we will use 2 USB Drives. One USB drive of 1GB and the 2GB USB drive which will hold our changes.

On the outskirts of the OpenSUSE Conference, core developers revealed details on the new openSUSE version 11.2. Although it will have Kernel 2.6.31, browser users will have to wait a bit longer for YaST.

I recently mentioned Linux in a conversation that started with "I'm tired of the problems my computer has with Windows" and was told that Linux doesn't have any support. Really? Then the dozens of websites, mailing lists, news feeds and IRC channels that I use must be figments of my imagination.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to propose a new so-called net neutrality rule Monday that could prevent telecommunications, cable and wireless companies from blocking Internet applications, according to sources at the agency. Genachowski will discuss the rules Monday during a keynote speech at The Brookings Institute. He isn't expected to drill into many details, but the proposal will specifically be for an additional guideline on how operators like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast can control what goes on their networks. That additional guideline would prevent the operators from discriminating, or act as gatekeepers, of Web content and services.

[Not really FOSS related but certainly of interest to our readers. - Scott]

When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales. But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them.

COBOL is celebrating its 50th birthday. Or at least the name is. In May 1959, during a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the US Department of Defense organized a committee charged with developing a "short range" approach to a common business computing language. And on September 18th of that year, the new Short Range Committee coined the name COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language.

Today is about sexism towards women in FOSS. It is about treating women differently, and poorly, just for being women. It is about doing harm to FOSS. There are a number of reasons why the participation of women in FOSS is so low, around 1.5%, and cruddy treatment of women is a big one. I don't know if it is worse in FOSS than in other arenas, and I don't care-- I'm not grading on a curve.

Latest statistics from Black Duck Software show version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2) sliding in popularity. Just under half of all the open source projects contained in the September 2009 statistics used the GPLv2.

If your interest is in becoming a Linux administrator one skill you must have is the ability to network servers and understand the interaction between servers. You will also need to know how to build servers using RAID, LVM and optional file systems. These skills can be practiced on a virtual network of practice servers. You can build a training network using one workstation. I use several options for building a training network; VMWare Player, OpenVZ and VirtualBox.

Please join the Free Software Foundation as part of an international day celebrating software freedom. We'll be one of the many groups around the world hosting an event that day (see http://softwarefreedomday.org).

Until yesterday I have been happily making backups of $HOME using the tar command in a bash script. However, my home directory has grown over the years but my storage device hasn't and there are tons of files that I don't really need to backup. So, I set out to learn how to use the --exclude and --exclude-from switches provided by tar. What I found was interesting, these switches didn't work.

If there's one complaint we in the Linux world hear more than anything, it's "My [whatever] doesn't work with Linux." The unfortunate truth is that, while their infrastructure is likely Linux powered, the majority of device manufacturers aren't thinking about the desktop version when designing their wares. When a manufacturer does think outside the box (the one on the shelf, with the $200 price tag), it's a great day for us all — when they make really cool devices, it's all the better.

A Linux-powered instant-on OS can get you connected faster by shaving precious minutes or seconds off your Windows system's startup process. Joe Moran reviews HyperSpace, Presto, and Splashtop.

How to install android sdk 1.6 on Ubuntu 9.04 Google has recently released version android SDK 1.6. This tutorial will teach you how to install it on ubuntu 9.04.

While the Internet may know no borders, the U.S Government does. There are a number of rules including encryption export regulations from the U.S Department of Commerce and export sanctions by the Department of Treasury that affect software vendors. But what do you do when your application is open source and freely available to anyone in the world? Do the same the rules apply? It's a question that Mozilla asked the U.S government about. The answer they received could have profound implications not just for Firefox but for all open source software vendors. "We really couldn't accept the notion that these government rules could jeopardize the participatory nature of an open source project so we sought to challenge it," Harvey Anderson VP and General Counsel of Mozilla told InternetNews.com. "We argued that First Amendment free speech rights would prevail in this scenario. The government took our filing and then we got back a no violation letter which is fantastic."

Version 4.3 of the lean Puppy Linux distribution is now available to download. At a size of just about 110 Mbytes, the system with its JWM and IceWM window managers offers up to date applications and includes many new features. Puppy Linux 4.3 now uses with kernel version 2.6.30.5 which includes ext4 filesystem support.

Proxmox VE is a very light-weight Debian-based distribution that includes a kernel with support for both KVM and OpenVZ. This means you get the best of both virtualization worlds... containers (OS Virtualization) and fully-virtualized machines (Machine Virtualization). Proxmox VE also includes a very powerful yet easy to use web-based management system with clustering features. Boot the Proxmox VE install media, answer a few simple questions, and within 10 minutes you have a very powerful virtualization platform you can manage from a web browser. Install it on one or more additional machines that are networked together and use Proxmox VE's cluster management tool to create a virtualization cluster that allows for centralized management, automated backups, iso media and OS Template syncing, as well as migration features. Proxmox VE really is a time saving turnkey solution... and it is freely available under a GPL license.