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Google and Adobe have announced that they are to collaborate on development of the Adobe's Flash plug-in. As a first step, Google's Chrome web browser is to have Adobe's Flash built in. Google have updated the Chrome developer channel with a new version which includes the integrated Flash Player and a basic plug-in manager. Google will also work with Adobe to enhance Chrome's sandbox technology to include plug-ins like Flash Player.

I've had a little time to think about it, and I realized that it's not yet time to give up on FreeBSD 7.3. I'm not in any way saying I'll be sticking with it long-term. But I think I should spend some more time running it before I end the test.

Open source software champions have been influential in excluding software from the scope of patents in the new Patents Bill. Clause 15 of the draft Bill, as reported back from the Commerce Select Committee, lists a number of classes of invention which should not be patentable and includes the sub-clause "a computer program is not a patentable invention." ...Christie and other supporters acknowledge the battle is not won yet. The Bill now goes back to the full Parliament for its second reading.

Late last week I came into possession of an old AT&T Tilt 8925. Just as when I receive any computer with a Windows based operating system on, my first inclination is to format said device to some variation of Linux on it.

Buck-Security is a security scanner for Debian and Ubuntu Linux. It helps you to harden your system by running some important security checks. For example, it finds world-writable files and directories, setuid and setgid programs, superuser accounts, and installed attack tool packages. It also checks your umask and checks if the sticky bit is set for /tmp, among other checks.It was designed for Debian and Ubuntu servers, but can be useful for any Linux system.

GNOME Split is a simple tool that allows you to split files and merge them back. It is written in Java and uses a GTK+ user interface. GNOME Split 0.6 codenamed Bengal Tiger has been released recently.

Linux was a resounding failure on netbooks, so what makes this French start-up firm think it can succeed with an Ubuntu Linux derivative?

Two italian students think that it's very bad when public schools only teach students to use proprietary software(even if the Italian government sees no problem with that). Therefore, for their final High School state exam, they are preparing a project that is as unusual (at least for Italy) as interesting: an alternative to Microsoft Windows!

When the Onion decided to hack Drupal 4.7 to make it work for a larger audience than Drupal could handle at the time, it diverted so far from the core build, it was difficult to upgrade after that. Companies considering open source solutions may want to learn from this cautionary tale.

Adobe's Flash is still the dominant rich media platform on the Internet, but HTML5 is coming. Love it or hate it Adobe's Flash technology is a key part of the Internet as it currently exists. It hasn't always been so and it may not remain so for much longer if the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft have anything to do with it.

Does motivation matter? Open source contributors are increasingly people who are paid to work on open source. GNOME contributor Lucas Rocha asks how this impacts communities over the long term. This is not a new question by any stretch. People worried about the influence of commercial interests in open source in the early days before Red Hat was a public company and when Slackware was still considered a major Linux distribution. I suspect people will still be asking this question for years to come.

Andy Ritger, NVIDIA manager responsible for the Linux graphics cards, as announced on the X.org mailing list that the graphics chip company will no longer develop the open source 2D video drivers for its chips. He recommends using the VESA X driver instead.

In my ongoing quest to bring the latest news about Xorg and its hatred of the Intel 830m chipset that I have on three laptops, today I'm running a long filesystem check in gParted on the Parted Magic 4.9 live CD.

What would have happened if Pamela Jones and Groklaw had not taken an interest in this case? Would there have been any semblance of truth anywhere? I think not.

A federal jury has decided that UNIX is owned by Novell - not SCO. But no, this does not mark the end of SCO's epic legal battle against the Linux industry. On Tuesday, the AP reports, after a trial in Salt Lake City, Utah, a jury ruled that Novell still controls the copyrights to UNIX despite a 15-year-old deal that transfered certain other UNIX rights to an earlier incarnation of the Utah-based SCO.

I was in the Peace Corps in Cape Verde as an ICT volunteer from 2006 to 2008, and while I was there, the One Laptop Per Child project came on my radar and I became pretty enamored of the prospect of bringing some XOs to the country, or at least raising awareness of the idea within the government. However, after considering all the obstacles with some fellow volunteers and local educators, including a Ministry of Education delegate, I kept running into the same issue: So we get the laptops, and then what? We discussed the potential of OLPC endlessly, but eventually came to the conclusion that the program was a mess, especially after the departure of some of their best minds and the insistence that the hardware is the only thing to supply. But if OLPC itself won't supply the rest of the framework, somebody must.

While Red Hat, Novell, Canonical and other Linux distribution providers continue to gain momentum, most of the Linux chatter has very little to do with small business success -- where Microsoft's grip on customers remains firm. Here's why.

According to the release plans, the release of X Server 1.8 should take place, and while in reality it will likely not be released today, its release is coming soon. When this release does arrive, it will add a new set of features to the X.Org stack and a number of other minor improvements and bug-fixes.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless CentOS 5.4 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.

The concept of open IT standards, which is central to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), is to be watered down to such a degree that it will fade into insignificance. At least that's the impression given by a current EIF 2 release leaked to the Free Software Foundation Europe.