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When it comes to choosing a Linux distribution, people tend to stick with the major players, such as Ubuntu, SUSE, or Fedora. However, every once in a while a distro comes along that offers a look at Linux in a new and fun way. One such distribution is Dreamlinux, a Morphix-based implementation of Linux that can be run from a single CD or installed on a hard drive. Dreamlinux 2.2 aims to offer a full range of desktop applications while providing a wealth of multimedia tools for easy production of professional-grade media.

Oracle has licensed patents of the Open Invention Network, a group seeking to give open source allies some clout in an intellectual property realm that favours the incumbent proprietary software powers.

Last time, I gave a users' perspective overview of the OpenID decentralized single sign-on system, and described how to take the first step: getting your own OpenID identity. Once you are comfortable with OpenID as a login method for the sites that you visit, you can look at implementing it for the sites that you run. Plugins for WordPress make the process easy to understand.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Ubuntu based server (Ubuntu 6.10) to act as a file- and printserver for Windows workstations in small workgroups. This howto uses the tdb backend for SAMBA to store passwords and account information. This is suitable for workgroups for up to 250 users and is easier to set up than an LDAP backend.

Novell is developing an open source version of Microsoft's InfoCard identity technology that will run on both Linux and Mac.

Open Invention Network (OIN), the company formed to spur innovation and protect the Linux System, has said that Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company, has become a licensee. By becoming a licensee, Oracle is demonstrating its commitment to a secure, fertile Linux ecosystem, ensuring choice in the marketplace.

The OpenOffice.org project team said today that three security vulnerabilities, which had been reported in the last week, have been fully addressed in OpenOffice.org 2.2. The latest release candidate (RC4) of v2.2 -- including all the security fixes -- is now available for download.

The humble personal computer has a well-deserved reputation as a giant-killer. After all, it was the virus-like spread of PCs which spelled the beginning of the end for the mainframe dinosaurs. Because the first low-cost servers emerged from high-end PCs being asked to look after more than one user at once, it took quite a few of the diminutive workhorses to match the capacity of the mini-computers they were slowly but surely replacing.

At the time of writing, half an week into the second week of the vote, we have the the following statistics gathered at the beginning of the week..

OGRE Team, the developers behind the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE), have announced the latest release of OGRE, codenamed 'Eihort,' including improved advanced lighting and shadowing techniques and more. According to the engine's official website, OGRE is “a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilising hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.”

So you've heard about Linux, and you’re itching to try it out. Why? Maybe you want to breathe some life into an older computer that can't run Windows XP or Vista. Maybe you want to stretch your technical skills a bit. Or, maybe you're just tired of Windows and need a change.

Deleting files can take forever. Windows Vista suffers from a bug that causes many machines to stall while deleting, copying and moving files, a flaw that has provoked consternation in online forums.

In less than three weeks it will have been a year since ATI Technologies had added it's Radeon X1000 family (R500) support to their Linux binary drivers. When that support was finally added it came about six months after the hardware was actually introduced to the public accompanied by the Windows Catalyst drivers. Even with this six months time that developers had to work on the Linux package, the fglrx v8.24.8 driver (the version that had introduced R500 support) resulted in ATI's flagship GPU series facing a miserable beating by NVIDIA's 7800GTX and even the GeForce 6800GT. However, a year later and what will be twelve driver releases with R500 support, how does the performance now compare? In this article we will be comparing several R500 parts to see how the performance stacks up using the latest driver.

A new phase of wrangling over the future of the dominant open-source license, the General Public License, is set to begin Wednesday and to end 90 days afterward.

Mandriva will now distribute O3Spaces Workplace as part of the Corporate Server 4 and Mandriva Linux Powerpack+ 2007 Spring editions. The alliance also covers an extensive support agreement.

[O3Spaces isn't Free Software though — Sander]

There are four objects that provide information about the environment of the user's system. They belong to the window object: navigator, screen, history and location. These objects are used to obtain information such as screen size and resolution, color depth of the monitor, limited information on the browser history, and the URL. In addition, information such as the user's operating system, including the browser type, version and language can also be obtained. In this installment, we'll look at objects, their related properties and methods. We'll delve deeper into them when we use them later in our study.

In Part 5 of this series about programming on the Cell BE processors, apply your knowledge of the synergistic processing unit (SPU) to programming the Cell BE processor in C/C++. Learn how to use the vector extensions, direct the compiler to do branch prediction, and perform DMA transfers in C/C++.

Access has licensed Bluestreak Technology's Flash player for mobile phones and set-top boxes, suggesting its Linux-based software stack for mobile phones could be used in phones that receive digital TV. The MachBlue player is said to implement a "large subset" of Adobe Flash 7 functionality.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Red Hat should be flattered. Less than two weeks after the company introduced RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), StartCom Ltd. released the first RHEL 5 clone, StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5.0.0.

SIL International, a nonprofit organization whose concerns include literacy and the study and preservation of minority languages, has announced the release of version 1.1 of the SIL Open Font License (OFL). The revision, which follows months of discussion and review on several mailing lists, including OFL-Discuss, clarifies the language of the license, especially about embedding fonts and allowing reserved font names.