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"If a particular manufacturer’s version of Android is this different from stock Android then it’s effectively a fork, a different operating system. In that case it seems like we would be better served to call it as such. Instead of talking about everyone running Android, implying it is the same thing on all these devices, it might be better to talk about Samsung Android running on Samsung devices, HTC Android running on HTC devices, and so on."

This Release Candidate of what will become ROSA Marathon 2012 GNOME uses the GNOME 2, and not the latest GNOME 3 desktop environment.

Gnome developer Erick Pérez has given us a glimpse of how Gnome Calendar is shaping up. Though still its in skeleton stage, you will get an idea of how it will look like in future version of Gnome.

The ARM platform is exploding like a mad wet cat out of the bath. Here are four good distros cram-full of ARM fun. Linux has had ARM support since forever, but it's been bumpy. There are hundreds of vendors of ARM devices (see Tiny Pluggable Linux ARM Computers Are Red-Hot for a sampling), all shoving their own personal hacked code out the door as fast as possible. This made Linux support complicated and unwieldy, to the point that Linus Torvalds threatened to stop accepting ARM changes in the mainline Linux kernel.

phpvirtualbox is a web-based VirtualBox front-end written in PHP that allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. It tries to resemble the VirtualBox GUI as much as possible to make work with it as easy as possible. It is a nice replacement for the VirtualBox GUI if you run VirtualBox on headless servers. This tutorial explains how to install phpvirtualbox on an Ubuntu 12.04 server to manage a locally installed, headless VirtualBox.

Debian Project Leader Stefano Zacchiroli has announced a plan that aims to get the project included in the FSF's list of free software distributions. To that end, Zacchiroli wants to set up a team within Debian that is actively working to resolve the remaining issues which prevent Debian's inclusion in the list.

Photo management is a task of great importance for the desktop user. We GNOME users are once again lucky enough to have a great variety of applications that can do the job easy and effectively. On this article we will compare two of the most popular photo management applications for the GNOME desktop environment.

Alan Baghumian announced last night, June 4th, the immediate availability for download of the first test version of the upcoming Parsix GNU/Linux 4.0 operating system.

Cultix is a Debian-based distribution for freaks and geeks, with cyber-gothic eye candy and speed and power in mind. It is built under the aegis of the VampireFreaks open-source cult and seems to be the only Linux distribution representing any VampireFreaks community for now.

Malware targeting Google's open source Android mobile operating system continues to rise – according to a new report, hundreds of thousands of devices have already been infected via applications from the official Google Play store. Security specialist Trend Micro says that, in the past quarter, the number of malicious apps doubled from 10,000 to 20,000 in a single month – a big increase from the 5,000 malicious apps it identified from January to March of this year.

Well it's been a few years since Linux Girl has had the pleasure of writing about dating in the Linux world -- always one of her favorite topics! -- but recently the topic came up again, albeit with a slight twist. Specifically, in a recent article over at Datamation, is wasn't so much human-to-human matchmaking being discussed as it was pairing of the human-to-desktop kind.

Last night I failed the Linux Community whilst trying to demonstrate the power of LINUX to a non LINUX user. So what went wrong? Read on....

Chrome version 20 represents a major step forward for the security of the Google browser, at least for Linux users, for whom this has often been a somewhat neglected area. It introduces a new sandbox concept which precisely regulates and filters the system calls a process is able to make.

OpenSesame is a graphical builder for psychological experiments. In this interview, Sebastiaan Mathôt, lead developer of OpenSesame, talks about the project, his motivations and the importance of openness in Science.

Charles H Schulz has announced the opening of voting to select a new name for the Mandriva community distribution that will emerge from the current work on creating a new Mandriva foundation. Mandriva is currently in the process of reorganising, and part of the plan involves handing the development of the distribution to the community.

In tech today, it has become a truism that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product". Somehow we have applied this wisdom to consumers without recognising that the same principle applies to enterprises and their developers. Recently, however, Netflix and LinkedIn have reminded us just how precarious it is to build on someone else's platform - or API.

Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one's keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.

Arch linux has the reputation of being for the hard-core linux enthusiast, and this is largely accurate. It can be a pain to install in particular, but the documentation is insanely detailed and helpful, so anyone that can read and follow instructions should be able to handle it.

Will Schroeder is the CEO of Kitware Inc., a company that builds open source scientific software that also depends on open source. He suggested that open source is the most effective way to get things done through agile, collaborative innovation. Traditionally science was open, critically reviewed and widely available. Results were shared and new innovations could build on previous discoveries. It is now largely closed and largely protected by patents.

So much going on here at DickMacInnis.com that it's hard to keep up with regular updates. As such, I've got some big news concerning several of the new things I've been working on..