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Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company -- far from it. "We had a predominantly Microsoft-oriented shop," says David Christian, Mindbridge CTO. But the company, which at the time offered an "intranet in a box" application, began hosting the software for its clients. "That required us to get a good handle on Linux, because Linux was the only inexpensive, cost-efficient way of handling that in a scaled environment," Christian says. "And I didn't want to add Microsoft to our customers' overhead." The more Christian worked with Linux, the more he liked it. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Students of Zürich's two big universities can finally obtain discount laptops without paying the "Windows Tax", thanks to the efforts of a student organization.

In light of the recent events relating to the standardization process of EOOXML, it seems appropriate to look into possible standardization of the process itself.

"Some people seem to be using'Acked-by' to mean,'seems good to me', without necessarily doing a full review of the patch, and instead of trying to change the meaning of'Acked-by', [the plan is] to have a new sign off which is a bit more explicitly about what it means," Theodore Tso explained in a recent thread on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He continued:"This was proposed by Andrew and discussed at the Kernel Summit; the basic idea is that it is a formal indication that the person has done a *full* review of the patch (a few random comments from the local whitespace police don't count), and is willing to vouch that the patch is correct, safe, extremely unlikely to cause regressions.

Microsoft's ISO standardization ambitions for its Office Open XML file format have hit a rough patch, as OOXML recently failed to garner enough votes for fast-track ratification. ODF (OpenDocument Format) advocates are pleased, but they're fooling themselves if they think that the lack of ISO standardization for OOXML is going to put any kind of a dent in the dominance that Microsoft holds over the office productivity market.

If you are having problems to upgrade your Ubuntu to Gutsy Gibbon because of this error: "current dist not found in meta-release" Read this "How-to" to solve it, maybe will not work for everybody.

This document describes how to install the Dovecot mail server from source as an imap / pop3 mail server for your domain and how to set up the sieve plugin so your clients can use the sieve mail filtering language for their mail accounts.

This week has been extremely exciting to say the least. We started by telling you about the AMD 8.41 Display Driver which is largely rewritten and offers Radeon HD 2000 product support, performance improvements, and soon will support AIGLX. Four articles looking at the R300/400, R500, and R600 performance under Linux followed that preview. Then yesterday we told you about AMD's new open-source strategy for supporting Linux and the open-source community. Well, what do we have for you today? With the 8.41 display driver we have completed some additional benchmarks using the Radeon HD 2400PRO 256MB and Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB graphics cards. In this article, we see if these two mid-range ATI Radeon HD 2000 graphics cards are able to compete against NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series.

Discover the proof-of-technology visual demonstration of the graphics power of the Cell Broadband Engine for realistic real-time animation. Interactive Ray Tracer for Cell Broadband Engine runs on both the Playstation 3 or QS20 platforms, and a single Linux binary is supplied that renders the provided scene.

Some Bible study programs are gratis, but not libre. Others cost $30, right on up to hundreds of dollars - and that's just for the base modules. Worse, most of these programs can only run on one or two operating systems. Follow along as Blue GNU explores a few Free/libre Bible software projects that let anyone have access to hundreds of Bible resources, regardless of what operating system they use, or what language they speak.

Recent conversations with knowledgeable colleagues has recently reached a point where it is difficult to have a rational conversation about any aspect of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software without having to invoke an entire other discipline to speak about it. As well, the lines of demarcation between EMR software engineering, law, licensing, economics, politics and public policy has now become so intertwined that it is becoming nearly impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. A nexus may have formed in which these are inextricably linked.

If you are a systems or network administrator and you do not own a copy of this book, stop reading this right now and go get one. If you are a manager responsible for the care and feeding of a technical team, purchase copies for yourself and each of your team members. Heck, even if you’re unfortunate enough to be married to a systems administrator (*gasp*), buy a copy for your significant other and steal it when they aren’t looking. It’s that good. You’ll get a better understanding of what he or she does on a daily basis, as well as be able to finally explain it to your mother-in-law. (True story!) Here’s why.

Author of OpenBSD's hardware driver layer for wireless Atheros devices,Reyk Floeter, sent a query to the Linux Kernel mailing list regarding the recent licensing debate surrounding the Linux"ath5k" driver,"I'm still trying to get an idea about the facts and the latest state of the incidence that violated the copyright of my code, because I just returned from vacation."

AMD announced on Sept. 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. The company announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops.

The most referenced and most often used command on any Linux distribution is man, which lets users read the manual pages of other commands. Here are a couple of less well-known but useful commands that let you bookmark a position within a man page, and test a command you read from the man page without closing the page.

After lots of rumors, which went on for some half year already, now it is official: today AMD put out a press release about their efforts to open the source to their graphics cards.

While many of us have been preoccupied with the OOXML vote, the rest of the world has naturally been continuing to go about its business. One piece of business that took an interesting turn in the last few days is a ruling by a Federal Appellate Court in the United States that breaks new ground in protecting the integrity of the standard setting system. The ruling may also have relevance to the regrettable conduct witnessed in the recent OOXML vote.

Apple faces calls to open iPhone. Office 2.0 Conference Apple is facing fresh calls to open the iPhone as new evidence emerged of the technical and legal challenges developers face putting their software on the device.

"The current VM can get itself into trouble fairly easily on systems with a small ZONE_HIGHMEM, which is common on i686 computers with 1GB of memory," Rik van Riel said explaining a small patch to cmscan.c. He continued, "on one side, page_alloc() will allocate down to zone->pages_low, while on the other side, kswapd() and balance_pgdat() will try to free memory from every zone, until every zone has more free pages than zone->pages_high." He noted that highmem could be filled up with "page tables, ramfs, vmalloc allocations and other unswappable things quite easily and without many bad side effects, since we still have a huge ZONE_NORMAL to do future allocations from. However, as long as the number of free pages in the highmem zone is below zone->pages_high, kswapd will continue swapping things out from ZONE_NORMAL, too! Sami Farin managed to get his system into a stage where kswapd had freed about 700MB of low memory and was still 'going strong'."

If you have video footage that you want to capture, edit, and share with friends or family (or even use professionally), you'll be happy to know that you can do it all with open source tools. I'll show you how to author a DVD that can play on most home players.