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The real beauty of open source software isn’t that it’s free; it’s that it’s free to change. Developers can tinker with it, strip it down or build it out, depending on their wants and needs.

In the case of Google’s Android, this increasingly means that we don’t have one Android operating system. Instead, we have a family of different Android forks and flavors.

Even to call Android “fragmented” assumes that it was or ought to be unified and singular from the beginning. It makes more sense to start talking about “Android-compatible” devices, rather than Android.

But, despite the backing of a coalition of powerful tech companies, the bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was dead on arrival, never even getting a hearing before the committee Leahy heads.

In contrast, another proposal sailed through Leahy’s committee, less than two weeks after Leahy and others floated it at about the same time as his ECPA reform measure. That bill, known as the Protect IP Act, was anti-piracy legislation long sought by Hollywood that dramatically increased the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites “dedicated to infringing activities.”

This dichotomy played itself out over and again in 2011, as lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — turned a blind eye to important civil liberties issues, including Patriot Act reform, and instead paid heed to the content industry’s desires to stop piracy.

One thing that GNU/Linux misses the most is marketing. We never get to know about the new and useful tools which are being added due to the lack of PR muscles. Recently Ubuntu made yet another incredible move which makes the application installation process of Windows look ancient. Ubuntu silently took its apps on-line by launching 'Ubuntu App Directory' (the name can be more attractive like Ubuntu App Shop). The 'Ubuntu App Directory' allows you to browse the apps available in Ubuntu's official repositories and install them with one click. With this move Ubuntu is now catching up with Fedora and openSUSE which already have such online resources where you can search and install applications with one click.

Being new to blog-sphere, I decided to play it safe and write about best desktop distributions in a different way. And there is also some Sandman related humor.

This guide describes how to search YouTube videos on Ubuntu's Unity Dash with the YouTube Lens.

After sharing the most popular Linux stories of 2011 in terms of Phoronix news articles, here is a listing of the most popular featured Phoronix articles from this past calendar year...

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Embedded mode for TabBox in KWin Reimplemented name filtering in Dolphin Initial support for resource events in read-only kparts in kdelibs read more

Alexander Tratsevskiy proudly announced earlier today, December 30th, the immediate availability for download of the Calculate Linux 11.12 operating system, all editions.

Better late than never (Sorry!), MyGameCompany has released the next preview of the upcomming platformer mainly for the younger audience named Dirk Dashing 2!

Mozilla Firefox 9 desktop web browser was released a few days ago. Mozilla always promises to bring better web browsing experience with newer releases of Firefox. The latest release of Mozilla Firefox 9 is 30% faster than Firefox 8 according to Java Script and HTML 5 benchmarks. Check Mozilla Firefox 9 release notes and installation instruction on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and earlier release of Ubuntu as well down below.

As a slightly belated Christmas gift, Juan Zhao of Intel has published a new Wayland Display Server patch-set for allowing full-screen mode-setting support...

Last week I identified the different types of Print on Demand (POD) publishers that are active in the market today and provided tips on how to decide which type would best meet your needs. Before we go on to talk about how to select a specific publisher, it's worth pausing to look more deeply into what each type of POD publisher actually does, and how it makes its money.

Two options of building patched QEMU-KVM 1.0 are considered bellow. First one : Qemu-kvm 1.0 has been built based on branch qemu-kvm-1.0-usbredir as of 12/29/2011. It contains all required usb redirection patches on top of QEMU-KVM 1.0 release. Second one : Patching QEMU-KVM 1.0 (core git tree) via extracted patches set to support USB redirection on Ubuntu Precise. Generating patches set via commands . . .

For people who want to carry a portable Slackware-based system in their pocket or who want to have a very small Slackware-based system on their desktops.

It wasn't exactly a great year for Microsoft on the mobile front as Windows Phone 7 struggled to find marketshare, but if it can seize the moment in 2012, Microsoft could have a shot at a solid third behind Apple and Google -- and that wouldn't be so bad.

I am pleased to announce the new version of the IceCat web browser. This version is based on the Firefox version 9.0.1[1]. To reduce load on the main server...

Introducing 3079 the Blocky Action RPG, that looks a lot like Minecraft only odder.

This screencast shows you how to add a Kill Window applet to the Unity launcher. This applet is a must have for anyone who was a fan of the kill applet in Gnome 2.

Copy Plain Text is a very useful add-on for Mozilla products, especially for Firefox, when you deal with lots of text copying from web pages on a daily basis. The old Copy Plain Text, created by Jeremy Gillick, died at version 0.3.3 and it dosen't work anymore with current versions of Firefox or Thunderbird.

This is an open letter to all the open source free loaders out there - you know who you are.