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This is the 10th year I have been writing regularly in some fashion about hacking around with Open Source systems and software. So to get things started first off a quick digest recapping the history of how this "thing" came to be, some of the great stuff along the way that resulted and of course the most important thing about the site....

Apple and Microsoft have millions to finance their marketing campaigns. GNU/Linux on the other hand is a totally different story.

Linux is famous for uptime, but even it has to reboot when a new kernel vulnerability is fixed. Or does it? Now there’s Ksplice, technology that applies patches directly into the running kernel. And thanks to their free Uptrack service it’s free for users of Ubuntu!

Android smartphones are sending waves of excitement through the mobile community that they are a serious contender to knock iPhone off its smartphone perch. But, are they really a threat or have they already missed the boat?

Bordeaux 1.8.0 beta 1 for Mac OSX systems has been released, this release adds support for Microsoft Office 2003 Applications (Word, Excel, Powerpnt) Microsoft Project 2003 and Visio 2003. Their are still a small number of known problems around libgphoto2 and libpng support with this release.

Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE (London Stock Exchange)'s Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day. While the LSE denied that the collapse was TradElect's fault, they also refused to explain what the problem really wa. Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect.

The Mono discussion may be tiring, but the fact of the matter is that thanks to this discussion, various major Linux distributions are now making official statements detailing their position in the Mono/C# debate. The latest to do this is Ubuntu, which reiterated their position yesterday.

The GNU General Public Licence is falling in popularity, looking at all the versions of the GPL as a whole, according to figures released on Tuesday by Black Duck. At the same time, Microsoft's open source software license, MS-PL, is gaining ground in the open source world, the company said. Black Duck, which provides services and products for developers working with open source code, compiled the figures from its database of more than 200,000 open source projects collected from the internet.

[The lead is a tad misleading. GPL has lost some percentage but it lost to BSD and MIT, not to MS-PL - Sander]

I have trolled my Twitter feeds looking for something exciting or provocative related to Open Source, but nothing, other than the release of Fedora 11 and Firefox 3.5 is jumping out at me and frankly neither is particularly news worth, despite the large number of people that are supposedly downloading both code sets. Has Open Source lost its mojo? Has it become so common place that there are no real innovations to talk about? Or is it simply the summer lull?

Linux Journal's Shawn Powers shows us how to use nice and renice to change the priority level of your processes.

One of the benefits of moving the different graphics hardware drivers over to using kernel mode-setting, an in-kernel GPU memory manager (whether it be GEM or TTM), and other newer X innovations is the possibility of now running the X Server without root privileges. By doing so, this of course improves the security since this very large chunk of code is no longer running with all of these high-privileged rights.

Due to now living in a KMS-enabled world, at least on the Intel and ATI side (the NVIDIA side is still slowly but surely coming via Nouveau), it's rather easy to get the X Server running without any special rights...

Adobe AIR is a technology that lets you run Internet applications on the desktop. With AIR you do not need a browser to run such desktop applications. This tutorial explains how you can install Adobe AIR 1.5.1 for Linux on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop and how you can install AIR applications.

The typical download manager at a minimum provides means to recover from errors without losing the work already completed, and can optionally split the file to be downloaded (or uploaded) into 2 or more segments, which are then moved in parallel, potentially making the process faster within the limits of the available bandwidth. So what is the perfect download manager i should use in Linux ?

When it comes time to move from Windows to Linux, one of the first things you want to consider is what software you rely on in the Windows world, and what you're going to use in Linux.

VirtualBox 3.0, with its improved 3D support, can ensure that some users won't need to boot Windows even when gaming. With its version 3.0 of VirtualBox, Innotek/Sun/Oracle made a significant step forward. End users will probably like the 3D graphics support the most: you can now run Ubuntu with Compiz. The new version brings enhancements and support for OpenGL 2.0.

Release candidate #1 for Slackware 13.0. Hi folks -- the TODO isn't entirely empty here, but it's pretty much down to minor nits, and so we're going to call this release candidate #1 and (mostly) freeze further updates unless they happen to fix problems.

A while ago I put up this article, reviewing 5 so-called 'essential' add-ons for Firefox. To continue in the same manner in this second part, here are 5 add-ons updated for Firefox 3.5 which can prove useful. Maybe not the most popular, but they definitely deserve a try.

The Ubuntu Technical Board has been asked for a position statement on the use of C#, specifically the Mono implementation, by applications in Ubuntu.

Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends, both at home and abroad. June was a very busy month for me, which is why there were so few postings and I wanted to jump on July with a really big bang, but I am having trouble finding a topic worth discussing. I could talk about my new netbook, an ASUS Eee PC that I picked up for a song, but it is still running Windows and while I have downloaded the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I have not had time to unspool it and begin the install process. I have trolled my Twitter feeds looking for something exciting or provocative related to Open Source, but nothing, other than the release of Fedora 11 and Firefox 3.5 is jumping out at me and frankly neither is particularly news worth, despite the large number of people that are supposedly downloading both code sets.

While StarDict touts itself as "the best dictionary program for Linux and Windows," it has a serious challenger to the title called GoldenDict.