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Transferring data off TiVo devices to watch them on laptops or desktops has often required expensive proprietary tools. Here are reviews of three free, Open Source tools that allow you to do this.

Huge under-utilization of virtualized servers is caused by inefficiency in migrating VMs across servers, to accommodate load spikes. As a result, an immense amount of wasted power and resultant carbon footprint and other ecological side-effects are created. A new software technique overcomes this

Android, Ubuntu, LiMo and Moblin have been battling it out in the Open Source mobile Operating system space for Mobile phones and Netbooks. Now, Novell has teamed up with Intel to push Moblin, instead of a version of OpenSuSE.

Coreboot.org released an almost-final 0.90 version of open source BIOS flashing firmware it says was nine years in the making. Flashrom offers Linux and UNIX users a BIOS flashing mechanism they can call their own, with support for 150 flash-chip families and 75 chipsets, Coreboot.org says. By its very nature, BIOS firmware is operating system-independent, since it loads before a computer's OS in order to identify, test, and initialize the device's processor, memory, graphics card, and peripherals. But, updating a BIOS to incorporate bug fixes and other improvements requires booting a computer into an operating system, then using the latter to run BIOS flashing software.

The release two weeks ago of WINE 1.1.20 brought some cleaner Direct3D code, but there really was not much to get overly excited about. The release of WINE 1.1.21, however, is different. With the release today of WINE 1.1.21, work is now underway in supporting Shader Model 4.0 in this open-source project atop Linux and other operating systems. Shader Model 4.0 is the shader language that is used by version 10 of Direct3D.

The saga of SCO v. Linux, known variously as SCO v. Novell, SCO v. IBM, SCO v. Everybody and their Mother, may be coming to a close. Yes, we know this comes as a shock — if anyone needs a moment to compose themselves, or, you know, dig out a case of Dom, we'll wait — but it may well happen faster than any of us ever expected.

Last month the US Election Technology Council (a trade association of US voting system manufacturers) released a white paper on open source and voting systems titled "Open Source - Understanding its application in the voting industry". The report came to the conclusion that the use of open source software for democratic elections is probably a bad thing - although the reasons given were less than convincing.

The night of May 7 a petition against Internet censorship hit the magic number of 50,000 signatures required for consideration by the Bundestag, the lower house of the German Parliament.

MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), the efficient, open industry standard for video encoding, has made huge strides to become the industry leader in all areas – it plays on mobiles and MP3 players, it's used by HDTV and Blu-ray Discs, and cameras and HD camcorders record in it. H.264, currently the most efficient video compression algorithm, is also, since Adobe integrated the codec into its Flash Player, used for web videos and now Microsoft is also adding H.264 to Silverlight 3. Nevertheless, there is one important snag with H.264 – from 2011, license fees will be required from sites streaming video using this technology.

Intel & Novell today announced broad efforts to closely collaborate & encourage OEMs & ODMs to adopt Moblin, an optimized open source Linux software platform for enabling rich Internet experiences on Intel Atom processor-based netbooks & other mobile systems.

Eucalyptus is an Open Source project that allows users to create and manage 'Private Clouds', and is API-compatible with Amazon's EC2. The founding professor, Rich Wokski, recently launched a company, backed by $5.5M in venture capital. Here's why he did so.

University of California, Berkeley, officials said Friday that hackers infiltrated restricted computer databases, putting at risk health and other personal information on 160,000 students, alumni and others. The university said data include Social Security numbers, birth dates, health insurance information and some medical records dating back to 1999. Personal medical records — such as patient diagnoses, treatments and therapies — were not compromised, officials said. The databases also included personal information of parents, spouses and Mills College students who used or were eligible for Berkeley's health services.

Version 9.04 of the multi-platform XBMC Media Center is released. Codenamed Babylon, the software comes with massive and in part, impressive changes.

My choice has fallen on the Eclipse IDE, I know there are many good perl editors out there and I don't have any knowledge about which is the best choice for what job. I do know the choice of editor is very personal and there are even people who use vi as a Perl IDE. My main reason for using Eclipse is because I've read about it on a forum and many people seemed to like it (and it's free). It seems to be a bit of overkill to write my very simple pieces of code in a full fledged IDE and I know it has some downsides too.

"Using MinGW it may be possible to develop software in Linux that can also run on Windows and, as it might likely be cross-platform, receive more attention than a program that is purely Windows, thus be of higher quality and in the end possibly contribute to users switching away from Windows."

Zimory's Linux-powered "cloud" services offers both great flexibility and frugality-- you pay only for what you use, and there are no long-term commitments or penalties. Paul Ferrill examines this vendor of "Cloud computing for the masses."

PC users who want to have an Ubuntu machine without eighty-sixing Windows completely often configure their systems to run both -- though a reboot is sometimes required. Not so with Portable Ubuntu. The app starts up an instance of Hardy Heron within Windows on demand. Though its window frames and menu bars appear the same as those of the user's Windows setup, it's Ubuntu through and through.

South Africa's newest GNU/Linux distribution, Kongoni, yesterday released its first alpha release for the upcoming 1.12.2 release. Kongoni - the Shona word for Gnu - is a desktop-focused distribution with significant inspiration from BSD-Unix systems. Codenamed Sophocles, Kongoni 1.12.1 is based on Slackware 12.2 with the latest upstream patches and also features KDE 4.2.2 as well as the latest stable releases of most common desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org.

The first release candidate for Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” has been released along with a great selection of useful new features. I decided to download the highly anticipated Linux Mint 7 release candidate and put the much talked about features to the test. I was so impressed I decided to display some of the new Linux Mint 7 features in these 10 simple how to videos.

I thought I'd finally gotten the ol' Linux thing figured out. I liked having a desktop chock full of bells and whistles and visual effects and nautilus-integrated apps. Once I had a taste of that Openbox magic, though, I couldn't get away.