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Linux Defender includes facilities for peer-to-peer patent review, post patent review as well as defensive publications for patents. With Microsoft alleging, or just hinting strongly in some cases, that open source technologies infringe on over 200 Microsoft patents , the new effort might potentially help open source and Linux vendors to defend themselves should the need arise.

Two Oregon educators who founded the K12Linux project seven years ago are glad that they have been able to hand that project over to Fedora, the home they always meant for K12Linux to have. Paul Nelson and Eric Harrison met online when Nelson, a classroom teacher and technology director at a small school in Portland's Riverdale School District, went looking for Linux help. "We were doing everything on the back end with Linux, but I was spending a lot of time keeping the Windows desktops running. I thought how nice it would be to use Linux on the front end too. I posted a notice on the local user group mailing list." Harrison, then a Multnomah County IT Services support tech, befriended Nelson, and the two had an idea: make a specialized Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) distribution that would allow schools to use thin clients running Linux on old, inexpensive hardware.

After two years of intense development, Amarok 2 has become a reality! Some of the highlights that are included in the 2.0 release are a completely redesigned user interface, tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast. There is an overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok. Much of the work has gone into migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework using core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma. Read more about the new release in the release announcement and start Amaroking!

For years now, HP has been slowly edging towards releasing a pre-installed Linux for general users. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that today, December 10th, HP finally took the big plunge.

Want something cool for Christmas that runs on Linux? Got a geek to buy for? Here's 10 cool gadgets that run Linux.

Every day people rely on search engines to find specific content in the many terabytes of data that exist on the Internet, but have you ever wondered how this search is actually performed? One approach is Apache's Hadoop, which is a software framework that enables distributed manipulation of vast amounts of data. One application of Hadoop is parallel indexing of Internet Web pages. Hadoop is an Apache project with support from Yahoo!, Google, IBM, and others. This article introduces the Hadoop framework and shows you why it's one of the most important Linux-based distributed computing frameworks.

Only around five percent of Lifehacker's visitors are using the open-source Linux operating system when they stop by, according to our traffic charts, and only one of our editors (ahem) is regularly using it every day. Having said that, when we get to write about great Linux-based tweaks or downloads, we get pretty excited—and, apparently, so do our readers and visitors linked in from across the web. Today we're looking back at the Linux-related posts that got the most attention in 2008, so read on to see what you might have missed, and what the open-source crowd is down with. Photo by Ypsy.

Well, it may be December, but it is time for the OpenSolaris 2008.11 update, the second tweak of the open source variant of the Solaris Unix platform. With the new release today, it's getting some interesting storage enhancements as well as the usual update additions. The OpenSolaris project launched its first pseudo-commercial release, code-named Project Indiana, in May, with the goal of getting the open source variant of Solaris humming along in binary form and being used by the development community and other cheapskates who like to play with operating systems but who don't want to pay for them.

The FSF Europe's Freedom Task Force and GPL-Violations.org have jointly prepared a few guidelines on how to best report (and avoid) license violations. Some of the advice is common sense (suspected violations are best handled in private, reported only to the involved parties, and organizations such as GPL-Violations and the appropriate branch of the Free Software Foundation), but reminders are always useful, especially in the heat of the moment.

The Android Open Source Project continues to go from strength to strength as the Open Handset Alliance announces a batch of new members. Amongst the 14 new companies to sign up and demonstrate support for Android as an open mobile platform, are Sony Ericsson and Vodafone.

Unison Technologies, with an assist from Canonical and Ubuntu Linux, says it is “launching a major threat to Microsoft Exchange” and Cisco PBXes. The effort involves free unified communications software running on Ubuntu. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

GNOME's Vala programming language lets you use the GLib2 object system at the heart of the GNOME desktop without having to do object-oriented programming in ANSI C. Unlike Mono or Java, a Vala program does not require any virtual machine or runtime libraries, so people who use your Vala objects don't even have to know they are not written in C.

Open Invention Network along with a series of powerful partners ranging from IBM to the Software Freedom Law Center to the Linux Foundation has unveiled Linux Defenders, a federated effort to shield the open source community from patent trolls. The program calls for open source developers large and small to contribute new open source software inventions to the group's attorneys and engineers so that they can help build moats to to keep out people pushing dubious patent infringement charges. Here's why this is a good idea, where the concept has worked very well before.

Previously, talking to Exchange without using Microsoft products was pretty much out of the question. The binary MAPI protocol is proprietary and poorly documented. Exchange supports IMAP and POP, but these protocols only give access to emails, not the calendar, address book, todo lists etc. But beginning with version 2007, Exchange now ships with a SOAP interface called Exchange Web Services, or EWS. This interface gives us access to the functions necessary to write clients in any programming language on any platform. This article describes a PHP program to look up, delete and insert items in an Exchange calendar.

Machines like Linutop can make a rather neat mini server which you can use to host virtually any application base on the LAMP stack.

Black Duck offers services for managed and secure implementations of open source software, and maintains a giant knowledgebase of over 170,000 open source projects. It's doing very well even in this economic environment, as seen in the story linked to above. Today, the company sent along a collection of myths about open source, responses for which answer some interesting questions.

HP and Novell today jointly announced that HP will pre-load Novell's SUSE LInux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) on its Compaq dc5850 desktop PC for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Additionally, Novell announced it will maintain a repository of educational software for SLED users, including dc5850 buyers. HP's dc-5850 is a small form-factor PC typically available with FreeDOS, or else various versions of Windows. Ordering the machine with Linux pre-installed will not add to the cost of the PC, which HP lists as starting at $520.

The last time we looked in-depth at HDMI support on Linux was last December when talking about HDMI with the ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Since then there has been improvements in a number of drivers for different hardware. In this article we have a brief overview on the status of HDMI support in the Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI Linux drivers.

Sometimes, df's best estimate can be off by more than several Gigabytes... give or take ;) Today we're going to look at a little something that is a fairly hot-running-water issue on most of the Linux and Unix boards lately (actually, probably always has been, but our research staff quit on us ;) This post will be similar in focus to our previous post on the differences between sar and vmstat with regards to free memory/swap reporting.

Just as the world's economies started to tank, Australia's Governments got themselves into an economic bind by promising to supply public school children with laptops. However, a leading systems integrator has issued a blueprint for an affordable blanket laptop roll out using Linux and netbooks.