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It is not quite ready for primetime, but with the announcement of OpenIndiana, a so-called spork of Oracle's OpenSolaris Unix distribution, the server world is getting a familiar, re-opened, and community-developed operating system aimed specifically at data center workloads.

A question I have fielded more then a couple times in the Wine section of the Ubuntu Forums is. What is the difference between commercial Wine products and vanilla Wine?

No, I do not want to talk of Linux MINT, but as is practically possible to apply some tricks to make our desktop a bit more nature oriented. However let me say that thanks to your choice of Linux operating system you are already on the philosophical choice closer to nature..

Marina is a senior software engineer at Red Hat and has been involved in free software development for quite some time. She shares with us her opinions about the importance of software freedom and how to get more women involved in the free software community.

While Kristian Høgsberg is now likely on his way to Toulouse, France for the 2010 X Developers' Summit, over the past day he has been working on some minor changes to the Wayland Display Server that he has now been working on for a while to leverage the latest Linux graphics technologies like kernel mode-setting and is something we initially reported on back in 2008 when it began.

We all know that there are passionate partisans of the GNOME and KDE versions of Linux Mint; yet, oddly, you rarely hear about people raving about the Xfce version. That’s a shame, because sometimes less is truly more. Linux Mint 9 Xfce has a lot to offer to those who have limited hardware, or who simply prefer not to deal with the eye-candy bloat of GNOME or KDE.

It's been a while since I last reviewed a shooter game for Linux, and one of them was World of Padman (reviewed here), which was a cartoon-like, funny first-person shooter. Well, the same goes for Warsow, the game I'm going to talk about in this article. Every graphical aspect of Warsow indicates we're dealing with a cartoon-like universe, from the character models to weapons and maps.

If Debian means one thing, it’s functionality. You typically don’t go to Debian for cutting-edge features or fancy bells and whistles, but if you’re after an extremely versatile, stable, and dependable Linux, it can’t be beat. One of Debian’s newer offerings is the ability to create a custom Live CD directly from their website. You choose your options, they generate the image. Like all things Debian, it’s not flashy, you’ll get no AJAX animations or jQuery effects, just a functional, flexible, and powerful tool, and here’s how to use it.

If you are long time Ubuntu user, then just may be you are also a compiz inspired linux convert, like me. Even now, I don't use a lot a compiz animations in my desktop, but I can't think of a Gnome desktop without Compiz. They are blended together so well. Compiz is nearing another major release and a lot of changes are coming.

The Linux-based Android mobile platform is exploding, with thousands of tasty apps to choose from. Juliet Kemp shares a few of her favorites, from secure remote administration to eBooks to file managers and more. The huge number of apps available for Android is both a joy and something of a trial. Finding an app that does the thing you want can be something of a hit-and-miss experience. Here's a roundup of a few of the most useful ones.

Palm webOS design VP Peter Skillman has left the troubled company to head the MeeGo user-experience at Nokia. Skillman joins Matias Duarte, the UI designer for webOS, as the second senior ranking webOS employee to leave for another mobile OS.

Linux Mint, long known as a multimedia-ready spin on Ubuntu, has gone deeper and released a Mint distro based not on Ubuntu but on Debian Testing, and my first impressions running the system from the live DVD is that this is a game-changer in the Linux world.

Blender is a free open source 3D modelling and graphics software widely used for making animated movies. Here is a nice collection of 8 short films and animations made using Blender which I think will give you an idea on Blender's capabilities. Enjoy the ride.

Open source Dropbox alternative releases early beta. Like using Dropbox but looking for a good open source alternative? The good news is that there is a new online storage sharing application heading your way and it's completely open source.

Forget Perl’s claims, Emacs really is the Swiss Army chainsaw of the *NIX world. Join Richard Smedley on the first of a three-part series revealing how you can do most of your day-to-day tasks without leaving Emacs – even if programming is a small or non-existent part of your typical day…

Qmmp (Qt Multimedia Player) is a Qt-based audio player for Linux which resembles the appearance of XMMS (and Audacious for that matter), so users of these two players which want to have a player which integrates well in KDE will probably want to give it a try.

Team Tiny Core has released Tiny Core 3.1 the world's smallest desktop distribution - an 11 MB live CD, the major theme for this release is the tinycore-logo-150x150introduction of on demand icons. This allows for more options to have even faster boot times with the easy access to less often used application extensions. Much improved internationalization support and other upgrades and enhancements have been performed throught the system.

If you are serious about keeping data on your server safe, you should consider deploying an offsite backup solution. So if anything goes wrong, you still have all your data up in the cloud. One cloud-based backup solution is to use the good old rsync tool with the rsync.net backup service.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on an OpenSUSE 11.3 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

In a discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Linus Torvalds leaked the fact the he became a US citizen last week. The Linux inventor grew up in Finland where he studied at the University of Helsinki. He moved to the US in 1997 to work for the chip developer Transmeta. For several years he has lived in Portland, Oregon, and receives an income as a Fellow of the Linux Foundation.