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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.

Solaris 10, the official stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, is no longer available to users at no cost. Oracle has adjusted the terms of the license, which now requires users to purchase a service contract in order to use the software. Sun's policy was that anyone could use Solaris 10 for free without official support. Users could get a license entitling them to perpetual commercial use by filling out a simple survey and giving their e-mail address to Sun. Oracle is discontinuing this practice, and is repositioning the free version as a limited-duration trial.

In a previous MTE article, you learned how to create a unified desktop using the KDE 4 Oxygen themes for KDE, GTK, and Firefox. Oxygen is clean, simple, and visually pleasing, but some people want a little more flexibility. QtCurve is a theming system that gives you the configuring power to have varieties of themes, from downright plain to shiny eye candy.

The jQuery library provides several techniques for adding animation to a web page. These include simple, standard animations that are frequently used and the ability to craft sophisticated custom effects. In this article we'll closely examine each of the effect methods, revealing all of the mechanisms jQuery has for providing customised visual feedback to the user.

Hacker Geohot claims he has a plan to permit PlayStation 3 (PS3) users to continue running Linux on the gaming system, despite Sony's announcement that it will block alternate operating system installs. On Sunday, Sony announced that a 3.21 update due on April 1 will prohibit the installation of alternate installations, due to security concerns. Sony's upcoming April Fool's Day update, which prohibits alternate OS installations on systems prior to the new "Slim" models launched in September, is no laughing matter to Linux hackers who have enjoyed a four-year run of loading distributions such as Yellow Dog Linux on the gaming box. Yet the last laugh may be on Sony if well-known hacker Geohot (George Hotz) gets his way.

IBM and Indian company Simmtronics are marketing their 10" netbook at a cost under $200. The Simmbook netbook with a 10.1" screen at 1024 x 600 pixels (VSVGA) works with the Atom N270 processor (1.6 GHz and 533 MHz FSB), a GByte of DDR2 RAM (maximum 2 GBytes with a slot) and a 160-GByte SATA hard drive.

JumpBox has launched Open Source as a Service, which allows 55 of their namesake “JumpBoxes,” each one a virtual machine containing an open-source server application like Ruby on Rails or MySQL, to be deployed in on-premise, cloud, and hosted environments. Here are the details.

I couldn't get PulseAudio to work on one of my computers no matter what I do. But removing PulseAudio can be tricky and besides, there is a very easy way to "fix" it (if you're using GStreamer as a backend for music and videos). This is very useful for applications which use GStreamer but do not let you select the sound output module like: Rhythmbox, Totem and so on.