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Nominations are officially open for the 9th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 14th-18th AMIA Fall conference in San Francisco, CA. Deadline for entries is September 30th, 2009. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group.

The CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation formed with the mission of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities, launched today, September 10, 2009. Incorporated as a 501.c6 non-profit, the CodePlex Foundation was created as a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects. The CodePlex Foundation will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities. Initial funding for the Foundation comes from Microsoft Corporation.

[It is going to be very interesting to see how they use this new tool of theirs. - Scott]

The controversy continues to heat up around Microsoft's misleading anti-Linux training materials designed for Best Buy salespeople. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin has alleged that Microsoft tried to spread anti-Linux FUD by dumping 22 Linux-related patents in the hopes they'd be purchased by "patent trolls."

Linux is fun, in my opinion, and I have been using it as my sole operating system since 2001. Most major Linux distributions are accompanied by well-stocked software repositories so I don't need to look very far to find a solution for any given task. However, there are times when I need a bit training and the first thing I do is reach for a tutorial. Linux is powerful and contributes greatly to productivity, but, as with most things in life, a new system can require a learning curve. This is where tutorials come in handy.

Some complain that there is simply too much choice in the free software world and far too many Linux distributions. Well, now there’s another called Lubuntu. A derivative of Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop, it’s super light and very fast. Finally, there’s an Ubuntu perfectly suited to those older, low end machines!

Windows 7 is better than Vista. Great. But saying that is like saying you'd rather catch the common cold instead of swine flu. Aside from the default options being obnoxious and hard to use, there are several things I need to see in a Windows operating system before I'll even contemplate switching back.

The latest version of Linux offers a whole host of new features – for example a USB 3.0 infrastructure, drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi, KMS support for Radeon chips and improved versions of Btrfs and Ext4. As is traditional with new Linux versions in the main development branch, however, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

In this talk I take you through how I produce podcasts like the Software Freedom Law Show and Linux Outlaws using only Free Software and Open Source solutions. Sound engineering is something I’ve done for a long time and it’s a real passion of mine. I hope that comes across in the talk.

X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will be arriving months late once it's released after failing to meet the original April release schedule and then failed twice with two more proposed releases during the summer. However, the latest release schedule, which puts the final release in late September or so, might actually work out this time -- in good part thanks to Peter Hutterer.

A planned maintenance for the transformers for the openSUSE servers at the Nuremberg office will bring down the critical services for a few days over the 9/11 weekend.

A message on the Chromium Blog indicates that Google are beginning the process of rolling out extensions for Google Chrome. Although Chrome and Chromium are regarded as good browsers, critics have pointed to the lack of Firefox style Add-ons as a reason for it not being adopted more widely. Google have been working on implementing extensions and have now moved to turn on the extensions system in the Dev channel builds of Chrome and Chromium.

A recent Blog of helios reported, as well as many other blogs, that Microsoft is sending literature, and sometimes salespeople, to train and educate employees from Staples, Best Buy and now Office Depot, in the art of Linux FUD. The outcry from our community has been impressive....as have the actual materials that have been handed out to various store employees. Wanna take a guess at which one will have an impact?

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 4.8 server 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. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Let’s roll up our sleeves and dig around inside webOS to find out just what’s available to the developer looking to make modifications on a rooted device.

With four billion connected mobile phones on the planet - compared to one billion PCs - handhelds offer developers the mother of all opportunities: ubiquity and mass market. But the reward comes at a great price: market fragmentation, thanks to so many different devices using so many different hardware configurations. To bridge them, we've had Java 2 Micro Edition, CLDC, MIDP and the OSDL's Mobile Linux Initiative that promised to abstract away the differences in hardware design or provide a common set of APIs that worked on a large number of platforms. Offered as the next "big answer," they've invariably compounded the problem by adding to the infinite soup of API configurations.

The perl5-porters recently saw a rather acrimonious discussion on how the Red Hat and Fedora distributions choose to package the Perl language and associated modules. Things have calmed down (the parties have essentially agreed to disagree), but an interesting issue remains: what can development projects do if they're unhappy with how distributors are treating their code?

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux operating system, but it's where the dream of a usable, completely free desktop is closest to reality. If every Ubuntu developer were assembled at one place, here are five things we'd ask them to accomplish.

Microsoft has been making overtures to the open source community of late, but suspicion abounds, and it was only heightened by Redmond's legal challenge to TomTom earlier this year. In an effort to stockpile ammunition against Redmond if it should declare war on the FOSS movement, a Linux-friendly group of companies have bought 22 patents Microsoft recently sold to a patent trust.

Ubuntu has a clearly stated mission: to select the best components from open source, to assemble and refine them, to encourage ecosystem development and to provide the best possible experience to our users while avoiding lock-in and the creation of monopolies. Canonical's cloud strategy follows this same mission. Here's how.

Knowing your UNIX network layout will go a long way with understanding your network and how it operates. But what happens when the performance of your UNIX network and the speed at which you can transfer files or connect to services suddenly reduces? How do you diagnose the issues and work out where in your network the problems lie? This article looks at some quick methods for finding and identifying performance issues and the steps to start resolving them.