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Making the point about Open, Closed and Free Softwares. We can notice that Closed Source software tends to look FLOSS-Like, while Open Source tends to use the Free Culture image. I will expose my views concerning the Free philosophy, and tell why informatics should only deal with Free Software.

Mandriva today announced that the Nigerian government has selected Intel-powered classmate PCs running on Mandriva Linux for educational use in nationwide pilot in Nigeria. Mandriva is working with Intel Corporation and Technology Support Center Ltd. to provide 17,000 Intel-powered classmate PC. The aim of this project is to improve the quality of technology delivered to students, and to help teachers and parents.

With the increase in complexity and data rates, modeling tools need to allow noise-free designs with fast turn-around times for many iterations in the design cycle. IBM Electromagnetic Field Solver Suite of Tools is a suite of full-wave and quasi-static electromagnetic field solver tools used to calculate the electrical parameters for interconnection and packaging design.

Even if you're too old for trick-or-treating this Halloween, you can still get in the spirit of things with these free software games, tools, and applications. Why should kids get to have all the fun?

A recent study has found that open source software's adoption by business has exceeded analysts' expectations, with bright prospects in the future.

"There needs to be a reform in how software purchases are counted. I originally wrote a paper called "The Open Letter to the Gaming Industry" where I outlined many points of interest that need to be reformed in order for the gaming industry to allow for greater competition. I did not, however, publish this paper because I never finished it. But, there is one major point that I continually address that needs to be changed."

Over at our sister site LinuxDevices, we're always looking at small, embedded-Linux systems. While reviewing Freespire recently on a Mini koobox, an Apple Mini-sized system, I began to wonder, Just how small do full-featured, Linux-powered PCs come?

AppArmor is one way to protect your assets on your Ubuntu Gutsy system. AppArmor attempts to protect processes on the server or desktop from security threats. AppArmor enforces limits on what processes can access on the system.

Command "ipcs -m" appears to be almost useless for getting Oracle 11g shared memory allocation maps. The basic steps for shared memory monitoring and tuning /dev/shm to handle instances with MEMORY_TARGET more then 1024M had been explained in Tanel Poder’s blog. Posting bellow follows advices from Tanel Poder’s blog to build Oracle 11g (64 bit) ASM database with MEMORY_TARGET size 1.2 GB on CentOS 5.

Do you want to give your desktop a dash of Mac OS X? The goal of this project is to bring the look and feel of Mac OS X (latest being 10.5, Leopard) to *nix GTK based systems. This document will present the procedure to install Mac4Lin pack & tweak certain things to get that almost perfect Mac OS X like desktop.

Over time, a filesystem accumulates a lot of useless items. FSlint is a nifty little tool that helps you clean your filesystem by pointing out junk in the form of empty directories, corrupt symlinks, files with bad names, duplicate and temp files, and more. However, its usefulness is marred by a virtually total lack of documentation and a GUI that takes some getting used to.

What's the most exciting technology of the next few years for the enterprise? Forget folding displays and virtual worlds: Think open source ERP, say some pioneering information technology leaders.

"This is one of the things which I feel is really hurting Linux... the inability to properly upgrade a distribution. Fedora and Ubuntu both have a 6 month time frame with releases, thats two versions a year. One would think that they would make upgrading as flawless as possible."

Uruguay has placed an order for 100,000 of the laptops aimed at children in the developing world, the first firm order received by the organisation.

Like many, I was pretty shocked by the recent Microsoft-EU deal to settle the long-running investigation into interoperability issues. This was not so much because of the way Microsoft has used every kind of delaying tactic it could before eventually agreeing (for the nth time) to try harder in the future. My real dismay was provoked by the gap between appearance and reality – a chasm that I think bodes ill for the future of open source.

This month’s issue of Wired Magazine had an article in it about LaLa, a CD swapping service. In the article, Wired’s Cliff Kuang wrote “The arrangement exploits a loophole in copyright law: While distributing duplicates is verboten, it’s perfectly legal to trade your own property.”

Here are the latest numbers on browser marketshare on German websites in the last quarter (Q3/2007):

Sometimes the machine you're working on has a little oops. Maybe the reboot command has hung and the system will not shutdown or a kernel panic has occurred and although you still have shell access, there is little more you can do with the machine. The solution is simple: you need to hard reboot the machine. But you're in Phoenix and the machine is in L.A. Like any good system administrator, you have the machine hooked up to an IP-KVM (or serial over IP, if the machine is headless), but the magic SysRq keys won't send properly. So what's a sysadmin to do?

MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) are text-driven cooperative or competitive games that you can play either straight from your terminal using the Telnet protocol or through a separate application specially designed to play MUDs. The majority of MUDs are free to play. Here's how you can get started with them. To find a MUD that appeals to you, visit a MUD-list such as The Mud Connector or Mud Magic. Both have reviews and top-rated and "game of the month" features to help you find a MUD to jump into. I recommend Mud Magic for beginners, as it is easier to navigate and provides clear, comprehensive lists of top-10 MUDs.

Last week I wrote the first part of this series which discussed the installation of Mepis, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, and Freespire on my laptops. Now that I have had time to play with each of the operating systems I would like to discuss my impressions of the different distributions. I have not spent any time on OpenSuse yet so I will leave it out of the discussion.