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Create and manage multiple shells on your console with GNU Screen. The command line is a powerful tool, but it has a fatal weakness: If the shell perishes, so does your work. To keep your shell and your work alive—even across multiple sessions and dropped connections—use GNU Screen, a windowing system for your console.

OSI Board member Alolita Sharma gives a status update of the adoption of open source in India.

One of the many problems with the patent offices around the world is that they are often unaware of prior art, granting patents for so-called inventions that are, in fact, common knowledge. In the computer world, there have been a number of efforts to provide prior art to patent offices, either after a patent is granted, in order to have it rescinded, or – even better – as part of the examination process. That's fine for a community with easy access to online source materials, but what about other fields, where prior art exists in other forms like books, or perhaps orally?

GroundWork Monitor has been updated to version 5.3 with improvements to key areas. The network management software from GroundWork is available as a free Community Edition, as well as two commercial versions, GroundWork Monitor Professional and GroundWork Monitor Enterprise. The new release includes version 3.06 of the Nagios monitoring tools. Updated components include MySQL, RRDTool, PHP and the reporting tool BRIT. Installation has been simplified for new Linux servers, as all prerequisites are now included in a single package.

The BBC is more often in the news for hassling others over the misuse of BBC copyrighted material on the web. Imagine our surprise when we learned that the BBC was on the other end of the copyright infringement stick for a change.

Tech vendors who can't think of good things to say about their products fall back on "It's Green! Save Money And Be Hip!" But as always, Open Source is ahead of the curve. Tina Gasperson examines how Open Source software uses innovative methods such as less clothing, fewer showers, and agoraphobia to generate substantial energy savings.

Over the last weekend, the Plasma team held their second meeting in Porto, Portugal. The meeting was organised by Akademy Award winner Nuno Pinheiro inviting the Akademy Award-winning Plasma team to his home country. The meeting was kindly hosted by the Departamento de Engenharia Informatica (Department of Computer Sciences) of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. The Plasma team (and most probably many of the KDE users) are grateful for being provided this opportunity to collaborate on the desktop.

Back in September we reviewed the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 graphics card that offered 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Overall, this RV730-based graphics card had performed well under Linux and not a bad investment with it retailing for about $80 USD. Sapphire Technology though has now introduced a new version of the Radeon HD 4670 that sports 512MB of GDDR4 memory. Will switching out the GDDR3 for GDDR4 memory have much of an overall impact on this graphics card? We have the results in this article.

Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, the myriad of licenses available can sometimes confuse and disorient the user, sometimes making this first step much harder than it should be. Let’s try and make things clearer.

Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island's battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony. The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on "technological sovereignty" and is central to the Cuban government's desire to replace the Microsoft software running most of the island's computers.

In the past I was trying many different linux distros. Each has its own package management systems: debian has apt, mandrake has urpmi, yellowdog has an apt front-end for rpm, suse has yast... While they all are quite similar and not difficult to use, I found that I often made mistakes because I often forgot which system I was using and the exact commands on that system. Another issue is that I wish I could keep track how I installed/removed those packages. So I wrote a simple wrapper for various package management systems.

Pagico is a cross-platform organizer that supports Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. This is its second beta release for Ubuntu systems, re-enabling many important features that were hidden in its first beta release.

In the previous part of the article, we learned how to create a basic dialog, work with dialog's properties and callbacks, and add buttons to the dialog.

In this final part of the article we will learn how to enable animations for the dialog and how to control the dialog programmatically.

Students and teachers in select German schools can access personalized virtual desktops from home or school, using Kreisbildstelle Stade's currently piloting "Desque" system. The desktops run in a Hamburg datacenter, on quad-core Xeon servers, and are delivered over "standard" broadband using open source NX compression.

In reading through "Top 10 Responses to Why I Should Use Linux? A Linux Evangelists' Reference," I couldn't help but think that Linux needs better evangelists for its desktop crusade.

Open source software development in Russia is one of the most important directives for Igor Schegolev, the head of the ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation. On February 5, 2009 Igor Schegolev, the head of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation, met with Werner Knoblich, Red Hat vice president for EMEA at the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation, and other industry leaders.

Access China and NEC Electronics are developing a "price sensitive" smartphone reference design incorporating the "new" Mini version of the Access Linux Platform (ALP) mobile stack. The touch- and 3G-enabled design will use NEC's ARM9-based MP201 system-on-chip (SoC), and a future design may use NEC's new ARM11-based Emma Mobile 1.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I like desktop Linux. I admit though that Linux is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with proprietary media formats. These formats are designed to lock users into a particular video or audio player and those programs seldom come in a Linux version. There are answers though to this problem and that's one of the reasons why I like the Linux Mint distribution. It makes listening to proprietary audio and viewing restricted video as easy as it's ever going to get on Linux.

OpenBI, an open source solutions provider, has deployed Pentaho's business intelligence software in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for a manufacturing customer. It's a sign of big things to come for open source and SaaS.

SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, is returning to Los Angeles February 20th through 22nd. I have had the opportunity to attend the first event and a few more including SCALE 6x. I will once again attend this year and will finally be able to attend the Friday sessions.