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VMware is offering a free (LGPL-licensed) client for use with its VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) thin client technology. The VMware View Open Client lets users access personalized, data center-hosted desktops from "almost any" device, VMWare claims. VMware will continue to offer its commercially licensed View Client stack for Linux and Windows. The commercial stack adds features like USB redirection, multiple desktop sessions, and multimedia redirection.

Everyblock, which sorts police reports, public records, and news by address, is going open source and looking for a business model. The site is headlined by Adrian Holovaty (right), best-known for Django and the Chicago Crime Google Maps mashup. It was funded in 2007 by a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant.

The recent out-of-band emergency patch for Internet Explorer has many pundits recommending any browser but IE as the best security defense. Although there is some safety in using less frequently attacked software, a better question is which is the safest choice among the most popular browsers? What are the most important security features to look for in a browser, and what are the weaknesses to beware?

If you were to break into my network, getting to the contents of the right computer would be easy. I facilitate digital burglars by naming my computers according to what they actually are; my main desktop machine carries the label "Desktop", my Aspire One is imaginatively named "One", and this trend continues down to "PowerMac G4", "Ultra 5", and "T2". I always found giving computers real names was a tad bit wacky, but as it turns out, it can actually be very useful to give your servers and computers whimsical but meaningful names.

There are some among the FOSS community who pay lip service to Mahatma Gandhi when talking about this genre of software. There are others who actually put Gandhi's methods into practice to spread the message. Four young men from the south Indian state of Kerala recently followed the example of the Mahatma - who undertook a famous march in 1930 against the tax on salt, to defy the British colonial rulers of India - and walked from one end of the state to the other , meeting people along the way, to spread the message of free software.

Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and is the first major update to the browser in over 5 years. And now web developers and end users of Linux can use IE 7 on their favorite operating system. IE 7 should also run on BSD systems with Wine 1.1.4 installed.

There are several layers at which a GNU/Linux system’s appearance can be customized. By far the most visible, especially on a multi-user machine, is the login manager screen. KDM (the KDE desktop manager) has a highly-flexible and easy-to-use XML-based theme system. If you can draw what you want, you can make it happen with a KDM theme. I’ll talk you through the construction of one simple theme I designed for my ASUS Eee PC. Read Terry Hancock's tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

Reports from several web sites are stating that the next version of the Sidekick from Danger, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, will run NetBSD. According to the reports, the Sidekick LX 2009 will run a custom version of the open source operating system, NetBSD, instead of, as expected by some observers, a modified version of Windows CE with an customised front end.

At the end of last year I wrote about a big Brazilian project to provide 150,000 GNU/Linux notebooks for schools. Now the Brazilian Ministry of Education has topped that by ordering 324,000 "green" workstations running on GNU/Linux (although I can't quite tell whether this is as well as or instead of - anyone know?).

I've had the good fortune to speak with Zend co-founder and PHP superstar Andi Gutmans several dozen times over the last few years. Though he co-founded Zend, Gutmans has long been its CTO with others taking on the role of CEO. That changes now as Gutmans was named today as the new CEO of Zend.

It has been two years since the last official release of Zope and now version 3.4.0 of the web application framework has been released. The Zope development team says that now that 3.4 is out the door, it is renewing its commitment to a short and reliable release cycle of six months.

The graphical user interface is a separate layer on top of a plain-text console subsystem on Linux, Mac, and Windows; this is not unique to Linux, and you need console skills to be an effective troubleshooter-and-fixer on all three platforms. A. Lizard shows you what to do when your graphical environment fails on Linux: as long as your system boots to the console, you can fix anything.

Using Linux may not make you smart but if you're already using it, you may be smarter than average. Linux may never gain widespread success, that we, the Linux fans want it to, because it's just too complex for the average computer user. Sure, we now have KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and other fancy graphical user interfaces that attempt to mimic Windows and the Mac OS but underneath the shimmering polish, it's Unix and that scares people. I'm not so sure that this is a bad thing.

[I could not disagree with his sentiments more. - Scott]

The new version 5.0 of the Google Earth exploratory 3D software provides excursions into ocean depths, to Mars and into the past. The official release will also include a Linux variant.

In late 2008 we witnessed the release of Compiz++, a rewrite of the Compiz core in C++ plus other invasive work in order to improve this compositing window manager. With Compiz++ being a branch of Compiz and various other developers working on their own branches, the future of Compiz was unclear, however, today it has been cleared up some.

Dr. Heather Leslie is listed as the "Director of Clinical Modeling " at Ocean Informatics in Australia. But I like to call her the "archetype guru" She has posted an announcement on the openehr-clinical mailing list regarding the launch of the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM). It is a pathway to get all members of healthcare involved in developing and vetting archetypes for use in openEHR based applications. Though the email was part of a thread; I will post it in it's entirety and then give a reference to the thread itself so the readers can view the entire context if they wish.

Asus is taking pre-orders for a new netbook that runs on the combined Atom N280/GN40 chipset.

Just over a month ago we shared that patches had emerged to support Intel's VA-API in MPlayer and FFmpeg. VA-API supports popular video formats such as MPEG-4 and VC-1 and is able to accelerate IDCT, Motion Compensation, LVC, bit-stream processing, and other functions, but this video API has not picked up much speed yet. The only display driver to have implemented support for VA-API in the hardware is Intel's closed-source driver (the one that's a bloody mess) for the Poulsbo chipset, which is found in a few select netbooks/nettops. However, it is now possible to use Intel's VA-API with NVIDIA hardware (the GeForce 8 series and later) and soon will be possible to use this video API on ATI/AMD hardware too.

There are 3 valuable tools that you can use from your desktop to review DNS settings; host, nslookup and dig. By using these tools effectively, you will be able to analyze your DNS settings to find problems. This tutorial will show you how to use each of these valuable tools.

Two veterans from Microsoft's Business Division have joined the management of Openbravo, the Spanish ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and PoS (Point of Sale) specialist. Jesper Balser, co-founder and CEO of Navision, which Microsoft acquired in 2002, has joined the Openbravo Board of Directors.