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The nonprofit LinuxFund.org is providing financial support for Gnash, the Flash alternative, to accelerate development of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

Jeremy Allison's contributions to the free software world are legion, and yet the project he's best known for continues to be Samba, the open implementation of some of Microsoft's most important networking protocols. Linux Format magazine asked him about KDE, NAS, LSB, DCs and other acronyms, and now his answers are here for your TLA titillation…

According to Wikipedia, a dojo is "a Japanese term which literally means "place of the Tao". Initially, dojo were adjunct to temples. The term can refer to a formal training place for any of the Japanese do arts but typically it is considered the formal gathering place for students of any martial arts style to conduct training, examinations and...", oh wait! Wrong dojo. Dojo, in this context, is a JavaScript toolkit, somewhat similar to jQuery, Mochikit, and Prototype. I previously reviewed a book largely oriented towards jQuery and was favorably impressed. How will the Pragmatic book on Dojo compare in presenting Dojo, especially in terms of being a teacher?

Originally begun to investigate the possibility of extending the useful life of legacy IT equipment, the Linux Terminal Server Project is now a comprehensive collection of tools for running driveless thin clients with a Linux server. Certainly in its current version 5, if not before, it has blossomed into an useful – and free – terminal/server solution.

Red Hat on Monday is giving away 5,000 JBoss Developer Studio subscriptions to Java developers in six territories in the Asia-Pacific region. The program will run in China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Hong Kong, targeted at independent Java developers and those from small and midsize businesses (SMBs), said the open source vendor, in an e-mailed response to ZDNet Asia.

If you've ever wondered whether there is a SCO case for open standards, many people would say that the answer is "yes." And the stand in for SCO that they would pick is a company called Rambus incorporated.

HP said last week that it will offer Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop to business and education customers. Suse's desktop software will be carried on the HP Compaq dc5850. The desktop will be available in the United States from 15 December, for US$519. A spokeperson for HP said that the OS is only being pre-loaded in the US and "there are no current plans to introduce this in the Unite Kingdom".

All WordPress site owners have their own list of "must have" plugins. Is one or more of these administration and security add-ons among yours? Each adds valuable functions to WordPress, and is simple to configure and use.

A series of punctuation marks used to convey a wink in text messages - known as an emoticon - has been trademarked in Russia, says a local businessman. Entrepreneur Oleg Teterin said the trademark for the ;-) emoticon was granted to him by Russia's federal patent agency.

In this interview we talk with Warren. In specific, we talk about: The origins of SimplyMEPIS, Ubuntu’s role in the larger community, differences among distros from a developer perspective, corporate use of free versus for-fee Linux, the Linux desktop and the future of client-side Linux and future directions of note: IPv6 and DNSSEC

Web frontend for changing your Unix or Linux user password

LXer Feature: 14-Dec-2008

Hello everyone, It seems that in the search to bring the infections under control, the USB drive ban I told you about last week has been expanded to the entire military now. AbiWord 2.6.5 just hit the streets and it boasts better compatibility with Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer and Amarok 2.0 with a host of cool new stuff was released earlier in the week as well.

On the kernel page a few weeks ago, we took a look at KSM, a technique to reduce memory usage by sharing identical pages. Currently proposed for inclusion in the mainline kernel, KSM implements a potentially useful—but not particularly new—mechanism. Unfortunately, before it can be examined on its technical merits, it may run afoul of what is essentially a political problem: software patents. The basic idea behind KSM is to find memory pages that have the same contents, then arrange for one copy to be shared amongst the various users. The kernel does some of this already for things like shared libraries, but there are numerous ways for identical pages to get created that the kernel does not know about directly, thus cannot coalesce. Examples include initialized memory (at startup or in caches) from multiple copies of the same program and virtualized guests that are running the same operating system and application programs.

You want a phone that can do it all? Internet, music, photos, films, documents, texting, instant messaging, diary, contacts and ... err ... phone calls? Then a smartphone is right for you. But as the market for high-end mobiles gets ever more crowded, which should you pick? The global market leader, Symbian, makes the software that runs most of Nokia's smart phones (and a few others).

There seemed to have been little buzz generated by this announcement when it first came about, but Tungsten Graphics has been acquired by VMware. They were acquired in late November for undisclosed terms and their only news mention of this acquisition is below (from their website).

Please sign this petition to help Adam Williamson get his job at Mandriva back, and to give me a reason to go back on my words that I will stop using and recommending Mandriva products.

MystOnline, also known as UruLive, a massively multi-player online (MMO) game, is to be released as open source by Cyan Worlds. MystOnline has had a difficult time, originally launched and then shut down by Ubisoft before leaving three years of beta, then being purchased by GameTap, released in fourteen countries and, after a year, again shut down. This led Cyan Worlds to come to an agreement to reclaim their intellectual property and to announce a plan to relaunch the game.

For a brief moment in time, between October 2007 and April 2008, thanks to the Asus Eee PC it really did seem as if desktop Linux was finally going to have its moment in the sun. Unfortunately for the Linux crowd, however, Asus, Acer and other hardware makers realised they could sell many more netbooks if they did deals with those nasty folks in Redmond.

Viet Nam has officially become a member of Asianux, an organisation dedicated to the development of free software, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Quoc Thang has announced. He was speaking at a recent symposium on open source software (OSS) in Ha Noi, organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other agencies related to the IT sector.

Put the computer down and come out with your hands up ;)