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Do we actually own anything any more? Every we time buy, download or use software we have to agree to licenses that means that even though we may pay for them, we are only paying for their use not their ownership.

Last month Radu-Cristian Fotescu, who writes the Planète Béranger blog, posted about running CentOS 5.3 on the desktop, describing his experiences as "simple pleasures". Mr. Fotescu has a well earned reputation for negativity, particularly when it comes to Linux distributions. He has been positively effusive about CentOS 5.3, going so far as to create his own repository of additional or updated desktop software for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, and sharing it with the community. As a result I began toying with the idea of running CentOS on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso.

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2009

Establish, connect, and empower an active community of open source software (and hardware) developers across the military-industrial complex of the United States of America.

Book burning, at least in modern democracies, is supposed to be something of the past. Indeed, with books taking to devices like the Kindle, burning would seem an unlikely, if possible, exercise. That may or may not be quite so, however, depending on how you read last week's news.

Everybody's guessing how would Google shape their recently announced OS. I guess the Internet would not break with one more bunch of half-guesses :)

It's time for the Linux community to come together for some serious "we need to talk" time.

Wikipedia users will be getting new tools for uploading, editing, and viewing video very soon. According to a Beet.TV interview with Erik Moller, who is the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, these features will be made available shortly. What's interesting, however, is the Web encyclopedia's choice of video formats and how it fits into a fracas in the browser world.

Clutter, the free software tool-kit that makes it easier to develop compelling user-interfaces that use OpenGL / OpenGL ES, is now nearing its version 1.0 release. Emmanuele Bassi with the Intel Open-Source Technology Center has announced the release of Clutter 1.0 Release Candidate 3.

Java vs C++ benchmarking rarely if ever looks at the real issue w.r.t. performance, ability to perform well within multi-tasking. In this article, multiple benchmarks are run concurrently, exposing the overhead of Java which generally at least partially slips into the cracks of extra hardware capacity on single task benchmarks. And it explains why Java is thus not a good fit for large scale computing settings, like Hadoop.

When Amazon deleted content from Kindle Readers last week without warning or permission, they released a firestorm of criticism. Although they backed down, the same day it showed the power the proprietary format has over Kindle owners and crystallized the need for open eBook standards.

In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.

Audacious is a free, lightweight advanced audio player based on GTK2 which runs on Linux and many other *nix platforms and is focused on audio quality and supporting a wide range of audio codecs. Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope comes with Audacious 1.5.1 while version 2.1.0 is already available for download so if you really like Audacious, I bet you can't wait to upgrade.

Remuco is a duplex remote control system for Linux media players and mobile devices equipped with Bluetooth or WiFi.

"In Windows they are used for a long time already, but most Linux-users probably don't even know that their system supports them too. Access Control Lists (ACLs) extend the regular permissions we all know with the possibility to give permissions for specific users/groups."

A shell is a program that acts as an intermediary between the user and the Linux kernel. The shell receives commands from the user through typed words and passes them into the kernel for processing. The kernel has the ability to communicate with hardware and gather resources like files and memory. The most common shell is bash.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.0 (released on June 30, 2009) on a headless Ubuntu 9.04 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

Micro-blogging is all the rage these days. ?It is a webservice which allows the subscriber to send short text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user.

Though you can now enable Flash on Google Chrome for Mac, the Linux still doesn't have support. However, if you're willing to run Chromium instead of the official Google build, you're in luck. Using a current version of Chromium from Launchpad, adding Flash to the speedy browser is a breeze. H3g3m0n posted a tutorial on how to enable Flash in Chromium but that post is outdated and some more tweaking needs to be done for this to work:

After a few month's of using Kubuntu Jaunty as our primary desktop environment, I've written a report on some of its shortcomings. Hopefully, this can be used as constructive feedback on what to improve on in the future.