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If you are new to GNU Octave this post will give you some good resources to get you started.

1 September release looking international It might not be just the Japanese who get to use Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed Mango, next month, as an international rollout is now being rumoured.…

Late last month there were the first Radeon HD 6550D graphics benchmarks under Linux that were published on Phoronix. There has also been a stream of A8-3850 benchmark result uploads -- among other AMD Fusion APUs -- to OpenBenchmarking.org. In this review we are providing a set of computational benchmarks from this "Llano" Fusion APU compared to a handful of other systems in our labs.

I'm making a best effort to turn my Windows XP box at work into a usable system. I'm tired of lugging the laptop to the office, and I have neither desk space nor a network connection for it.

You can be the coolest and best-equipped network administrator on the block with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Linux on a netbook. Netbooks are lightweight and portable, have long battery life, and bright sharp screens -- and, thanks to Linux and open source, you can outfit your netbook with all the software network troubleshooting and fixit utilities you'll ever need.

This week we explore the link between the All Star Game Home Run Derby and software development, if the cloud can replace offshoring and what to do when your help desk needs help.

Unity Interface has just received a massive overhaul in Ubuntu 11.10 and the main dash menu looks better than ever. Application access and discovery has improved greatly. Two main lenses in Unity launcher, Applications and Files Lenses have been removed and are now integrated into the dash only. A new Music Lens has also been introduced for quickly searching and browsing your favorite artists. The Ubuntu Button on top left corner has been removed and a new big Ubuntu orb on the launcher now activates the main dash menu. Active blur option for the dash is turned on by default now giving it a really sleek and polished look. Application title, window controls and app menu on top panel now show all the way to the left. There are still two more Betas to come so the interface will be polished more overtime as it is quite slow and there are still many rough edges.

Faenza has always been my favourite icon theme for Ubuntu. We have had numerous posts on Faenza Icon theme before with some of them like this one here becoming hugely popular among our readers. Well the good news is, Faenza has just breached version 1.0. Faenza 1.0 adds a number of new icons and even launches support for symbolic icons in GNOME Shell.

Defcon visitors see handsets being scoped Claims that both CDMA and 4G networks were compromised at the recent Defcon security event in Las Vegas have raised little surprise, but the vulnerability of handsets is hotly debated.…

Node is a newly-developed software platform that liberates JavaScript from the web browser, enabling it to be used as a general software development platform in server-side applications. It runs atop the ultra-fast JavaScript engine from the Chrome browser, V8, and adds in a fast and robust library of asynchronous network I/O modules. The primary focus of Node is on building high performance, highly scalable server and client applications for the "Real Time Web".</p> In this article we shall:</p>

• Learn what a module is
• Learn about the CommonJS module specification
• Learn how Node finds modules

This is a tutorial for people originally using the Windows Operating System who want to try out Linux Mint 11. It is supposed to show the differences and similarities between the two systems and depict Linux' functions with examples.

Intel Capital announced a $300 million fund designed to help foster the chipmaker's Ultrabook category of portable computers. The money will be invested over the next three to four years "to create a cycle of innovation and system capabilities for this new and growing category of mobile devices," the company announced....

Roundup on 5 applications to do Music Notation, they are music engraving programs, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reportedly looking into alleged anti-competitive behavior on the part of Google, including forcing Android OEMs to use its own services. According to The Wall Street Journal, the FTC is said to be preparing subpoenas related to the Android issue, which follows up on an existing investigation into whether Google's search practices violate antitrust law....

The story of the free software desktop is littered with what-ifs and might-have-beens. The desktop has been 'good enough' for years, and can boast some considerable success stories, but has yet to make a significant breakthrough. On the face of it, the free software desktop should be an easy choice. The average GNU/Linux desktop costs little, looks good and performs well, and offers a real opportunity to break the upgrade cycle. Cost, security, scalability and versatility are persuasive arguments for the free desktop, but other factors have worked against the uptake of Linux at the corporate level. Inertia among users is usually given as the reason and users are made to take the blame, but perhaps there are simpler explanations. The desktop has been left in the hands of the Linux companies, and the Linux companies are many and small. Many have come with grand ambitions and some with high ideals, but few have stayed the course.

Jonathan Kolberg Desktop Summit 2011 continues. On Tuesday, GNOME and KDE had their annual meetings, with KDE e.V. managing to finish in time for lunch. However, many members came back after lunch to continue discussion about challenges and opportunities for KDE in a BoF. Over the past few days, the university has been kept busy with four tracks of BoFs, workshops and meetings - enough to keep most attendees checking their schedules and the building maps. One particular highlight of the past few days was the Intel AppUp workshop, in which conference attendees who had preregistered for the workshop were able to learn about the AppUp program. Discussing both, we caught up with Jonathan Kolberg, one of our Individual Supporting Members. We asked him why he decided to Join the Game, what he made of the KDE e.V. meeting and the Desktop Summit as a whole and how he is enjoying playing with the Intel developer tablet. read more

NPM is a package management and distribution system for Node. It has become the de-facto standard for distributing modules (packages) for use with Node. Conceptually it's similar to tools like apt-get (Debian), rpm/yum (Redhat/Fedora), MacPorts (Mac OS X), CPAN (Perl), or PEAR (PHP). It's purpose is publishing and distributing Node packages over the Internet using a simple command-line interface. With npm you can quickly find packages to serve specific purposes, download them, install them, and manage packages you've already installed. npm defines a package format for Node largely based on the CommonJS Package spec.

CentOS, Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a Linux distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not many would consider it a desktop distribution, but it could be configured as one, though it requires a bit more tweaking than other well known desktop distributions to just work. The latest stable version, CentOS 6, was released on July 10, 2011. This article started from an attempt to assess the suitability of CentOS 6 as a desktop distribution for new users. What follows is a 2-page writeup of my experience.

As a Linux user I know that I should revel in sparse user interfaces and command line driven applications, but for my day to day communications, I prefer Pidgin over XChat. It's just more pleasant to look at, and goes beyond just IRC chat. The problem with Pidgin and Gnome 3 is that it is hard to tell when someone is trying to get your attention. The little smiley face that gets displayed on the system tray icon is lost in Gnome 3, as the icons are now hidden in a disappearing bar at the bottom of the screen.

Amid the brouhaha around Linus Torvalds' unhappiness with GNOME 3, as well as the speculation that he may or may not be using Linux Mint, there's a glaring omission from the discussion. Specifically, Linus is one of us. Sure, he's the reason we're all here, but at the end of the day he's just another Linux user. After all, which of us hasn't changed distros or desktops, or posted our praise or displeasure on mailing lists or forums? Larry the Free Software Guy says we should afford Linus the same luxury of change which most of us seemingly take for granted.