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The Wikimedia Foundation has received another major donation. Today Google announced that it is donating two million dollars to the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia. "Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet," explained Google co-founder Sergey Brin, "This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online." Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales emphasised the long friendship between Google and Wikimedia, "Both organisations are committed to bringing high quality information to hundreds of millions of individuals every day, and to making the Internet better for everyone."

I recently purchased an HTC Magic, my first device running Android, Google's Linux-based mobile operating system. Although there are a lot of things I like about Android, I also quickly realized that there are also a lot of things that either require urgent improvement or are going wrong altogether. Below is my not-so-small list of Android issues. A lot of them are related to the Android market because it is in my opinion the part of Android that requires the most urgent efforts.

Ever wonder whether a given FLOSS project is going to succeed or flounder? Need a little help reading the tea leaves? Now you can follow along at home with a handy scorecard that looks at everything from source control to project communication. A little history. I was researching a project yesterday that required potential users and contributors to pull source from a Git repository, rather than simply downloading a zip file or tarball with the source and other materials that users would need. I mentioned this on Twitter, and Karsten Wade of the Fedora project pointed out the scorecard on the newly launched guide to helping people learn to interact with and build community, Open Source Way.

When Google announced their ChromeOS there was a flurry of comment and opinion on what this could mean for the GNU/Linux user and the future of free software. Our esteemed editor, Tony Mobily made a bold statement (albeit framed as a question) at the time that Google’s ChromeOS could turn GNU/Linux into a “desktop winner”. I’m not sure that it’s true. Whatever happens of course the fact is that when somebody of Google’s size and impact enters a market, there will be winners and losers, losses and gains. Now that the dust has well and truly settled let’s have another look at the potential impact of ChromeOS. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine

Mutt is a text-based mail client along the lines of Pine or Elm. It's known for being a fast and highly configurable mail client, and since it is text-based, it’s ideal for checking email quickly over SSH (Secure Shell). Click through to learn exactly how to use it…

Just as they did last year, over thirty international security organisations have come together, to publish a list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors leading to vulnerabilities that can be exploited for cybercrime and espionage. The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors has been updated with a number of improvements to how the errors are graded, prioritised and categorised. For example, new "Focus Profiles" allow readers to quickly see the listed errors sorted for particular professionals' interests.

The Network Information Service distributes information on the network that must be shared between the Linux machines. Sun Microsystems developed a system known as Yellow Pages (YP) that eventually became known as NIS. The original YP is added to most commands for NIS ypserver, ypbind, and yppasswd. Typically NIS is used to distribute information about the users and how they authenticate to Linux.

As of this writing (Tuesday Feb 16th) there don't seem to be any new suggestions from Microsoft to assist XP users whose systems were rendered un-bootable after installing the February 9th patches. For example, the last entry on The Microsoft Security Response Center blog is four days old. So let me offer a suggestion: boot to Linux and move some files around. Windows Update on XP is architected [sic] to allow for the backing out of patches. The problem is that this depends on the system being bootable, so it's of no use when even Safe Mode is unavailable, as is the case here. And, as I wrote last time, the official troubleshooting tool from Microsoft, the Recovery Console, is unusable for many, if not most, Windows XP users.

Codeweavers offers downloads of its Crossover Games for $39.95 and Crossover Professional for $69.95 If you apply coupon code "ComeToTheLight" this will drop CrossOver Games to $29.96 And Crossover Professional to $52.46

For an open source company, nurturing a community around the software is as important as picking the right licence. Although developer communities tend to be more self-starting with a reasonably open development process, user communities, which are a source of valuable feedback, need more encouragement. The H went to the first meeting of the UK BIRT User Group (BUG) to see how one company was helping to create a user community.

Canonical’s partner program for Ubuntu, the fast-growing Linux distribution, took two promising steps forward this week. One step involves a vote of confidence from a key consulting company. The other step involves a key move in the government market. Here are the details.

Mark Guzdial, respected professor and Vice Chair of the ACM Education Board, has expressed some concerns about the impact that open source is having on computing education. Are these concerns legitimate?

He starts from an awfully dramatic position: "At a time when we are trying to broaden participation in computing, open source development is even more closed and less diverse than commercial software development."

PHP might have put the "P" in LAMP - the all open-source server stack - but on the desktop, it seems that those using PHP generally prefer the "W" to the "L." In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The most heated talk this year during FOSDEM in the X.Org development room was certainly the talk by Luc Verhaegen with his ambitions to clean up the Linux graphics driver stack. Building the entire X.Org stack can be a mess and there is certainly areas to improve upon in the development process and making it easier for end-users and others to test out this latest code. Luc's goal for this is to create unified trees for each driver that contain all of the driver-specific code rather than having various bits scattered all over the place.

There are certain things you need to tweak in Apache running under any Debian platform (including Ubuntu) in order to have it properly redirect webpages (301) after you change your permalink structure in WordPress.

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver. What makes this open-source 3D support for NVIDIA GPUs even more interesting is that it is atop the Gallium3D driver architecture rather than classic Mesa. With that said, we are providing early benchmarks of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 with two GeForce graphics cards as we compare the performance to NVIDIA's official Linux driver.

Dr. Ali Jahangiri, the well known security expert and author of Live Hacking: The Ultimate Guide to Hacking Techniques & Countermeasures for Ethical Hackers & IT Security Experts, is pleased to announce the launch of the Live Hacking CD, a new Linux distribution designed for ethical hacking. The Live Hacking CD contains the tools and utilities you need to test and hack your own network but using the tools and techniques that more malicious hackers would use. As a derivative of Ubuntu this 'Live CD' runs directly from the CD and doesn’t need installing on your hard-drive. Once booted you can use the included tools to perform penetration tests and ethically hack on your own network to ensure that it is secure from outside intruders. As well as the standard Linux networking tools the Live Hacking CD has tools for DNS enumeration and reconnaissance as well as utilities for foot-printing, password cracking and network sniffing. It also has programs for spoofing and a set of wireless networking utilities.

Between radical changes and limited functionality, the KDE 4 series got off to a rough start. However, with each release, KDE 4 has improved steadily and silenced more critics. Now, with the KDE 4.4 release, the series has reached first maturity. Those who expect everything to behave exactly as it did in the KDE 3 series may still struggle with 4.4. But, for those willing to accept change, 4.4 has no shortage of new features to offer, ranging from the implementation of several long-term directions to enhanced usability on the desktop -- including Plasma Netbook, a new interface designed specifically for netbook computers. Released a week ago, KDE 4.4 is rapidly finding its way into distributions. Packages have already found their way into the Debian testing and unstable repositories, and guides are available for installing the new version in many major distributions, including Fedora, openSuse, and Ubuntu.

The convergence of ubiquitous connectivity and cloud computing has one simple and very exciting output: the explosion of hardware gadgets we will use to access information anywhere and anytime. Here are 20 computers you'll be using within the next 5 years.

There is no denying the fact that we have become a touch-centric society in regards to our technology. Where is our technology headed though? With the idea of "bigger is better" in mind: if a 3.5~ inch touch screen is good a larger screen must better right? Enter Tablet PCs and the year 2010