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A lot of tech-savvy indivuals face the same dilema: their parents, who aren’t so tech-savvy, count on them to provide constant technical support for their Mom & Dad PC. Here are 7 reasons why the best solution to the problem is not to load up the parents’ PC with antivirus or malware protection, but to ditch Windows altogether and go with a clean Ubuntu approach.

If you have problems in understanding the substance of Free Software, read the following dialogue between Socrates and Antiphon. How do you feel about this? Does it represent the essence behind FLOSS to you? And in what perspective?

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 13 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

We've already shown you how to keep your desktop interesting by setting a video as your wallpaper and how to download and rotate fresh photos. This week, weblog Simple Help shows us how to rotate a photo of the Earth from space.

Compared to Ubuntu The out of the box experience of Kubuntu can be a little rough edge and quite overwhelming especially to a user who is very new to KDE. It is for this reason that I decided to share some tips and walk around for minor annoyances I encountered using Kubuntu Lucid and generally things I did after installing Kubuntu

TurnKey Linux has launched a private beta of the TurnKey Hub, a service that makes it easy to launch and manage the open source project's Ubuntu-based virtual appliances in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

To learn more, try the demo and sign up for an invite:

https://hub.turnkeylinux.org/

On May 19, Google unveiled something that many in the open source community had been expecting (and which the Free Software Foundation asked for in March): it made the VP8 video codec available to the public under a royalty-free, open source BSD-style license. Simultaneously, it introduced WebM, an HTML5-targeted open source audio-and-video delivery system using VP8, and announced a slew of corporate and open source WebM partners supporting the format, including web browsers and video sites such as its own YouTube property.

A new attack on a Flash bug has surfaced that would give attackers control of a victim’s computer after crashing it, reports PC World. Adobe put out a Security Advisory about this on June 4. It is categorized as a critical issue and all operating systems with Flash are vulnerable including Windows, Linux, and Apple and it is also found in the recent versions of Reader and Acrobat.

With a week having passed since the release of Linux 2.6.35-rc1, Linus Torvalds has now replaced it with Linux 2.6.35-rc2. This second release candidate for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel brings more changes than Linus would have liked to see, but a bulk of the activity is happening within the kernel's driver staging area.

Once you start using SNMP with Nagios you will need to translate OIDs, Object Identifiers, so that you can monitor them correctly. This translation process is made easier with the use of online tools that can help you save a lot of time.

Something most new Linux users often struggle to understand when first using Linux is the concept of desktop environments. What a desktop environment actually is I feel gets further clouded when users start exploring different "spins" of a distro.

The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I’d download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5’s got in store for us.

Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global. The bulk of publicly available media is now created by people who understand little of the professional standards and practices for media. Instead, these amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

The main problem you face when you're attempting to lift the lid on what makes Linux tick is knowing where to start. It's a complicated stack of software that's been developed by thousands of people. Following the boot sequence would be a reasonable approach, explaining what Grub actually does, before jumping into the initiation of a RAM disk and the loading of the kernel. But the problem with this is obvious. Mention Grub too early in any article and you're likely to scare many readers away. We'd have the same problem explaining the kernel if we took a chronological approach.

The biannual list of the fastest supercomputers in the world was released at the beginning of June and unsurprisingly, the vast majority (91 percent, to be exact) run some form of the Linux operating system. The Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson discussed the positive effect this statistic has on end users by citing that any improvements to Linux made by one of the supercomputer manufacturers got poured back into the kernel.

Since its 2008 debut, Android has grown - not only meeting all of the functionalities of the iPhone, but besting it in nearly all aspects. Here is our list of the top 10 things Android does better than the iPhone.

At Computex, Shenzhen-based Joyplus announced four tablets that run Android, only two of which use the same CPU. The five-inch Joyplus M508 and seven-inch 5701 both tap the 624MHz Marvell PXA303, while the seven-inch M702 runs on a 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm MW8505, and the seven-inch M703 uses a 600MHz ARM926 CPU paired with a 600MHz DSP, says Joyplus.

Google is adopting the BSD license for WebM in order to address a licensing conflict. When Google opened up the VP8 codec and announced the launch of the WebM project during the Google I/O conference last month, the actual license under which the code was distributed was not an official open source software license. It was a custom license that had not yet been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the organization responsible for maintaining the open source definition and validating licenses.

Open source development can appear to be a very practical magic, and where better to bring its community leaders together with academics and businesses than a conference at Oxford's Keble College whose Hall provided the inspiration for Hogwarts hall in the Harry Potter films.

As an update to my story from last week about the WebM CODEC project started by Google, I am pleased to say that the project is now fully open source, with the copyright licensed under the BSD licence. Many thanks to Google for addressing the concerns that I and many other members of the community expressed over the licence under which the project was initially announced. We are spared yet another open source licence, something I welcome as an OSI director.