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Nationwide unemployment may be heading toward double-digits in the U.S., but among the skills that are in highest demand are those of a Linux sysadmin. That's partly due to the effects of the recession -- more companies are willing to experiment with lower-cost open source alternatives to proprietary software. Still, the good news is qualified: Many of those jobs can be done anywhere on the planet.

The Mac is fairly widespread among musicians because tons of professional programs run on it. Apparently Ubuntu can completely replace the Mac, however, as in the following story.

The OpenOffice.org team has been experimenting with a new user interface for the suite of programs, and they've presented the first rough prototype of this new interface, more specifically for Impress. The general gist? It's Microsoft Office 2007's ribbon interface. The ribbon interface raised quite a number of eyebrows around the world, with many wondering whether it would be wise to ditch the old established garbled mess user interface of menus and toolbars in favour of something completely new. It was all additionally surprising as Microsoft generally isn't the company to change a winning team.

Ekiga, formerly known as GnomeMeeting, is a videophone program similar to Skype. It’s free, open source, and has so far worked better for me than Skype ever did. Today, we’ll cover how to use Ekiga to conference Linux and Windows clients together.

Ubuntu has introduced a new Patent Policy to help developers and rights holders deal with software patent issues. With the Private Support, Canonical hopes to improve its revenue.

Open source isn't just for Linux users, there are many excellent free open source applications available, ready to run, for Apple Mac OS X too. Part 1 of this 2 part feature takes a look at alternative browser, mail, messaging, productivity and image editing applications.

The Mind Mapping In Linux course has been designed to be a basic overview of Xmind and how to use it in different scenarios to increase productivity in your projects planning process. Xmind is a free, open source, applications available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. This Course is designed to allow a complete computer novice to use mind mapping for brainstorming and project planning without any cost at all. That's why we chose to use Ubuntu Linux as our operating system and the free software application, Xmind.

When people think about adopting an Open Source solution, the first factor that comes to mind is the price: it is usually cheaper than proprietary alternatives. What a lot of people fail to consider is that there are a lot of other advantages to Open Source that can be much more important than the price factor. Let's have a look at a few of them...

The whole time the dispute between the CentOS developers was in the news development moved forward and patches were released. CentOS was never a one man show. It was perhaps in danger of forking or a name change but it never really was anywhere near point of death.

A Chapter 11 trustee has been commissioned to take over the business affairs of the SCO Group, which is threatened by bankruptcy. The trustee will work to guide the company out of the impending bankruptcy according to Chapter 11 of US bankruptcy code, but can also send the company into liquidation according to Chapter 7 and auction individual company assets to the highest bidder. With this order, the Bankruptcy Court in Delaware has removed SCO's executive board.

recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for GNU/Linux that attemps to be easy to use, yet also effective at its primary task. It produces files using only open formats. These are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container. This tutorial shows how to install and use recordMyDesktop on Ubuntu 9.04.

Although some X.org drivers have been updated for X server 1.7, development work is running behind schedule. New drivers from AMD, Intel and Nvidia and new Linux versions mean a number of corrections and enhancements in the graphics system. 3D support for newer Radeon GPUs is now adequate for Compiz. DRBD should make it into the main Linux kernel development tree in 2.6.32.

The Android operating system is a step closer to being embedded in consumer electronics, after the company behind the Mips processor architecture open sourced the code for its Android port. Mips Technologies released the source code on Monday, two months after it first said it had ported Android to the 32-bit version of the Mips architecture. This architecture is used in set-top boxes, digital TV sets, home media players, internet telephony systems and mobile internet devices (MIDs), and is a rival to the Arm technology on which Android already runs.

In its latest 10-K report Microsoft admits what we already knew. Open source has run away with its lunch money. (Picture from MeallDubh.org, the blog of John McCreesh.) A whole bunch of companies are identified as villains. Springsource. Canonical. RedHat. Google. What Microsoft does not admit here is the truth. Look at that list of “competitors” again. Other than Google — which gets is money from ads — are any of them more than a a bug heading for the Microsoft windshield?

There's twelve days left until the release of X Server 1.7 and X.Org 7.5! Wait, there still is not even an X Server 1.7 Beta, which should have happened last month, so chances are slim to none on seeing a final release this month. The release schedule for X Server 1.7 / X.Org 7.5 has already slipped a few times, after it was supposed to be released back in April.

There is a persistent and annoying myth that nobody should have to bother with learning to use a computer competently, but rather should wait until that far-off day when computers are perfect and effortless, and even dead people can use them. Your editor has a bit of fun and shoots this down.

This tutorial has been written for both vi and vim. It starts with really basics, such as cursor navigation and ends with more advanced techniques like merging files. For every section of this tutorial there is a short video with hints to help you understand how vim / vi works. Even that I have divided this tutorial into parts from novice to the expert user, there is plenty more what vim can do to make your work with vim editor easier and more efficient. However completing this tutorial you will give sufficient knowledge about vim / vi and its features for your daily tasks.

Hi folks, I've stayed quiet in this discussion, though several folks have invoked my name and ascribed motivations to me that were a little upsetting. I'm not responding to that here, instead I'd like to focus on what we can achieve together, and how we can lead a very significant improvement in the health of the whole free software ecosystem. Apologies in advance if this mail is lengthy and not particularly witty!

KDE 4.3 was released just yesterday, and it comes with a lot of great new features and improvements, like the the new Plasma theme called Air, new Plasma widgets, several improvements to Dolphin, the default KDE4 file manager, improvements to the KDE games, and these are just a tiny part of all the improvements KDE4 introduced. The full announcement including reader's changelog can be found on the official KDE4 website, here.

Early registration closes on Aug. 15 for the Linux Foundation's inaugural LinuxCon event, scheduled for Sept. 21-23, 2009, in Portland, Oregon. LinuxCon intends to draw a mix of end-users, administrators, and top Linux developers, with speakers including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, and Greg Kroah-Hartman.