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Modern all-purpose Linux distributions require a lot of RAM and disk space. What's going on, is it lard? Functionality? Have the bytes themselves gotten porky? Paul Rubens investigates the Case of the Portly Linux.

Free software is definitely going strong in some areas, especially in the server market. However, there are other areas where free software and free protocols have failed. Internet based voice and video communication is one of those areas. The market is basically fully owned by Skype, a piece of proprietary software based on a proprietary (and abusive) protocol in the hands the same company that runs eBay. Free software advocates have been saying “what if Skype was discontinued?” for years. Then I read about eBay considering shutting Skype down. Pardon? What's bugging Tony Mobily? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine

Human beings are very interesting creatures. Their behaviour is very unpredictable and often illogical. They have emotions and feelings that drive them to do certain things. My Blog is about promoting GNU/Linux and technology.

As is already indicated by version 0.9, which has just been released, Eclipse 4 will incorporate several familiar web technologies and put them to new uses. The Eclipse development environment has become a very popular open source project. A flexible software tool kit, Eclipse can integrate the products of several vendors as plug-ins, for example for modelling, development and software tests; for some time now, Eclipse hasn't just been about Java.

If you're in the mood for Linux — and who amongst us isn't — September may be your month, as the Linux Foundation presents the inaugural LinuxCon in Portland. Just shy of two months ago we sounded the call to rise, shine, and catch the early bird rate — sadly, the early bird's worm is no more. It's still possible, though, to grab yourself a spot and shave a nice slice off the price.

When I try to use Iceweasel to access a certain Firefox-compatible Web app, I get an error message and can't continue. However, there's an easy fix: Make your browser tell the world that it's Firefox, not Iceweasel.

What if it would be possible not only to change the application background color in OpenOffice.org, but also replace it by a pattern / bitmap? Some mockups here...

Red Hat will step up its efforts to help drive developer contribution and remains unfazed by desktop competition, according to its chief executive Jim Whitehurst. Addressing local students during his address Friday at UniSim, Whitehurst provided updates of Red Hat's Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative launched just over a year ago.

Howto install VLC media player 1.0.0 in Ubuntu. VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

There are two things you can be sure of about the annual Las Vegas Black Hat security conference: nobody will use the free wifi as they are all too worried about being hacked, and someone will demonstrate an exploit that will scare the living bejesus out of you. The latter has just happened for iPhone users who now have to worry about being their Jesus Phone being hijacked by nothing other than a malformed SMS text message.

A group of developers has released open-source software that gives administrators a hand in making the Internet's addressing system less vulnerable to hackers. The software, called OpenDNSSEC, automates many tasks associated with implementing DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions), which is a set a set of protocols that allows DNS (Domain Name System) records to carry a digital signature, said John A. Dickinson, a DNS consultant working on the project.

I didn't make it to OSCON this year, so I missed out on more than a few nifty events. One was a panel chaired by Matt Asay of Alfresco, where he cited research to show that companies do switch to open source as a way to save money, but that there are other, much larger goals beyond that.

It's usually not this easy. Ever since I did this test Debian Lenny installation with encrypted LVM, I've had trouble with NetworkManager, the package that allows for "easy" management of networking settings.

Welcome to the premier Unified Computing magazine for Information Technology Professionals. Published on a monthly basis, opensourc3 is available for FREE download in PDF format, or can be read on-line. This first issue contains articles on Hypervisor and Cloud Technologies, Virtualization and KVM, Deploying iSCSI in Linux, Management with Puppet and more.

According to a recent IDC study, the market for open-source software has been accelerated by both the slow economy and increased acceptance from enterprise customers The IDC study, "Worldwide Open Source Software 2009-2013 Forecast," showed that worldwide revenue from open-source software (OSS) will grow at a 22.4 percent rate to reach $8.1 billion by 2013.

Back in May we shared that the Ubuntu Intel graphics performance was still in bad shape after testing out very early Ubuntu 9.10 packages. The netbook experience was killed in Ubuntu 9.04 after a buggy Intel Linux graphics stack led to slow performance, stability issues, screen corruption, and other problems. Months have passed since we last exhaustively looked at the Intel Linux graphics stack, but we have just carried out some new tests using Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3. This new development release of Ubuntu carries the latest kernel, Mesa, and Intel driver packages as we see how the graphics performance is with an Intel 945 and G43 chipsets.

Mozilla's popular Firefox web browser is quickly approaching one billion downloads for all versions since it was officially launched. According to the Firefox Download Guesstimator, the total number of downloads should reach one billion between 13:30 and 15:00 GMT today.

The Gnome team has released an update of the Gnome Desktop Environment, version 2.27.5. The highlights of this new release are Brasero 2.27.5, fixed memleaks, lot's of bug fixes, added documentation to libbrasero-burn and lots of Translation updates.

Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks' chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially: OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering, Field3d, a voxel data storage library, Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking, Scala Migration, a database migration tool and Pystring, python-like string handling in C++.

It has been roughly four months since Red Hat, Synnex, Alfresco, EnterpriseDB and other open source companies unveiled the Open Source Channel Alliance. The effort aims to promote open source applications and Linux to IT consultants, integrators and resellers. Here are the top three questions I plan to pose to the alliance on Aug. 3.