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People who use and promote free software cite various reasons for their choice, but do those reasons tell the whole story? If, as a community, we want free software to continue to grow in popularity, especially in the mainstream, we should understand better the true reasons for choosing it—especially our own.

Learn how to create and manage hard and symbolic links to files on your Linux® system. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to explore the differences between hard and soft, or symbolic, links and the best ways to link to files, as opposed to copying files.

Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and "could be an incredible iPad alternative," according to a hands-on Laptop story.

Once again, the buzz has grown surrounding rumors that Novell may soon be snapped up in a buyout. As many as 20 companies may have registered bids for the company, according to the Wall Street Journal. Matt Asay notes that an auction of the company could become a patent troll bonanza, and I have to agree. Let's remember that Novell is no spring chicken. It owns lots of patents and lots of legacy applications. Overall, it would not be good to see Novell bought out, partly because it's one of the few U.S.-based public companies focused primarily on open source.

The iPad has finally landed in the U.K., and I spent much of the past holiday weekend playing with mine. While investigating its use to sys admins, I came across this photo of someone using it to read shared docs from a server room. Trying out GoodReader, I established that you can transfer files from desktop to iPad. However, that's controlled from the desktop end, with the iPad viewed as a network share. I wanted to control the transfer from the iPad -- less forward planning required! You can also do this from an iPhone.

Check out how well the X-fi USB works for surround on my netbook in combination with VAAPI accelerated HD video. CPU load figures inside.

Intel's Computex press release highlight a variety of initiatives by the company, and slipped in added netbook support for the Linux-based MeeGo operating system, an open source joint venture between Nokia and Linux itself.

KDE has issued another update to the 4.4 desktop, applications and development libraries. KDE SC 4.4.4 brings, in addition to its funny version number, mainly small bugfixes that further polish the user experience. Most notable are probably sorting fixes for natural sorting in Dolphin, our nice file manager. The KDE release team also decided to do another release in the 4.4 series, 4.4.5, to come out next month, before fully concentrating on the 4.5 tree. SC 4.4.4 though is a stable update that is recommended to everyone running 4.4.3 or earlier. Packages from your favorite OS vendor will become available soon.

One of the companies that we have been collaborating with on some of the features for the Phoronix Test Suite has been CloudHarmony, which is a company that seeks to provide an assortment of information on different cloud computing platforms and offerings from the various firms. Using the Phoronix Test Suite they have been benchmarking a plethora of different cloud computing platforms and today they have published a huge batch of results -- benchmarks from over 150 different cloud server configurations from 20 different providers!

Spring is a lovely time of year, when the flowers bloom, the birds sing and community Linux projects release the fruit of their winter labours. Specifically, the Fedora and Ubuntu projects come to the end of their six-month cycles in the April/May time frame. This year’s yield is a bumper crop, with Fedora 13 including a number of interesting technologies and improvements and Ubuntu putting on its finest polish for a Long Term Support (LTS) release…

Android operating system is spreading like wildfire. Smartphone manufacturers are scrambling to produce their version of Android phone and all this has just started. Let's celebrate this stellar success of a free and open source software called Android with some stunning android wallpapers.

More than 90% of the world's largest supercomputers now run Linux - here are the fastest supercomputers in the world

Over the next few weeks my articles will focus on software systems designed with special consideration for music composition by the use of algorithms. Wiktionary defines an algorithm as "... a precise step-by-step plan for a computational procedure that begins with an input value and yields an output value in a finite number of steps". By that definition algorithmic music composition is the process of using such procedures to generate values for the pitches, dynamics, rhythm, instrumentation, and other formal aspects of the composition.

"FluxBox lightweight window manager based on blackbox window manager, we already reviewed FluxBox and how to install it on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS follow this post."

A recent message on the Ubuntu development announce mailing list points out that Firefox 3.6.4 is about to be pushed in Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic (and Lucid - obviously). Until now, users which didn't use the latest Ubuntu version found it to be a real pain to upgrade to the latest Firefox version.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Fedora 13 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP5/Ruby/Python, 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 Fedora 13, 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 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

"It was with delight that I read these words on Thursday: "The proposed IndexedDB standard, which provides a local database store for Web applications, will be supported by Firefox 4." The statement appears on Mozilla's new Firefox 4 for developers site, boding well for those of us who use the Web a lot: the IndexedDB interface gives Web applications a way to work even without a network connection. "

Geek toy, or serious business? At first when discovering this I thought of it as just another geek toy, but after thinking about it for a while it came to my mind this is actually a very interesting subject. Home automation may seem like something most interesting for lazy people or people with very big houses, but it can actually save lots of time and money.

How many Linux/BSD distros/projects have slogans? And what do those slogans say about the software projects they represent? Some of these slogans are more "official" than others, but whether sanctioned or not, they all do say something about the code and people behind them. Do you think the projects live up to their slogans? If not, what should their real slogans be?

Great news for uTorrent fans client who use Linux: uTorrent will finally come to Linux!