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students of the State-owned Federico II University in Naples, Italy, get Windows 7 for free thanks to a deal with Microsoft, but can't access the University online campus from Linux

YouTube is running an HTML5 trial that will allow those with compatible browsers to enjoy the site's millions of videos without the Flash Player/plugin. The fact that maybe 99 percent (I don't know the exact figure, but it's huge) of web-delivered video comes wrapped in Flash, a protocol controlled by one company — and only available on platforms that company deems worthy — is a major disturbance in the Force.

Thankfully, Google has started the release process for their latest and greatest Android version -- Gingerbread. I'm looking forward to installing CyanogenMod's spin of 2.3 as soon as it's available. The big frustration for me, however, is that Gingerbread turned out not to be the tablet killing OS we all hoped for. Oh sure, there are some Android tablets available, but until Google allows regular access to the Marketplace, tablets running Android are going to be a kludge.

Nagios is the foundation for many networking applications world wide and is know for its flexibility. Building upon those concepts is a new project named the Nagios Visual Shell (V-Shell). What follows is a short review of V-Shell and an interview with the lead developer of this new Nagios project.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced that nine major Linux distros have been certified to Linux Standard Base 4.0 (LSB 4.0), said to confer application portability. While announcing LBS 4.0 registrations for Canonical, Kylin, Linpus, Mandriva, Neoshine, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag, and Red Hat, the LF The LF also released a beta of LSB 4.1.

Part of the big hype over the release of KDE 4 was its new and improved eye candy, mostly due to the Plasma workspace. Those who liked the changes, loved the new KDE from the beginning. Those who did not are still complaining about it. But like any good desktop environment, you are by no means stuck with the default look. In fact, KDE offers more easily customizable features than any other. What follows are 7 ways to get the desktop look you dreamed about when you were a child.

Optimisation only makes sense if the code in question is used a lot – this seems to be the philosophy followed by the compilers of the latest incarnation of Google's free V8 JavaScript Engine. The new "Crankshaft" compilation infrastructure for V8 uses runtime information to see which parts of the code would benefit the most from optimisation. The developers say that the technique is mainly useful in large JavaScript programs; short scripts, such as those used by the SunSpider benchmark, do not benefit much.

You know the basics of how to find out what an errant process is doing. But what do you do when the basics aren't enough? But sometimes those methods aren't enough. What if the failed process is on a server, or a minimal system like a sheevaplug, and you don't have tools like gdb and strace installed? Or what if the runaway process is in Python, so your gdb stack trace isn't any help? What are your options then?

Because Chrome OS is open source, it has been available for people to explore for some time, which means that it's not really possible for any elements of it to be a surprise, rather deflating any attempt to launch it in the traditional sense. But in yesterday's, er, confirmation, there were a number of new announcements separate from the underlying operating system.

Though we used to talk a lot about Ubuntu desktop eyecandy, Conky is something we never really discussed at all. Conky Ubuntu Lucid theme was the only exception, which is by far the most easy to install Conky theme I have ever used. So as to settle the Conky drought once and for all, here we feature one of the best collection of Conky configurations available.

In this tutorial we will setup two Debian Linux nodes with a DRBD volume. MySQL will be available on the primary /actice node. If the primary node fails, the secondary /passiv node will takeover the MySQL daemon.

Ubuntu One Music has now support for iPhone's new AirPlay technology, which allows users to stream audio, video and image files stored in your Ubuntu One account directly to your Applet TV, stereo device, or any other AirPlay-compatible hardware. The AirPlay technology was made available by Apple via the new iOS 4.2 software update.

In an unexpected move, Matt Asay, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be leaving Ubuntu. In an e-mail to me, Asay, former VP of Business Development at Alfresco, the open-source enterprise Content Management System (CMS), told me that the news of his departure from Canonical would be be announced internally at Canonical today, December 8th.

You can direct grep to search through one file or many. You can also pipe in output from some other utility so that you’ll see only the information that you want to see. And, the fact that grep uses regular expressions allows you to perform searches even when you only have an approximate idea of what you’re searching for.

Whether it was the uncertainty of openSUSE's future or in spite of it, there seems to have been a fire lit under openSUSE lately. On several fronts, the often controversial project has kicked into high gear.

It's been just six weeks since the release of Chrome 7 but this week Google pushed out a new version of its browser, Chrome 8. Not happy to rest on its growing market share, the latest Chrome release sports some performance improvements as well as new PDF capabilities. Naturally, bug fixes are a large part of the Chrome 8 release but this is not just a bug-fix release.

It's difficult to understand the different license rules associated with any open source project. This article looks at different license models with a focus on open source content management.

The KDE community has announced that the KOffice project will in future be known as the Calligra Suite. According to the announcement, "The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications".

When Chrome launched their web store earlier today, the main question on a lot of minds was: "How are these apps any different from bookmarks?" Here's a look at five of our favorite exclusive apps for Chrome that stand out.

Although TeX is most often used to create structured documents like research papers, it can be used to generate any document type — including specialty items. For the unfamiliar, here are some resources for using TeX to print envelopes, labels, badges, and cards.