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Google Chrome OS may still be a year away from making its debut, but TechRadar readers are champing at the bit to get hold of the Windows competitor. More than 2300 votes were cast in a poll to gauge interest in Google's operating system, following the arrival of the excellent Windows 7. And, although 35 per cent were happy with the latest Windows, 16 per cent contented with OS X and 10 per cent confessed to being wary of Chrome OS – a big percentage admitted to being intrigued.

So unreal the name, so real the news: Epic Games is providing its Unreal Engine 3 free to developers. It isn't open source, but game developers can implement it for noncommercial games and applications.

Social media and open source are natural allies. This post explains how to use social media tools to promote your open source project.

For many individuals collection managers are an important type of software. It is human nature to collect objects, in part because people derive pleasure from the simple ownership of objects. The things that we collect change over time, partly as a result of technological improvements, and partly because our wants and desires do not remain static.

This will show you how to set up a Samba Domain Controller with a local LDAP backend, using CentOS 5.x (tested on 5.3, still successfully running on 5.4). Includes a web-interface for managing LDAP users/groups/etc.

The initiator of the free K Desktop Environment (KDE), Matthias Ettrich, was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit in Berlin on Friday. The highest German state decoration for the common good was awarded to him for his contributions in the field of open source software.

One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut.

Is not a Joke, OpenofficeMouse is available, OOMouse is the first multi-button application mouse designed for a wide variety of software applications. With a revolutionary and patented design featuring 18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands

This addon allows installing ubuntu packages from iceweasel, firefox, galeon or konqueror just clicking on a web link. For this to work, links need to have an url beginning with apt:// This package does not install the packages or download them from the web sites, it just launches apt, passing the package name to install as a parameter to apt.

LG has launched its first Android phone, a QWERTY slider called the "Eve," on Rogers Wireless' network in Canada. In other Android news, LG is prepping a second Android phone, this time with a Snapdragon processor, for Korea, and Philips has launched a V808 oPhone handset in China.

It's been a week since Ubuntu 9.10, aka the Karmix Koala, was unleashed on the world. I wanted to post a general review after having used the special K since it went RC in late September and early October. In general, I've been very impressed, especially in comparison to another, recently released, operating system. This mini review will focus on using Ubuntu as a desktop system. When I drop it onto my Linode server, I'll provide commentary on server usage as well.

A couple of stories have hit the headlines this year concerning the huge cost that some UK Local Governments incurred when dealing with malware attack on their Windows machines. If you missed them, Manchester City Council had a single USB infected with the infamous Conficker worm and it cost them — brace yourself — £1.5m ($2.4m) of which £1.2m (US$1.9m) was spent on IT, of which a staggering £600,000 (US$980k) went on consultancy fees including money to Microsoft. A while later, Ealing Borough Council were hit with a cost of £500,000 (about US$ 800k) when they were also hit by a single USB stick containing conficker. Some in the industry tweeted and blogged this as being a “hidden cost of using Microsoft Windows”. In the ensuing discussion, many pointed out that the high cost was really due to the lack of a proper patching and disaster recovery policy at the council. So which is right? Is dealing with malware a hidden cost of using Windows or of a poor IT strategy? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Back in November of 2008 I attempted to migrate to KDE. That migration proved to be a lesson in futility. Today I installed Kubuntu Kubuntu 9.10 on three different computers to see how much progress this once awesome distro has made in a year. This is what I found:

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. 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).

You probably know that to use a Launchpad PPA repository, you must also import the GPG key. Lately, keyserver.ubuntu.com which we need to import the GPG key goes down quite often, so how can we solve this?

Amahi version 4.2 is released. Amahi Linux Home Server is a server targeted for home and home office environments.

This is the third of four guest posts by software and system engineer, and former maintainer of freeDOS, James Hall.

After learning that Microsoft opened a Win7-themed cafe, it got me wondering what a cafe would like if it ran in the same style of the OS it was named for...

It is hard to describe the difference between what are called markup systems and, say Microsoft Word, OpenOffice.org Writer, or AbiWord to people, especially to some of the newer people who were not initially weaned on ed. And, it is especially hard to explain LyX. But I'll give it a go.

If you think Linux is difficult to install then read this. I've summed up three easy ways to install and try out Linux. I'm talking about: Live Media, WUBI and Virtualbox. So read on, and go try out Linux.