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The path to the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems is nearly clear. On Thursday, during a special meeting at the companies headquarters in Santa Clara, California, Sun shareholders approved Oracle's offer. The only remaining obstacle to the planned takeover of the server, Unix and Java specialist is approval from the US Department of Justice.

Mozilla updated Firefox to version 3.5.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Thursday, fixing a security problem, improving stability, and speeding launch time on some Windows systems, according to the release notes.

Going from Windows to Linux need not be done all at once. You don't need to throw yourself into the deep end of the pool in order to learn how to swim. For those with a Microsoft habit they want to kick but don't want to go cold turkey, here are some ways to ease into Linux without giving up Windows -- well, not immediately, anyway.

Btrfs, the designated "next generation file system" for Linux, offers a range of features that are not available in other Linux file systems – and it's nearly ready for production use.

Open source project Amarok, in an open letter to Palm, has invited the company to work with them. The reason: the Apple iTunes 8.2.1 update guarantees that the Linux-based Palm Pre smartphone can no longer use the iTunes music management software.

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).

Spotify is a free and legal service which gives you access to millions of songs. They achieve this by licensing the tracks from record companies in a similar way to radio stations, and they pay for it with advertising. When I first heard about it, like many others I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I also discovered there was no Linux version, so I pretty much gave up on it. That was until recently, when a friend was extoling it’s virtues to me so enthusiastically that I decided it warranted a second look. It turns out it’s pretty easy to install and configure with WINE on most Linux distributions. So I wanted to share with you how I did it, in the hope it might prove useful to others.

It has been a while since we last had any major to report on VIA with their open-source efforts, but this morning they have finally published DRM code that supports their Chrome 9 IGP hardware. The announcement regarding this new Chrome 9 DRM was made on the dri-devel list and was made up of three patches.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.1 to fix the recently reported security vulnerability in the Just-in-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler, an exploit for the Windows version of which is already doing the rounds. Attackers can exploit the vulnerability to inject and execute code on vulnerable systems. Since JIT is a new feature that only appeared in Firefox 3.5, prior versions do not contain the vulnerability. Users who had previously deactivated JIT as a work around can now safely re-activate it, after installing the update.

mod_qos gives some fine-grained opportunities to scale the number of used connections and to defend an attack according to bandwidth limits. Unfortunately it is only available as source-package and there are many possible settings, wich might be hard to set up for this special case. So I provide the way that helped me.

For some, Redmond's decision to apply its "Community Promise" to C# and CLI came as a great relief. For others, caution was the watchword. Then there were those who were downright suspicious: "We do not respect promises of drug dealers and pedophiles; we should not accept the promise of a habitual offender of anti-competition law to restrain its evil tendencies," said blogger Robert Pogson.

Development distributions play a crucial role in the free software ecosystem. They are the proving ground where much new software is first exposed to a wider user community; they are also the place where this software demonstrates how well it plays with other packages. Distributors would like to see wider testing of their development releases, but, as your editor's recent experience shows, there are limits to how wide this testing community can be expected to be.

Although Dell didn't have much to say about Google's Chrome OS announcement last week, the PC maker is apparently looking closely at it. But for Dell--which was not listed as one of the PC makers working with Google on Chrome OS--it is just one of a number of Linux-based operating systems it is evaluating.

Like many people who aren’t able to get DSL, I use mobile broadband. Typically, at least in Ireland and the UK, you are forced to purchase a modem with your contract. What if you want other devices in your house to use this broadband and you don’t want to fork out several hundred wing wangs for a mobile broadband router like the Novatel MiFi when you have a perfectly good modem and wireless router already? Read the full howto atFree Software Magazine.

In the deepest, blackest parts of us, bad things exist... Things that we cannot touch, but we see...in a momentary flicker of peripheral vision...in the dark room that takes its only light from the moon...shadows that move...that take shape.

Before using Pardus, I had read in the Pardus release announcement that Pardus had been “improved graphically in every part of the distribution”. It takes about 3 seconds to realize this as you put in the Pardus CD and immediately notice splash screens that have been updated from bootloader to login screen. The color/logo scheme carries on through the distro and provides a very pleasant experience. I also thought the KDE 4.2 desktop look and basic behavior was fantastic on Pardus.

With it being a while since we last compared many Linux distributions when it comes to their measurable desktop performance, we decided to run a new round of tests atop four of the most popular Linux distributions: OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. To see where these Linux distributions are at, we used their latest development releases and then performed all package updates as of 2009-07-15. Following that, we ran an arsenal of tests using the Phoronix Test Suite. Here are the results.

Hewlett-Packard Co., looking to take advantage of uncertainty surrounding the future of Sun products once it is acquired by Oracle, today unveiled a series of migration plans to entice Sparc users to switch to HP.

Bugs are a fact of life in the technology world, and the Open Source community is no exception. What is exceptional, however, is the open way these vulnerabilities are handled, as the developers behind Mozilla's Firefox browser have aptly demonstrated.

With all the recent heat generated about Mono and the C# language, it only seems appropriate to take a look at the issue from a programmer's perspective. David Siegel talks about how he came to choose C# for writing GNOME Do.