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Clean your glasses, tie up your ponytail, groom your Van Dyke, turn on your digital voice recorder and slip on your ninja suit* for a trip into geekdom through this crash course: Geekonomics 101.

Hardware manufacturer Toshiba has released a series of notebooks with pre-installed OpenSolaris 2008.11.

Putting Linux on mobile phones is all the rage these days, what with Google's Android popping up on prototypes left and right, and even the venerable Palm pushing the Pre, a penguin-phone of its own. That wasn't always true, though, but way back in those dark days of proprietary phoning — at least a little ways back — there was Openmoko bringing us hope of truly-open telephony.

While there are great open-source games like Nexuiz and XreaL, a title many Linux gamers have been waiting years for has been Unreal Tournament 3. Prior to the game launching, a Linux client was confirmed and that famed developer/porter Ryan Gordon was porting the UT3 engine.

Building software in most languages is a pain. Remember ant build.xml, maven2 pom files, and multi-level makefiles? Python has a simple solution for building modules, applications, and extensions called distutils. Disutils comes as part of the Python distribution so there are no other packages required.

The PHP architect and CEO with Zend Technologies, Andi Gutmans, about the future of the company and the scripting language.

The anti-Linux propaganda du jour, being dutifully parroted by "news" publications everywhere, is that Windows now owns 96% of the netbook market, and that Linux netbooks are returned four times more than windows netbooks. Both are untrue and have been debunked repeatedly. Yet they persist-- why?

Red Hat today announced a new open source effort called Teiid that is all about virtual Enterprise Information Integration (EII). The problem that it solves is one we're all familiar with -- data lives in multiple sources and environments and users don't always want to have to physically move/copy it to make use of it for data integration. The way Teiid is supposed to work is it focuses on data virtualization allowing real data access without having to move data

VirtualBox opens the opportunity to have easy-to-use virtualization built right in. It seems like a missed opportunity not to make installing a Windows VM seamless.

Imhad Sousou, director of Intel's Open Source Technology Centre, has said that Intel want to see a future version of Moblin boot within two seconds. This aim was one of the items he discussed at the Linux Collaboration Summit, in San Francisco. The recent Moblin 2 alpha has already shown a reasonably rapid boot process with most of the major components starting up within seconds, but Sousou says that Intel wants to build on this to bring the total start up time to two seconds, while retaining the full software stack.

Sharing lies at the heart of free software, and drives much of its incredible efficiency as a development methodology. It means that coders do not have to re-invent the wheel, but can borrow from pre-existing programs. Software patents, despite their name, are about locking down knowledge so that it cannot be shared without permission (and usually payment). But are there ever circumstances when software patents that require payment might be permitted by an open source licence? That's the question posed by a new licence that is being submitted to the Open Source Inititative (OSI) for review.

Linux Mint 6 "KDE" edition is released. This edition is based on Kubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. This KDE edition comes with a brand new "Software Manager", FTP support in mintUpload, proxy support and history of updates in mintUpdate, mint4win (a Linux Mint installer for Microsoft Windows), and a lot of other improvements.

The open source Asterisk VoIP PBX is now at its 1.6.x release -- it's a number that Asterisk is going to stay at for a long time. "Basically everything is now a candidate for a 1.6.x release," Fleming said. "We're much like the Linux kernel in that way, we see no reason why we will need an Asterisk 1.8."

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that Linux adoption is advancing two to three times faster than that of other platforms and that it will be boosted as companies consolidate their technical infrastructure during this economic downturn. Similar views were expressed by an IDC analyst who has recently authored a report which suggests that Linux will withstand the recession better than its competitors.

Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems have software built-in necessary for tracking and reporting usage statistics. Thankfully GNU/Linux doesn’t include such software. But, we also can’t see what kind of market share GNU/Linux holds. So, I want to share with everyone, a way to tell when GNU/Linux has entered the mainstream. It’s called “The Simpsons Test.” We’ve all probably seen the episode of The Simpsons “The Burns and the Bees” Here’s how it works...

Last week Nexuiz 2.5 was released and we said it raised the bar for open-source gaming as it already offered impressive graphics and this new release was greeted by various engine improvements, new models, and over 3,000 other changes. Well, Nexuiz is not the only open-source first person shooter striving for perfection even without the backing of a major game studio. A relatively unheard of game engine is XreaL, which has not had a stable release yet but its lead developer claims that it is definitely the most advanced open-source game engine.

Plugins are not mysterious elite geek things, but rather are scripts for automating tasks that you perform frequently. They can be very simple, for example flipping an image upside-down, or as complex as you like. Akkana Peck shows us how to create a simple GIMP plugin using Python.

Once we demonstrated a GNU/Linux live cd for him and showed him how he could run his "necessary" programs via Wine and VirtualBox, he was sold...and I mean on the spot. We used two 8 gig thumb drives to copy his music, pictures and documents then did a partition session and replaced his Windows Vista sytem with Mint Linux. After 29 minutes, I announced that his install was done and that we would now boot into his new Linux Operating System. His jaw dropped.

In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure MyDNS-NG and MyDNSConfig 3 on Debian Lenny. MyDNS-NG is a DNS server that uses a MySQL database as backend instead of configuration files like, for example, Bind or djbdns. MyDNSConfig is an easy to use web-based interface to MyDNS-NG. MyDNSConfig can create all types of DNS records that are available in MyDNS and adds features like user management and access privileges.

A vulnerability in the CIFS client in the Linux Kernel code makes it possible for a manipulated SMB server to cause users systems to crash or be compromised. The problem is caused by a buffer in the CIFSTCon function in fs/cifs/connect.c file being too small. This function is used when the server responds to a connection request for a resource, known as a Tree Connect. Overflowing the undersized buffer could allow code to be injected and executed. The bug only comes into play if the users system attempts to mount a resource on a manipulated server.