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The European Research Council will provide an additional 2.5 million euros to fund development of the Minix 3 operating system for a further five years. The funding will bankroll the workPDF of three academics and two developers. The UNIX-like operating system, which emphasises stability and reliability, is the brain child of computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum says that there are fundamental flaws in the design of all current computer systems and that radical change is needed in future designs to achieve necessary levels of stability and security. His goal is to create a system capable of repairing itself in the event of failure.

The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the second released of the G:Noblin. The G:Noblin 3.0.rc01 (2.9.90) is Released.

The game has all the elements you've already encountered in other RTS titles: resource gathering, upgradable buildings, workers, warriors and an enemy to eradicate from a map of your choice. What makes Globulation 2 particularly interesting is the way you'll have to make some sort of order in the total chaos of your units.

When you have to pay people to do your open source development, even development that is in their interest to have done, you are naturally going to take a proprietary attitude toward what results. You may indeed wonder what the excitement of open source is all about - is it just taking your work for nothing? It's not, but Microsoft has never gone far enough down the open source incline to know any different and I wonder if it ever will.

The Android is about to take the leap from the cell phone to the netbook, and much like the first Android-powered cell phone, the first iteration is a bit of head-shaker.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The second and final day of the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop was held in San Francisco, California on April 7. Conflicting commitments kept your editor from attending the entire event, but he was able to participate in sessions on solid-state device support, storage topology information, and more.

Zimbra, the open source email provider owned by Yahoo, plans to launch a formalized partner program in the next few weeks or so. More than 700 partners already sell or host Zimbra’s software, which is marching toward 50 million paid customers, The VAR Guy hears. But that’s no all. Here’s where Zimbra is heading next in the channel.

The first thing that strikes you about Eschalon is the music. It's soothing, calm, makes you feel comfortable while playing. And play you will. Alot. This is not the kind of game you can finish in a week then move on to another turn-based game. You'll give up your social life, you'll start arguing with your girlfriend about going to sleep late and in a few more day you'll be calculating everything in turns. I swear to God I was seeing tiles on the street by the third week.

Less than one week after Canonical debuted Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix edition, System76 is playing an encure by launching an Ubuntu 9.04 netbook. The move had been rumored for several weeks. And it’s certainly the first of many Ubuntu netbooks that will hit the market. Here’s the scoop.

LXer Feature: 27-Apr-2009

The biggest story of the week was by far the purchase of Sun, not by IBM but Oracle, which has many FOSS proponents worried about the Open Source projects that Sun is an integral part of. I agree with SJVN's take on it and it explains why Oracle had "Dr DBA" himself appear on stage at the MySQL annual conference only days later.

Michael Silver, an analyst at Gartner Inc., echoed Cherry's take on what motivated Microsoft to offer XPM. "It shows the extent to [which] Microsoft wants to get people who use XP onto Windows 7," he said.

But Silver sees some big downsides. "You'll have to support two versions of Windows," he said. "Each needs to be secured, antivirused, firewalled and patched. Businesses don't want to support two instances of Windows on each machine. If a company has 10,000 PCs, that's 20,000 instances of Windows."

The other big problem Silver foresees with XPM is that it may cause some companies to neglect the real task: making sure the software they run is compatible with Windows 7. "This is a great Band-Aid, but companies need to heal their applications," Silver said. "They'll be doing themselves a disservice if, because of XPM, they're not making sure that all their apps support Windows 7."

The Asterisk industry seems to be answering a loud, global call for open source IP PBX training. While Digium has started planning for the annual AstriCon conference, solutions providers and training centers are striving to educate the masses about the open source IP PBX. Here's how Asterisk training is evolving.

With Oracle ready to annex Sun Microsystems, there may finally exist a true, full and global counterweight to IBM's hegemony. Who else loses? Microsoft, SAP and Cisco -- and maybe even Amazon. If HP plays along and aligns with Sun and Oracle, together they could create a full-service IT powerhouse.

The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.

Maybe it is just in my mind, but some new Linux Distributors cannot redact good license terms for their works. Even some of them have written license too narrow (in excess from my point of view) that they look like the one of an infamous Proprietary OS...

Last fall, T-Mobile became the first wireless provider to offer a handset based on Google's Android platform: the T-Mobile G1. And the world rejoiced. Now, some six months after that debut, Samsung has jumped in the game with its own Android offering.

If you run a business, finding an efficient system for managing invoices is critical for sustaining a positive cash flow. Here’s how you can create an easy invoicing solution using OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc.

The Tiny Core developers have announced the release of version 1.4 of their minimal Linux distribution. Tiny Core is only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. Version 1.4 now includes Tiny Core Virtual Disk (TCVD) support and an updated watcher, which now supports the no swap option.

Today Eric Geier shows us how Zeroshell makes it easy to set up your own wireless access point with the strongest authentication and encryption, and nice user-management features so you can easily maintain control of who has access to your wireless network.