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When last we left the scene, one server was dead, the desktop dieing. However, ordering two new motherboards was successful. They arrived from Magic Micro quickly and in good order, and it was time to clean things up and make two working machines. First, a note on cleaning. I am sick (and tired) of computer hardware that cannot be cleaned. Laptops that require being sent back to the manufacturers in order to be cleaned, things like that. I remember one call to Circuit City for a Sony Vaio laptop I owned, where the person who answered the phone simply did not understand what I meant when I said the fan needed to be cleaned.

The Freedom Box is starting to roll, with a fundraising drive that met its goals in a few short days, along with a newly formed foundation to oversee its development. What started as an idea in a talk given by Eben Moglen just over a year ago has more recently gained a lot of momentum. What can we expect to see from this "personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy", and when can we expect to see it?

Accelerated software development company Black Duck Software is beating a fast path towards the Android mobile development platform with a bundled software and services offering designed to help developers automate and ensure compliance and simplify the operational challenges of managing Android projects. Android Fast Start is built on a customized version of the Black Duck Suite preconfigured with Android to address change-management issues and automate legal and compliance-related obligations.

Canonical’s new frontier is the potentially lucrative dual boot market. With Ubuntu Light Canonical is offering swift boot times, access to media in Windows partitions and the fastest route to the internet possible on small form factor computers. Russell Barnes investigates to see if it’s ready for prime time…

If you like how Chrome displays the window controls (close, minimize and maximize buttons) next to the tabs and want this in Firefox, you'll be glad to know it's quite easy to achieve.

Exclusive Leading Enterprise Technology Event Features the Latest Advances in HPC and OEM Appliance Technology. Danville, CA – March 7, 2011. Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from a worldwide network of high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, announced today their participation in the 9th Annual AMAX Technology Showcase 2011, an exclusive leading enterprise technology event, which will take place at AMAX’s corporate headquarters in Fremont, California on March 10, 2011.

We knew Ubuntu was “Linux for human beings.” Aiming to catch the current cloud computing wave, Canonical has now also officially deemed Ubuntu as “the cloud OS.” But what exactly does the claim mean to cloud services providers (CSPs) and potential Ubuntu channel partners? Here's the update.

A good stout Linux media server has a home in the enterprise because it's a better tool than traditional file shares for storing, archiving, and sharing company multimedia presentations.

Nokia has announced that it is selling the commercial licensing and professional services arm of its Qt group to Digia, a Finnish services and software company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Android moves pretty fast. It's import to know when, how and what to expect when you upgrade your device. Let's step through a recent upgrade from Froyo to Gingerbread on a Nexus One.

For the last 15 years we have been living in a Microsoft monoculture, which has had very real knock-on consequences for everyone online – not just for users of its products. Today, though, that monoculture is fading away, to be replaced by something much more complex.

Canonical, Ltd.'s new business model of choice — proprietary relicensing (once trailblazed by MySQL AB) — was also barely legitimate. In one literal sense, that's still true: it's legitimate in the sense that it doesn't violate GPL. In the sense of software freedom morality, I think proprietary relicensing harms the Free Software community too much, and that it was therefore a mistake to ever tolerate it.

Linux from scratch6.8 is released, This release includes numerous changes to LFS-6.7 and security fixes. It also includes editorial work on the explanatory material throughout the book, improving both the clarity and accuracy of the text.

The FreeBSD project announced the release of versions 8.2 and 7.4 on February 24. Both bring lots of new features and bug fixes. FreeBSD can be run on a large variety of architectures and is still considered one of the most stable and hardened systems available.

Linux is, without doubt a good operating system, although I feel more needs to be done to de-alienate it for the average user. I’ve been using Linux as my primary OS for the last 12 years. A few months ago I decided to give OS X a try and since then I’ve been spending more and more time using it.

Read more at Petur.eu

When one's computer becomes unstable, it's natural to think first of a particular app or the desktop. After that, one may tend to suspect the operating system. Finally one may find it turns out to be hardware at fault. This is what happened to me recently, and at the operating system phase, Debian became a last resort. At first I blamed Sabayon and tried Linux Mint. When Linux Mint seemed to also be crashy, I resorted to the newly released Debian 6.0. I thought if anything was going to be stable, it'd be Debian. Although I finally found and replaced faulty hardware, I've learned a bit about Debian on the desktop. I've used Debian on my X-less server for years, but never thought of it much as a desktop system. So, here is a summary of my Debian desktop adventure.

The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. Liquorix tracks the kernel very closely, and as such there’s a new update every few days. Due to update fatigue, for now I’m “pounding out” the Liquorix entry in my sources.list. I have a good 2.6.37 kernel, and I want to stick with it for at least a little while.

Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens, has defended the company's change to how it distributes the kernel source code in a blog posting. The company had changed its policy on how it distributed the source to its Linux kernel, a key component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Where it had previously shipped out a standard kernel with all the patches which needed to be applied to make that kernel into Red Hat's version, for RHEL6 it switched to shipping an archive with those patches pre-applied and details of the patches not explicitly listed.

In mid February there were news reports that Canadian government computers at the Finance Department, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada had been hacked and information mined by persons unknown, most probably operating out of China.

I’ve been experimenting with other flat-file blogging systems, including Blosxom and Ode. Both Blosxom and Ode are based on Perl scripts, while FlatPress is written in PHP.