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Back in September we reviewed the Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 graphics card that offered 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Overall, this RV730-based graphics card had performed well under Linux and not a bad investment with it retailing for about $80 USD. Sapphire Technology though has now introduced a new version of the Radeon HD 4670 that sports 512MB of GDDR4 memory. Will switching out the GDDR3 for GDDR4 memory have much of an overall impact on this graphics card? We have the results in this article.

Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, the myriad of licenses available can sometimes confuse and disorient the user, sometimes making this first step much harder than it should be. Let’s try and make things clearer.

Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island's battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony. The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on "technological sovereignty" and is central to the Cuban government's desire to replace the Microsoft software running most of the island's computers.

In the past I was trying many different linux distros. Each has its own package management systems: debian has apt, mandrake has urpmi, yellowdog has an apt front-end for rpm, suse has yast... While they all are quite similar and not difficult to use, I found that I often made mistakes because I often forgot which system I was using and the exact commands on that system. Another issue is that I wish I could keep track how I installed/removed those packages. So I wrote a simple wrapper for various package management systems.

Pagico is a cross-platform organizer that supports Windows, Mac and Ubuntu. This is its second beta release for Ubuntu systems, re-enabling many important features that were hidden in its first beta release.

In the previous part of the article, we learned how to create a basic dialog, work with dialog's properties and callbacks, and add buttons to the dialog.

In this final part of the article we will learn how to enable animations for the dialog and how to control the dialog programmatically.

Students and teachers in select German schools can access personalized virtual desktops from home or school, using Kreisbildstelle Stade's currently piloting "Desque" system. The desktops run in a Hamburg datacenter, on quad-core Xeon servers, and are delivered over "standard" broadband using open source NX compression.

In reading through "Top 10 Responses to Why I Should Use Linux? A Linux Evangelists' Reference," I couldn't help but think that Linux needs better evangelists for its desktop crusade.

Open source software development in Russia is one of the most important directives for Igor Schegolev, the head of the ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation. On February 5, 2009 Igor Schegolev, the head of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation, met with Werner Knoblich, Red Hat vice president for EMEA at the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation, and other industry leaders.

Access China and NEC Electronics are developing a "price sensitive" smartphone reference design incorporating the "new" Mini version of the Access Linux Platform (ALP) mobile stack. The touch- and 3G-enabled design will use NEC's ARM9-based MP201 system-on-chip (SoC), and a future design may use NEC's new ARM11-based Emma Mobile 1.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I like desktop Linux. I admit though that Linux is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with proprietary media formats. These formats are designed to lock users into a particular video or audio player and those programs seldom come in a Linux version. There are answers though to this problem and that's one of the reasons why I like the Linux Mint distribution. It makes listening to proprietary audio and viewing restricted video as easy as it's ever going to get on Linux.

OpenBI, an open source solutions provider, has deployed Pentaho's business intelligence software in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for a manufacturing customer. It's a sign of big things to come for open source and SaaS.

SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, is returning to Los Angeles February 20th through 22nd. I have had the opportunity to attend the first event and a few more including SCALE 6x. I will once again attend this year and will finally be able to attend the Friday sessions.

Just when you thought it was safe to stow your stuff and go... Today's post is the third volume in our series on covert file storage. If you're interested in reading up on the 57th installment of this series, please feel free to click the link that's way behind the anchor text right here ;) Today, we're going to be looking at the tip discussed in volume 57, but with respect, specifically, to the ZFS filesystem. The meaning of those initials is included in the hyperlink, again, preceding the sentence that should land you at your anchor text.

There are two schools of thought about netbooks. The first is that they are simply another kind of notebook - smaller, a bit cheaper, but otherwise nothing really new. The second is that they are a completely new market sector - a view that I have been propounding for almost as long as they've existed

Archos, the French manufacturer of multimedia tablets, has announcedPDF plans for a portable media device that will run Googles open source Android operating system. The Archos Internet Media Tablet (IMT) is to be a multimedia player with Smartphone capabilities.

The next few months should see three supported and modular versions of Red Hat's JBoss application server rolled out, scaling from web to full enterprise-class scenarios. Red Hat's vice president of middleware Craig Muzilla told The Reg three profiles of the JBoss Application Server 5.0 would be delivered in the "next few quarters."

EMMA Facilitates Interaction Through Keyboard, Mouse, Voice, Speech, Touch, Gesture

As part of ensuring the Web is available to all people on any device, W3C published a new standard today to enable interactions beyond the familiar keyboard and mouse. EMMA, the Extensible MultiModal Annotation specification, promotes the development of rich Web applications that can be adapted to more input modes (such as handwriting, natural language, and gestures) and output modes (such as synthesized speech) at lower cost.

Apple and Psystar have been locked in a legal battle for some time now, but it appears that, if Psystar wins, the consequences could be quite large and broad.

LXer Feature: 11-Feb-2009

This weekend, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future.

Here is the blow-by-blow of the first day with talks about Mozilla's future, the role of Debian, two OSI talks, Reverse engineering and much, much more.