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The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year. To that effect the next freeze will happen in December 2009, with a release expected in spring 2010. The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed "Etch") and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny").

GNU Generation is a new project sponsored by the Free Software Foundation to involve high school age pre-university students (approximately ages 13-18) in free software. Participants will have the opportunity to get involved with the free software community, and win some prizes! If you have never considered contributing to a free software project before, or if you wanted to but had no idea where to start -- this is your chance!

Just when I was getting a little worried about Ubuntu Server Edition’s ISV (independent software vendor) support, I received a heads up from John Pugh, software partner manager at Canonical. The timely news involved some Ubuntu-Alfresco developments. Here’s the scoop.

You wouldn't let your ISP block Hulu, just because it was in competition with their TV service, so why do you let you cellphone carrier?

IBM announced that is has acquired Ounce Labs, which makes software to scan source code for security and compliance vulnerabilities.

Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. It is a very popular game, played by millions across the world, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.

If you're thinking of upgrading from Windows XP or Vista to Windows 7, why not give Linux a try? Matt Hartley ponders the pros and cons of both platforms, the relative pain of making a change, and the economic incentives for continuing to favor a buggy, insecure platform.

UNIX has hundreds if not thousands of commands, and it's impossible to remember every option and nuance. But, happily, you don't have to: man, UNIX's built-in, online reference system, is man's best friend.

The recent problem with prelink in Fedora Rawhide has led some to wonder about what advantages pre-linking actually brings—and whether those advantages outweigh the pain it can cause. Pre-linking can reduce application start up time—and save some memory as well—but there are some downsides; not least the possibility of an unbootable system as some Rawhide users encountered. The advantages are small enough, or hard enough to completely quantify, that it leads to questions about whether it is justified as the default for Fedora.

As it strives to replace email, Google has open sourced two chunks of its new-age communications platform, Google Wave. Unveiled to a standing coder ovation at the Google I/O developer conference in late May, Google Wave is a (still-gestating) web platform that crossbreeds email with IM and document sharing, exhibiting a particular talent for near real-time interaction. Hoping to promote its use across the net, Google intends to open source the platform's underlying protocol and the "lion's share" of its client and server code.

Multitail improves on the well-known and useful program tail, adding colors and multiple-file monitoring. Juliet Kemp offers some great tips on using this excellent file-monitoring utility.

With anti-piracy outfits warning those who share copyrighted content and ISPs threatening to pull the plug on alleged offenders, many file-sharers have decided to protect themselves by going anonymous. To accommodate this growing demand, ItsHidden is now offering a free VPN targeted at those who want to protect their privacy online. Named ItsHidden, the free VPN solution has opened up a BETA test to the public, who can now privatize their Internet traffic - including BitTorrent transfers - in next to no time. ItsHidden was set up with torrent users in mind, allowing them to hide their identities from ‘third parties’ who choose to snoop on their activities.

While NVIDIA's driver engineers are hard at work on the 190.xx driver series, which among other features does bring OpenGL 3.2 support, for those living by the stable releases there is a new driver that's out today. The NVIDIA 185.18.29 Linux driver was uploaded to NVIDIA's FTP server this morning and does bring a number of changes as listed in their official release highlights.

Novell and Tech Data have inked a partnership to promote SUSE Linux and open source application appliances to VARs and channel partners. In some (but not all) ways, the partnership counters recent work by Red Hat and Synnex (co-founders of the Open Source Channel Alliance). Here’s the scoop.

Recently I profiled the latest LiVES video editing system, and in that article I mentioned that I intended to buy a camcorder for use with LiVES and other video editing software. Since then I purchased a Samsung SC-D382 midiDV recorder. Studio Dave is now on its way to becoming Studio DV.

Android developers looking forward to the inclusion of multi-touch support in the upcoming release of Google's open source mobile operating system, code named "Donut", will need to wait even longer. It was previously believed that Donut, which would see a final release as Android version 2.0, would include the much anticipated multi-touch gesture support. In a post on Google Groups, Android developer Romain Guy has announced that the Donut release won't include multi-touch.

Raise your hand if you've ever used a credit card. Now, raise your hand if you love Linux. There must be octopi in the audience, because that's a lot of hands. For those who were waving wildly on both counts, the good news out of the Linux Foundation today is that now you can take your favorite penguin along every time you feel the need to shout "Charge it!"

Novell has announced the launch of the SUSE Appliance Program for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). With the Appliance Program, ISVs can can create software appliances, such as an email server for a small office, using SUSE Linux Enterprise or openSUSE and SUSE Studio, test their appliances and get them to the market.

Developer Kovid Goyal introduced many new features in version 0.6.0 of his Calibre e-book suite. With the 0.6.1 update, he also fixed numerous bugs.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 9.04 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.