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Labs are step-by-step exercises that students can perform to learn how to perform a task. Labs can also provide the aspect of experience if it is repeatedly done, which creates confidence.

SeaMonkey, the default browser in Puppy Linux, is good, but what if you prefer Firefox? No problem, it takes only a few simple steps to install your favorite browser onto Puppy Linux.

LWN last talked to Leslie Hawthorn, Google's Open Source Program Coordinator, in September, 2007 about the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a project where Google pays students to work with a mentor to write open-source code. The 2009 Google Summer of Code recently concluded, marking the end of the project's fifth year. The official end of project summary, Wrapping Our Fifth Google Summer of Code, covers this year's effort.

Our Hive Five asks readers to identify five of the best tools for any job, then vote for the absolute best. Here's a look back at the winners—the best of the best—from each week. The following list showcases the winners in each of the categories we covered in the third quarter of 2009.

Two prolific open web standards advocates at Mozilla are leaving the non-profit foundation for Palm, vowing to spread their developer-centric gospel to the smartphone maker's webOS platform. Ajaxian.com co-founders Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith have accepted new positions helming Palm's developer relations team. The duo announced their change of venue on their blogs this Friday.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, sat for a video interview with Dell Cloud Computing Evangelist Barton George. In it, Shuttleworth takes a “service pack” shot at Windows 7 and covers numerous questions about Canonical’s business and cloud strategy. Here’s the video — plus some perspectives from WorksWithU.

GNOME 2.28 provides a few new features and improvements to well-known functions and components. So the GNOME Epiphany browser now uses the sleak WebKit that makes apps such as Google Chrome work faster.

Want the same kind of facial recognition, name tagging, and easy geo-location of Picasa 3.5 for Windows and Mac on your Linux desktop? There's no official release, but you can fairly easily plug Picasa into your system.

Despite warnings about loss of privacy, security, reliability, and accountability, vendors are in a headlong rush into the "cloud" and reduce computing to something like the old-fashioned telephone network: smart network, dumb user interfaces. Red Hat is positioning itself to jump on the cloud bandwagon; is it any better when it's an open source company?

The Xiph.org Foundation's open source developers have released version 1.1 ("Thusnelda") of their reference implementation of the libtheora encoder library. Thusnelda is said to offer considerable quality and performance improvements over version 1.0.

Google has sent one of the most prolific independent developers for the Android phone a letter demanding he stop distributing software that greatly expands the capabilities of the fledgling smartphone operating system. Neither Google nor the developer, who goes by the handle Cyanogen, is saying much about the cease and desist letter. In a short chat transcript posted here, the developer says only that the demand centers around closed-source applications such as Google Maps and Gmail, which are bundled with CyanogenMOD, an Android modification program he maintains and offers for free.

It is no secret that the equation editor in OpenOffice sucks (well, there are a few folks out there that think it is great, but not many). What I always wanted was an equation editor of OpenOffice that used Latex as the backend. Then, I found it, and boy is it awesome: Ekee.

Yep, I used wireless to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and finally 9.04, and NetworkManager lost control of my wired Ethernet interface in the transition from 8.04 to 8.10. I did manage to find a fix very quickly, and I can confirm that it does indeed work.

FOSS is still a geekbeard ghetto, and it's going to stay that way until some serious attention is paid to community-building, and actively recruiting new people from all walks of life. It's not good enough to leave it at "Whoever wants in badly enough, and to heck with the rest."

Moblin.org shipped the final version of the Moblin v2.0 netbook distribution, and released early-preview versions of a Moblin app store, Moblin installer, and Moblin v2.1. Meanwhile, Moblin v2.0 is now available on Dell's Mini 10v netbook, as part of an "Ubuntu Moblin Remix Developer Edition" option.

It's always hard to believe pre-release hype where Microsoft is concerned, but if Windows 7 is as stable as early reports suggest, it could mean more companies bent on using Microsoft anyway, will make the switch, and when they do chances are they'll need to upgrade their hardware. And that could be an economic boost.

Google is taking action against the CyanogenMod project for offering customised Android firmware. The search giant primarily objects to CyanogenMod distributing proprietary Google applications like Google Talk and Android Market without a licence and has ordered the developer to discontinue his work immediately. The CyanogenMods contain several customised graphical elements and already offer a range of features which will be part of the forthcoming Android version 1.6 (code name Donut).

Here is a nice collection of themes for Gnome and ubuntu for September 2009, most of these themes are just updated in this month or just published, so you will find themes that you see for the first time.

This will be NOOSS's fourth year doing this live webcast from OLF

Improvements in the new Ubuntu Karmic koala includes updated splash screen, login window, latest Gnome 2.28 and many more. Here is a quick list of improvements that you need to know about the Karmic release.