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I’m a big fan of Free Culture and free open source web services too, licensed under the AGPL. I wrote about the creation of Libre.fm a little while back, and I think we could really use more of these truly “free” web services. So when I heard about a new AGPL social network for film fans, I was very happy. The site is called Filmaster and I was lucky enough to have a chat with Borys Musielak (the site’s creator) about how it all came to fruition.

As Canonical polishes Ubuntu to potentially support Google Android and Moblin v2, I’m both impressed and concerned. On the one hand, Canonical continues to change with the times — and in some cases, stay ahead of the times. On the other hand, Canonical runs the risk of repeating some major software mistakes IBM made in the 1990s. Here’s why.

Linux and open-source companies have made much about how the recession is creating opportunity at the expense of proprietary and licensed-based software as IT budgets are cut. For proprietary and license-charged, read Microsoft and Oracle.

Reader Mark Scott submitted this interesting variation on Linux OEM netbooks: this one is bundled with Symantec's Norton 360. No, it doesn't run on Linux.

Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache web server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.

Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released with hundreds of changes from the previous version, including a new architecture for suspend and resume that Linus Torvalds says switches the kernel to a "new world order." "Hopefully now done with the suspend/resume irq re-architecting, and have switched to a new world order," Torvalds announced to the Linux kernel mailing list. "Although I suspect lots of details will still change, of course." "I'm sure we've missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending. At the same time on the whole it looks pretty good. We've fixed a few regressions in the last few days, and there's always 2.6.30.x."

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects.

The release of Fedora 11 promises numerous new improvements. One such improvement is an updated and more efficient package manager. How does it compare to the previous release, version 10?

The error "Permissions on the password database may be too restrictive" sounds bad, but it's actually much worse if set carelessly.

So Asus decided to part way with Linux, the operating system that made the brand famous, to join forces with Microsoft. And they decided to make it in a very public way by stating a nice 'better with Windows campaign'. Well, sorry to disappoint you Asus, but this is turning into a Public relation disaster!

In the previous two installments of this series we learned how to create a simple, colorful screensaver in PythonGTK. Today Akkana Peck leads us into some key fundamental concepts of programming: objects, code re-use, and making our program respond to user input.

Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar has written in to report that he and his team at the Interactive Computing Lab in ENAC, Toulouse have been successful in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainlinue X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7), there is now multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions.

In its mission to bring to world+dog the joys of Hadoop - that open-source grid-computing platform based on Google arrogance - Cloudera has out-Amazoned Amazon. Today, the star-studded Hadoop startup told the world that its commercial stuffed-elephant distro can now be run on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in tandem with so-called Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage volumes. EBS volumes are mounted directly onto EC2 server instances.

I first reviewed the ASUS Eee PC 901 when I was getting frustrated with the Xandros Linux customized installation that it came pre-installed with. Within a couple of days, I immediately installed Easy Peasy over it and had a significantly better experience. And while Canonical was pushing their Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I recently decided to install the desktop release and have my netbook run the standard 9.04 release of the Ubuntu distribution. Below are the results to my experience.

In November of 2006, Microsoft rocked the Linux world by signing a landmark patent and interoperability agreement with Novell. According to the two partners, it's an agreement that today, two and half years later is still paying off, even during the current recession. Heystee said that in just the past six months, the two companies have signed more than 100 new customers, which is double the rate in the first two years of their relationship.

Abuse. Intimidation. And support. You can find all that and more on the Ubuntu Users mailing list. An official support channel, the mailing list is where new users are directed by Canonical for technical support and discussions about new features and ideas. But there are some key problems with the mailing list. In the past few months, I believe there have been unacceptable comments posted — directed at peoples’ race, gender, sexual orientation and nationality. There’s no moderation and no consequences to stop people from repeating their offenses.

A small but intense code sprint took place in Oslo last weekend. Peder Osevoll Midthjell, Sveinung Dalatun and Anders Sandven, who work on mobile broadband connections for Linux as their thesis project, met with Darío Freddi, Will Stephenson and Frederik Gladhorn of KDE. Knut Yrvin spent his weekend with us to make us feel comfortable at Qt Software.

The most impressive F11 Xen related features seem to be the nice Xen 3.4.1 build with python 2.6 coming as default with F11 and graphical installer behavior during pygrub based PV DomU installation phase. F11 is supposed to be installed without libvirt to avoid conflict during Xen 3.4.1 port to Fedora 11 instance.

User GwydionDd commented on my previous anti-Vista rant post: "My daughter’s PC had Windows XP on it and as a teenage girl she likes to use the PC as an extension of her personal life (facebook, skype IM, etc, etc) and also as her media centre for music and DVD’s as well as her photo booth. Just your avarage typical home user. … I had enough of wiping Windows and I installed Pardus 2008 on the PC, setup her WiFi … imported her music and photo collection and sorted out the DVD codecs... "

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.