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Chemistry is not the most open field of scientific endeavor; in fact, as I began working more in the area (coming from a background in physics), I was surprised with the norms in the field. As a PhD student way back in 2003, I simply wanted to draw a 3D molecular structure on my operating system of choice (Linux), and be able to save an image for a paper/poster discussing my research. This proved to be nearly impossible, and in 2005 a group of like-minded researchers got together at a meeting of the American Chemical Society and formed an unorganization: The Blue Obelisk (named after their meeting place in San Diego).

The Edubuntu team has announced today, April 25, that the final release of the highly anticipated Edubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) operating system is now available for download.

After posting my Pantheon DE review, a lot of people emailed me, telling me that what I did was wrong, namely install this desktop environment from a PPA and run it on top of a Ubuntu desktop. All right then, so what should I have done, I asked politely. They said, test elementary OS, which is a Ubuntu fork all right, with the Pantheon desktop environment on top it. Aha. Same thing? Supposedly not. Go figure. I did test elementary in its very first incarnation two years back. Now, the increment has gone up a notch, from 0.1 to 0.2, and it's time to pulsecheck the progress of this distribution, one of the few that hail minimalism as their ultimate goal. Can it be done, without hurting the user, and everything else. We shall see. Follow me, lasses and gents.

Here are two words that have no business hanging out together: "used MP3s." If you know anything about how computers work, that concept is intellectually offensive. Same goes for "ebook lending", "digital rental" and a host of other terms that have emerged from the content industries' desperate scramble to do the impossible: adapt without changing. These concepts are all completely imaginary, and yet we treat them as if they are real, and have serious discussions about every last detail of how they function — like a debate about the best mutant superpower, but with multimillion dollar lawsuits. Copyright necessitates that we all pretend we don't know any better. It makes us act stupid.

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 12.3 server with PHP5 (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.

I swapped an old hard drive into the HP Pavilion g6-2210us and gave a few Linux distros a spin today. Why a separate drive? I’m not at all confident about a successful Linux-Windows 8 dual boot.

NASA's Android-powered PhoneSat mission was successfully launched on the inaugural flight of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket, to the delight of amateur radio operators.

Security expert HD Moore warns of the existence of unprotected terminal servers on the internet. The researcher says that he found over 100,000 such systems during his analyses, and that more than 13,000 provided administrative access without requesting a password. HD Moore said that he used SNMP queries to identify 114,000 terminal servers by Digi and Lantronix alone.

openSUSE is a great distribution with a great community. It is well known for its excellent Gnome and KDE support. As such, it is never described as a lightweight distribution. However, using openSUSE you can build a lightweight desktop starting from a regular server install and adding only the necessary components.

While Nemesys Games is going to release its racing game Ignite for Linux only after releasing it for iOS, the developers of SCS Software have already started the closed beta of Euro Truck Simulator 2 for Linux. The game was voted on Steam Greenlight for inclusion in the Steam games catalog by the gamers community.

President Obama has backed open standards for an integrated electronic health record system to serve the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments since his first term, but Pentagon plans to acquire commercial software to replace the department’s current EHR are “manifestly inconsistent” with that approach, J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation wrote in a blistering memo. Gilmore noted that Defense has resisted open standards and software for years.

The Fedora 19 'Schrödinger's Cat' alpha release has arrived with a preview of the latest fantastic, free, and open-source technology currently under development." Some of the more interesting features of this release include: "Developer's Assistant - a tool that helps you to get started on a code project with templates, samples and toolchains for the languages of your choice; Syslinux optional boot tool integration brings simplified booting; systemd Resource Control lets you modify service settings without a reboot; GNOME 3.8; KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.10, MATE Desktop 1.6..."

I’ve written lots of distro reviews over the years, but every once in a while I find a new one that turns out to be a delightful surprise. Manjaro 0.8.5 is definitely one of those. Manjaro is based on Arch Linux, and promises to provide an easy to use distro that is still highly customizable.

Linux Containers (LXC). Yet another free open source Linux Kernel feature starts to mature. Why does it matter? Dietrich Schmitz explains.

The final release of X.Org Server 1.15 isn't likely until September or October of this year, but Keith Packard decided to do this 1.15 snapshot to take care of a previously reported security vulnerability. Aside from closing out the CVE, there's various other updates too. There isn't anything too extremely exciting about the 1.15 development state but there's some fixes, X Input and XKB updates, and a new ZoomModes monitor option for the X.Org Server configuration.

AMD has added full-fledged system-on-chips (SOCs) to its Embedded G-Series integrated x86 processor family, by merging the APU (CPU + GPU) and I/O controller hub functions into a single chip. The Linux-ready AMD Embedded G-Series SOC incorporates up to four “Jaguar” CPU cores (clocked as high as 2GHz), a Radeon 8000 GPU, video accelerators, and an I/O controller, and is available in five versions featuring 9 to 25W TDPs.

Unity Technologies has announced that it has dropped support for Adobe Flash from its cross-platform Unity game development toolset, citing the declining popularity of the technology among developers and inconsistent support from Adobe. "As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses," Unity founder and CEO David Helgason wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "We will continue to support our existing Flash customers throughout the 4.x cycle."

AMD has added full-fledged system-on-chips (SOCs) to its Embedded G-Series integrated x86 processor family, by merging the APU (CPU + GPU) and I/O controller hub functions into a single chip. The Linux-ready AMD Embedded G-Series SOC incorporates up to four “Jaguar” CPU cores (clocked as high as 2GHz), a Radeon 8000 GPU, video accelerators, and an I/O controller, and is available in five versions featuring 9 to 25W TDPs.

Inforce Computing has unveiled a $149 Linux- and Android-friendly Pico-ITX single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. The tiny SBC comes with 2GB RAM and 4GB flash memory, and provides HDMI out, MIPI-CSI camera input, WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, a GbE port, and numerous other functions.

Last week, members of the Plasma team met in Nürnberg, Germany to discuss open questions on the road to Plasma Workspaces 2. The meeting was kindly hosted by SUSE and supported by the KDE e.V.. For the Plasma team, the meeting came at a perfect point in time: porting of Plasma to a new graphics has commenced, is in fact well under way, and has raised some questions that are best discussed in a high-bandwidth setting in person.