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Google has announced a patent-sharing program around WebM in an effort to guard the open source web video format from legal attack. On Monday, with a blog post, the company introduced the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative, which brings together companies willing to license each other's patents related to the format. Founding members include AMD, Cisco Systems, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Matroska, Mozilla, Opera, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the Xiph.org Foundation, as well as Google.

At the core of Linux is open source software that is enabled by open source licenses. Open Source licenses are what enables Linux to thrive, but other legal mechanisms, in particular the U.S. patent system, continue to lurk on the edges as a risk to the continued growth of Linux. This past week, the Linux Planet got both positive and negative news on the patent front, as the lawyers took center stage.

Here is another great all purpose Linux distribution with lots of the newest software only a few clicks away. Although things don’t appear to have changed much in recent years there are still some great improvements under the hood.

A Texas jury has ruled against Google in a suit that alleged some of its use of open source Linux code amounted to patent infringement, something that could have big implications for other companies using Linux technology and other open source systems. In the verdict, delivered last week, the jury decided that Google should pay US$5 million for the infringement.

The recently held Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (LFCS) had its traditional kernel panel on April 6 at which Andrew Morton, Arnd Bergmann, James Bottomley, and Thomas Gleixner sat down to discuss the kernel with moderator Jonathan Corbet. Several topics were covered, but the current struggles in the ARM community were clearly at the forefront of the minds of participants and audience members alike.

Landing in the Phoronix e-mail inbox last night was a question by a reader asking how hardware vendors determine the operating systems used by their customers and their respective market-share since there isn't anything to "phone home" and report usage statistics. In other words, this reader had just purchased four desktop processors and he was wondering how to inform AMD that he's a Linux user. This is in hopes of going towards their Linux tally and eventually increasing their Linux level of support.

This just in (from the openbsd-misc mailing list): The FlashVideoReplacer add-on for Firefox works in OpenBSD with the help of gecko-mediaplayer, which is now an OpenBSD package. Testers reported this combination working in OpenBSD-current. I've since found that it works for Vimeo videos in OpenBSD 4.8-release and could very well work for YouTube in 4.9-release.

Various internal changes to the block layer that were specifically mentioned by Linus Torvalds are designed to enhance performance and scalability. The Ext4 file system is also said to offer improvements in this respect. Still classified as experimental, Btrfs now offers Batched Discard functionality, and LIO (Linux-Iscsi.org) includes a loop-back function.

There are literally dozens of tablet PCs heading our way. We look at some of the iPad alternatives. If you've been paying attention over the past couple of months you'll know that tablet PCs are big business. You've probably even played with an iPad if you've ventured into any of the many hardware retailers in your local mall.

Your Android device is not only good for snapping photos and sharing them with others. Using the right apps, you can turn it into a handy photographic companion which can handle a wide range of photography-related tasks.

For those that are not familiar, this is the third such bundle since last year. It features independent games that are GNU/Linux compatible and DRM free. The Humble Bundle also provides the chance to donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as well as Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity. Both of these charities are ones I'm interested in continuing to support in the future and the EFF does amazing work with limited resources. Be sure to follow their Deeplinks blog to see their on-going progress.

Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents. That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.6 server (x86_64) that offers all services needed by ISPs and web hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of CentOS 5.6, but should apply to the 32-bit version with very little modifications as well. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Clement Lefebvre and the community behind the Linux Mint project announced yesterday, April 25th, on their official blog that Linux Mint 5 LTS (Elyssa) operating system will reach end-of-life on April 28th, 2011.

A few weeks ago, we did an in-depth review of Ubuntu 11.04 when compared with Fedora 15. One of the interesting little features we missed was Quicklists in Unity. Quicklists allow users to access common menus, or perform common tasks within a program by right-clicking the launcher icon. The feature is very much similar to Jump Lists in Windows 7, which could be accessed by right-clicking the Windows task bar. Applications, like Browsers and Media Players use these Jump Lists to let the user access documents and tasks associated with the current application. Unity on the other hand being freshly baked from the oven, there aren't many applications that take advantage of the Quicklist features. Here's a quick tip that will let you enable Quicklists for both Google Chrome and Firefox.

Linux desktop is on a roll. First came the revamped KDE 4.0 which took the level of User Interface(UI) fit and finish of Linux desktops to another level. Then came the GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces. But one thing they all lack, especially GNOME Shell and Unity, are good looking and user friendly login screens. And here are some very interesting login screen mockups for GNOME.

Shane Remington, co-founder of the Peppermint operating system (OS), announced plans to merge the previous two Peppermint OSes into one OS to be released as Peppermint Two.

This article provides a detailed factual explanation of why software is mathematics, complete with the references in mathematical and computer science literature. It also includes a detailed factual explanation of why mathematics is speech, complete once again with references. My hope is that it will help patent lawyers and judges handling patent litigation understand these fundamental truths, so they can apply that technical knowledge to their field of skill.

I put away Eric and my Gedit scripts and began "working the streets" to get Linux onto more computers and those computers into the hands that needed them most. Six years and over 1200 computers later, I believe that HeliOS has gained some significant insight into how people react to the Linux Desktop.

In computing terms, a cache is a collection of temporary data that will be required to be accessed in the future, and can be retrieved extremely quickly. The data stored within a cache may be a simple reproduction of information held elsewhere or it may have been the results of a previous computation. Where data stored in the cache is requested, this is known as a cache hit. The advantage of a cache hit is that the request will be served considerably faster. The flipside, a cache miss, occurs when information has to be recalculated or retrieved from its original location, consuming more system resources and slower access. If 20% of data is accessed 80% of the time, and a system can be utilised which reduces the cost and time of obtaining that 20%, system performance will dramatically improve. Fine tuning a system to improve the cache hit rate speeds up overall system performance.