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Six months ago we pointed out the best Android apps to boost your mobile productivity, but since then more free applications have appeared in the Market that offer useful features you don't want to miss. Let's take a look at a few notable free apps that make getting things done with your Android handset easier and more fun.

What the heck is going on in Boston? Apologies to any Bostonians in the audience, but something is in the water, at least in the education and law enforcement districts. Once again, the "Cradle of Liberty" is in the news as the Defenders of the Fourth are forced to rush in to defend the baby against the hand that rocks the cradle.

Besides seeing 3D acceleration for their hardware in an open-source driver, one of the other leading requests from ATI Radeon customers has been to see improved power management within the ATI X.Org driver stack. There is Dynamic Clocks support and some other power management capabilities, along with some more innovative ways, but ATI's PowerPlay is not fully implemented in the open-source stack. Today though committed to the xf86-video-ati driver is support for two new power management features. The two new power options in this open-source driver are ForceLowPowerMode and DynamicPM, both of which are xorg.conf options.

Google’s Android mobile operating system is likely to see increased adoption as hardware buyers tightening their purse strings consider netbooks and other types of mininotebooks in lieu of full-size laptops. The least inexpensive netbooks tend to run Linux or Android, and HP, Dell and Acer are all expected to have Android-based netbooks in the works. Right now, Microsoft Windows XP dominates the netbook market, at least within the United States.

Google is giving developers an early look at the next build of Android, and it has released a software development kit for Android 1.5. Code-named "Cupcake," the latest version of the Linux-based operating system adds numerous features to the Google-backed OS. One of the complaints of the Android-powered T-Mobile G1 is that it lacks an on-screen keyboard, but Android 1.5 fixes that issue.

Google's decision to only including support for a subset of Java classes in its App Engine development platform, is a major mistake, according to Sun Microsystems' chief open source officer, Simon Phipps.

So-called open core software is essentially a subset of open source -- a vendor gives away a free version under traditional open license and sells a commercial version with advanced features. Some open source purists see this as undermining the purpose of open source, but open core proponents say it's the key to a new business model.

Five years after it was first launched, South Africa's Impi Linux distribution no longer exists. The distribution, which began life as a Debian-derivative and later became an Ubuntu-variant when Mark Shuttleworth invested in the company, finally reached the end of its life under the ownership of Business Connection (BCX). The company says that it no longer makes sense to maintain an open source specialist division and has re-assigned open source staff to new roles in the company.

It's more than a bit ironic that the Linux Foundation, an organisation that drips with bizspeak, has chosen as the winner of its Linux promotional campaign an ad that espouses the virtues of freedom.

On Monday March 30, Intel announced the availability of their much anticipated new line of processors, the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series–nicknamed Nehalem. Red Hat, a long-time partner of the market-leading chip maker , collaborated on the chip’s debut, testing and optimizing the recently released Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3 on the new processor. Changes include a new processor architecture, platform architecture, memory subsystem, I/O subsystem, and options (including SSD and 10GbE). So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? Here’s just a few of the improvements wrought by the combination of Intel’s processing power and Red Hat advancements in performance and efficiency.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) is perhaps best known as the distro whose owner Novell, in 2005, signed an extremely unpopular patent-protection deal with Microsoft. From that moment on, Novell was essentially dead to those that prize the free software aspects of Linux. Given SLED's $120 price tag, individuals unconcerned by Novell's ideological stance will likely not be interested in this distro, especially when Ubuntu, Fedora and dozens of other Linux distros are "free".

A Bulgarian open source project has released a Live CD compilation of five popular boot-and-run Linux distributions. Just released in version 3.0, "Ultilex" can be booted from CD/DVD and USB flash devices, and offers Slax, Puppy Linux, Clonezilla, Parted Magic, and the System Rescue CD, says the Ultilex project.

Long, highly-technical, and animated discussion threads are certainly not unheard of on the linux-kernel mailing list. Even by linux-kernel standards, though, the thread that followed the 2.6.29 announcement was impressive. Over the course of hundreds of messages, kernel developers argued about several aspects of how filesystems and block I/O work on contemporary Linux systems. In the end (your editor will be optimistic and say that it has mostly ended), we had a lot of heat - and some useful, concrete results.

The Psyb0t worm infects Linux-based routers, including consumer-level broadband routers, and turns them into botnet nodes. Psyb0t finds easy entry because they are misconfigured. Eric Geier tells how to find out if you are infected and what to do about it, and gives sound advice that is pertinent to all routers.

Let's face it, databases are only minimally human-readable. Or, at least, that's the case in OpenOffice.org Base, regardless of whether you view a database's tables directly or filter them through a query or form. In fact, to anybody who's not an accountant or a computer geek, reading databases can be downright intimidating. Reports are an effort to manipulate database records into a more friendly form, including preparing them for printing or for insertion into a larger document.

The publication of the final draft JavaScript standard, ECMA-262, ECMAScript fifth edition, marks the final stage of revision for the ECMAScript standard, which was last updated in 1999. The redevelopment of the standard has been an acrimonious affair.

Recently the latest version of perhaps the world's most friendly BSD distribution was released. PC-BSD 7.1 is based off FreeBSD and we take a first look at this interesting operating system. In the news, Novell's openSUSE Build Service, recently added to the Linux Foundation's Developer Network, gains support for the ARM processor, Moblin sets its sight on a 2-second boot, Fedora re-issues 64-bit images of its recent beta release of version 11, FreeBSD hits 20,000 packages in its ports directory, Debian announces the final results of the project leader elections, and Kubuntu releases a KDE 3 remix of its 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope beta. Finally, don't miss the first episode of "Ubunchu!" the world's first open source manga featuring Ubuntu Linux.

Over the past few days there's been a raft of stories about how the Linux netbook market share is not as healthy as it used to be. Up until now it's been believed that the emerging netbook market (arguably the first new PC hardware platform for decades) has been sewn up almost entirely by various varieties of Linux. However, it seems the truth is that Linux netbooks see far more returns than their Windows equivalents, and -- according to research firm NPD -- about 96% of netbooks sold recently ran Windows. Needless to say, a Microsoft employee has been gloating about this.

While there are many netbooks on the market from a variety of different vendors, for the most part they are composed of the same hardware. They generally carry an Intel Atom processor with a solid-state drive or hard drive, 1GB or so of memory, and an 8" to 10" screen. One area though where these netbooks can differentiate is with the operating system. While Microsoft's Windows XP continues to be used on a large number of netbook computers, when it comes to those vendors deploying Linux each usually has a slightly different flavor. ASUS prefers a spin of Xandros on their Eee PC, there is Linpus, gOS, and many others are out there. When it comes to Dell with their popular Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, they happen to be using Ubuntu but with a few modifications. In preparations for an article later this week where we will be extensively looking at Ubuntu's netbook performance, in this article we are taking a closer look at Dell's Inspiron Mini 9.

Three Intel employees are to contribute to the development of the GNU Compiler Collection. So far, corporate contributions to the GCC have been made by AMD and by other processor forges, while Intel focused on the development of its Intel Compiler Collection (ICC).