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Fedora 13 has been working out very well over the past couple of weeks. Let me bullet-point the good and bad.

Virtual desktops in Linux are great for remote working and for administering and supporting remote computers. A single server can host virtual desktops for several remote workers. This recipe is for Debian-based Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

In reality, Oracle is a major proponent of open software, pushing Linux and taking a stand against the notion of software patents themselves. Yes, that's right, the company filing the year's biggest software patent infringement case is also a major critic of the idea of software patents in general. When somebody points a gun at you, you point one back even if you don't like the idea of guns. You might even shoot first. Oracle likes Linux so much that it funds Btrfs, a GPL licensed, futuristic and advanced new file system that supports pooling, snapshots, checksums, and other features that sound a lot like Sun's ZFS, which Oracle now also owns. The difference is that Oracle didn't mire Btrfs in legal quandary the way Sun did with ZFS before Oracle bought them.

Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr is buzzing with activity once again. With the release date of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick getting nearer everyday, the submissions onto Ubuntu Artwork Pool in Flickr keeps piling on. Here are a few of those wallpapers that I think, are worth mentioning. Click on the links provided to get wallpapers with different resolutions.

A customer service trouble ticketing (or help desk) is an information and assistance resource that helps the resolution of computer related problems.

The tech industry loves a good vendor slugfest, and the upcoming legal battle between Google and Oracle has all the makings of a truly spectacular one. At issue is Dalvik, the unique, Java-based runtime at the heart of Google's Android smartphone OS. Oracle, which gained stewardship of the Java platform when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2009, claims Dalvik knowingly, willfully, and deliberately infringes on Java intellectual property. According to a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week, Oracle is seeking a halt to any further Android development, destruction of all infringing Android software, and for Google to pay damages, both actual and statutory.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer Linux system administration bootcamp on September 1 - 2, 2010 near San Francisco (South Bay). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas. All attendees get a free Linux laptop.

At my place of work, we use a Java-based trouble-ticketing system from Atlassian called Jira. It is hosted on a LAMP server virtual machine in our production VMware environment. The system has been in daily use (well, week day use) since near the end of 2008 - requiring minimal maintenance in that time (the occasional reboot after security updates have been installed). Up until yesterday, we had been using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server. I decided it was time to move to the latest LTS release - 10.04 - which was released earlier this year and had just received it's first .1 refresh.

Canonical have just released a video trailer of the forthcoming Ubuntu Unity interface for netbook computers. Impressive stuff…

We introduced to you guys probably the best combination of gtk theme and icon set for Ubuntu/Gnome[Equinox gtk theme + Faenza icon theme]. Now take a look at Awoken icon theme. I won't say it is better than Faenza icon theme, but it is almost as good.

Some Linux design decisions seem like hangovers from Windows-land. But, unlike Windows, Linux does not need to be protected from itself, so why hang on to old habits?

I use Audacity for podcast audio capture and production on a variety of platforms, and the speed with which my new Lenovo G555 (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) mixes down to MP3. I can't remember adding the LAME package from RPMFusion, but I must have done that because I tested that feature before I needed to edit a podcast and all was working fine. What I forgot to test was the ability of Audacity in Fedora 13 to import MP3 audio,

The Wine development release 1.3.1 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

In order to get a sense of the popularity of various Linux distributions over the past several years, we entered their names into Google’s search insights tool and grabbed Google’s “embed code” for the resulting graphs. The graphs display some fascinating trends and bode well for the future of Linux.

French robotics specialist Gostai has announced that its advanced Urbi robotics operating system is now available as open source. The robotics platform is compatible with Linux, Windows and several real-time operating systems and uses a new orchestration script language called urbiscript that natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Note: The Urbi community portal is located here.

System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.

I’ve been using the drop down terminal Guake for some years now. It has become an indispensable tool that I cannot imagine being without.

AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration.

In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students' presentations. Here are seven tools that your students can use find and or create sounds for their multimedia presentations.

[I am working on my Education degree and came across this. Its aimed at Teachers but I thought royalty free stuff would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Google Docs is a great online office suite, and the fact that it allows collaboration has made it quite popular. Make it even better by integrating these services straight into your Ubuntu desktop…