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In January 1991 a Finnish student, Linus Torvalds, bought an IBM PC with an Intel 80386 chip. A month later he installed a copy of Minix, the UNIX-like operating system developed as a teaching tool by Andrew Tanenbaum, and began to write a standalone terminal emulator to access the UNIX servers at Helsinki university…

uGet is a GTK+ download manager that runs on both Linux and Windows. The latest uGet 1.8.0, released today, brings support for Torrent and Metalink files (by using aria2), Ubuntu AppIndicator as well as GTK3 support.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.0 on a headless Debian Squeeze server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

Firefox 5 Beta 3 has been released today. Here is an updated guide about how to install Firefox 5 on any Linux distribution. It also covers symbolic links, updates, uninstallation, ...

In what is beginning to become quite a tradition, the Krita team came together from May 20 to May 22 for the third Krita meeting. The first sprint had four attendees. Last year's, eight. This year, we had twelve people in attendance. If the trend continues, the Blender Institute, which hosted our sprint, will be too small for us next year! read more

While many Linux users are upset that Microsoft's buying out Skype and that the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Call hasn't matured much in being a reliable replacement to Skype (not all of the FSF projects move along), there is some interesting news this morning: an independent researcher has reverse-engineered the Skype protocol...

For people who use an USB stick or mobile phone to surf the Internet on the go, it’s often reported that the connection is slow or unresponsive. This is a script that help speed up your mobile connexion.

A full review of Xubuntu 11.04, including a gallery of images.

Recently, myself and my colleagues at Pelagicore decided to try to ditch Skype for an open replacement. We have been suffering stability issues with Skype for a long time, but our customers rely on it for contact with us and most people know how it works. However, recent events such as Microsoft buying Skype and cancelling support for Asterisk motivated us to try the alternatives.

We finally did it! Forking is always a big and hard decision especially when you spend years on a project and nothing was really win when we started together. Now Mageia 1 is out and ready to go. Security team is all ready to provide all expected updates for it and Cauldron (development version of Mageia). Cauldron will reopen at the end of this week and work will start again for Mageia 2.

The rolling-release Arch Linux distribution has just enabled floating point textures for Mesa. This was the hotly-debated feature for Mesa that provides OpenGL floating point textures and render targets, but is disabled by default since its protected by patents in the United States and elsewhere. Arch Linux users when building new versions of Mesa will receive this support irrespective of their physical location.

As I reported on May 31st, 2011, Oracle has, with IBM’s encouragement, given the open-source OpenOffice office suite to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

The free, open-source office suite OpenOffice has been dying by inches for quite some time. Now that Oracle has "given" the project -- sans support, it would seem -- to the Apache Foundation, I'd say it's time to close the lid on the box and drop it in the ground. It's not like Oracle didn't kill it first.

The bottom line is this: I'm a married man today. I really don't have time to struggle with poorly documented programs which don't give out helpful error messages and require source-level hacking to figure out what the !@#$ is going on.

I was baptized into the zero bugs religion about 20 years ago. This was before the web and time-based releases, but these only add complications, and are yet compatible with zero bugs all the time. As a beginner, you can cheat such as zero bugs older than 6 months / 2 releases, or give yourself 1,000.

There’s a fifth spot available on the Open Virtual Alliance’s governing members board. Who’ll take it is anyone’s guess but Microsoft and Apple are potential contenders.

The Bodhi team and I are proud to announce the availability of Bodhi Linux 1.1.0. This is the first of our quarterly scheduled update releases to keep the software on the Bodhi live CD current. The live CD includes a number of package updates including: Linux kernel 2.6.39, Enlightenment SVN build from 2011-05-23; Intel 2.15 drivers, Midori 0.3.6. The Bodhi repository also saw a number of recent package updates including Firefox 4.0.1, Chromium Browser 11 and NVIDIA driver 270.41. When booting the new live CD you will notice that the art has undergone some changes as well.

A month has been passed since the eventful release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Many loyal Ubuntu users turned hostile with this release and Canonical's new Unity interface is at the receiving end for what it does and what it doesn't. I actually liked the new Unity approach to desktop and I believe that it has got a great future, provided that Canonical is able to rectify the bugs and usability issues in time. This post is for those who would like to use Unity. A quick recap of Ubuntu 11.04 tips and tricks that we published during the month.

This month openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, discusses copyright assignment and the buzz surrounding ‘Project Harmony’.

Android represented 36 percent of U.S. smartphone share through April, 10 points higher than Apple iOS, but down a point from March, says Nielsen. The research firm also says Android users download more data than iPhone users, while Distimo reports that Android Market has significantly fewer paid apps than Apple's AppStore -- and that it's earning less money for developers....