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I just came across an italian programmer who says that he adores FOSS but can't afford to write it. With his permission, I published his complete explanation on my website.

Ubuntu Secured Remix 11.10 is actually based on the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system and is a slightly modified version of the Ubuntu Desktop Live CD.

The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 10X is putting the final touches on the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America. Games? SCALE has them, as well as classes at SCALE U and the rapid-fire UpSCALE talks and more.

Microsoft has published the hardware requirements that manufacturers must follow if they want to slap a "Designed for Windows 8" sticker onto their systems. In among many innocuous requirements—multitouch systems must support at least five points of touch, there must be at least 10 GB of free space available to the user, and more—are a set of requirements for Windows 8 systems' firmware. These requirements have reignited Linux users' fears that they will be locked out of Windows 8 hardware.

In my previous article, I explained that I would embark in the Herculean task of starting a company, and make it successful and profitable, in just 5 days. And by using free software.

The first piece of this complex puzzle is a corporate web site. I had mine ready in less than 4 hours, start to finish. Here is what I did.

Read more at Free Software Magazine.

There are a lot of BIG tech vendors that aren't talking about SOPA.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- and there are many reasons to celebrate his legacy. But one thing that should not be celebrated is what his heirs have done with his words ever since. In the past, we've discussed how his heirs have done everything they can to try to use intellectual property laws to lock up MLK Jr.'s legacy -- and set up a toll booth to charge anyone for making use of them in any way, shape or form. The most recent episode of On The Media explored this...

Microsoft has released extensive details on their next-generation ReFS file-system to be introduced with Windows Server 8. How though does the file-system compare to Btrfs and the Linux file-systems?..

Kontron announced two rugged 6U CompactPCI compliant with PICMG 2.16, based on Intel's & Sandy Bridge& Intel Core i7 processors. The air-cooled Kontron CP6003-RA and even more rugged, conduction-cooled Kontron CP6003-RC, support up to 16GB of soldered DDR3 and up to 32GB of ruggedized NAND flash memory, and offer a wide range of I/O from gigabit Ethernet to HDMI....

No Gravity (classic) is a space arcade game with 5 game modes and it has very nice graphics, it is inspired by Wing Commander, a famous game of a few years ago that made ??history for the space shooter.

No Gravity runs on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, Amiga OS4, BeOS. It’s an arcade type game with great playability, where it is easy to plunge into space battles against spacefighters, space stations and more !

Last year, as I was checking the licensing and attribution on the tracks in my soundtrack library for Lunatics, I came across a bizarre and rather disturbing practice: bait and switch licensing as a ploy to sell music. This is a truly weird idea, if you understand what a free-license means, and it's deeply unethical, but here's what I think is going on: the artist (or more likely, some intermediary, such as a small record label) gets the idea of using a "free" loss-leader to try to draw people into buying a commercial/proprietary album. This is okay in itself, but the problem lies in that confusing word, "free".

In my previous article about GNUMeric , entering data with a leading apostrophe, as in '12/3, ensures that the 12/3 will be interpreted by Gnumeric as text, even when the cell is formatted 'General'.

But Gnumeric displays the 12/3 without the apostrophe. It's hidden. This can lead to unpleasant little surprises when sorting groups of cells, some of which contain hidden apostrophes and some of which don't.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

Seeking to "send Washington a BIG message," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that the English version of Wikipedia will go dark on Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, anti-piracy bills now being considered by Congress.

This is a call for talks and presentations that will take place in the Security devroom at FOSDEM 2012. Do you develop software that can do HTTPS queries? Can it use keys and certificates on a smart card? Does your service use RSA keys for signing? Can it work with hardware keys? Are you interested in protecting your private keys like Three Letter Organizations or do you want to roll your own proper PKI with a smaller than five or six digit budget? How can we make cryptographic hardware Just Work with any application that uses crypto? The devroom is the place to share experiences and learn.

Read the details at Free Software Magazine.

The OpenShot video editor was the easiest to get in Ubuntu Studio's "Oneric Ocelot" release, so we had a chance to try it out recently. It's pretty good -- much more capable than Kino. It provides similar capabilities to Blender's VSE, but without the burden of learning Blender. In fact, the learning curve is very gentle, because the interface is clean and simple.

Read more at Free Software Magazine.

Hard disks break. Really, they do. When it happens, most people are sadly unprepared: even the most experienced computer person only recovers a (big?) portion of their data after a crash. Even today, with cloud computing. The reason? Backing up is tricky. If you use GNU/Linux or Ubuntu, it's easy enough to make an incremental backup using rsync and gpg. If you have no idea what this means, don't worry: yu will be able to use them without even knowing it

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine

You've just got to love those crazy Swedes. Liberal, progressive, cool and politically correct. What's not to like? They've excelled themselves this time though. As dedicated filesharers they applied, and succeeded at the third attempt, to register filesharing as a religion.

Read more at Free Software Magazine.

Gnumeric is an excellent spreadsheet application and gets a lot of use in our house. Every now and then, though, you can hear a "!Q#z$%* Gnumeric!" from me or my wife, because we didn't pay attention to cell formatting.

By default, every cell is formatted 'General', which means Gnumeric guesses what type of data you enter in that cell. Gnumeric seems to be particularly fond of dates, and strings that are definitely not dates get interpreted as dates anyway. If I enter 12/3, Gnumeric uses my Australian date format preferences and displays 12/3/2012.

Read more at Free Software Magazine.

This is getting seriously ridiculous. Relative to the power and feature sets computers are getting cheaper and cheaper. But they don't come much cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, a $25 computer designed specifically to encourage children to program. My colleague, Ryan Cartwright wrote about it right here on FSM.

Read more at Free Software Magazine.

Aaeon announced a COM Express Type 2 computer on module (COM) equipped with an Intel Atom D525 processor and an optional wide DC input range. The COM-LN Rev.B supports up to 4GB of DDR3 memory, provides a PCI interface and five PCI Express interfaces, and features gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, PATA, and SATA connections, according to the company....