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When the machine gets old and becomes useless. You get short on options. You can't sell it because you are so emotionally attached to it and it doesn't worth that much and you can't run new applications on it because it can't afford them. But you can turn it into a beautiful workstation using xubuntu.

The platform that has defined “cool” for years has not had a reputation for being an open platform, but that hasn’t discouraged a number of open source projects for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Some of us rely heavily on our personal information managers for keeping our appointment calendars, contacts, reminders, and notes. Gnome offers Evolution, and KDE has Kontact. Which one is better? Bruce Byfield takes a detailed look at both.

Earlier today, Canonical has announced the availability of a major security update for the following Ubuntu distributions: 6.06 LTS, 8.04 LTS, 8.10 and 9.04 (also applies to Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu). The update patches no more than 15 security issues (see below for details) discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various hackers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to update your system as soon as possible!

In this tip, Juliet Kemp shows how to use xclip for copy-and-paste on the Linux command line-- without using the mouse.

Andrew Tridgell has published a patch that could make the Linux implementation of the FAT filesystem impervious to Microsoft patent claims of the kind that forced a settlement from TomTom. The patch alters the VFAT code so that it does not generate both short and long filenames, says Tridgell. The Microsoft FAT patent claims lay at the heart of its lawsuit against Dutch personal navigation device (PND) vendor TomTom earlier this year, which resulted in a TomTom settlement in late March.

While both Red Hat and Canonical/Ubuntu are offering cloud services, Canonical is not providing a certification program like Red Hat is for vendors. While Red Hat sees value in certification, Canonical does not. "At this time, we believe there is limited user value for certifying a public cloud provider which has already delivered a considerable brand for operational excellence in public cloud provision," Simon Wardley, head of Canonical's cloud strategy said.

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 ?