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According to the ruling, the patents granted for business practices would have to undergo specific and stringent testing procedures to check the worthiness of granting a patent to it. Essentially, they are aiming to mandate a passing of “machine-or-transformation test” as a pre-requisite for granting a patent.

Packt’s annual Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award reached its climax today with the announcement that Drupal has won the Overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000. Three months after it was launched and a staggering 20,000 votes later, Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke to retain the Award it won in 2007.

The computer manufacturer Dell has announced a further recall of potentially dangerous notebook batteries. The recall of the Sony built batteries began in 2006.

The Ubuntu Linux project has just released a major update to its highly popular Linux OS. Ubuntu Version 8.10 boasts a 2.6.27 Linux kernel, GNOME 2.24 desktop environment, and X.Org 7.4. Although I've been a staunch KDE advocate over the years, this slick new release is strongly tempting me to convert to Ubuntu!

LinuxPlanet Classics: "No," the technician explained, "Linux is probably causing this problem and it needs to come off the machine." Michael Hall's classic battle with Dell tech support was first published in July 2001. Has anything really changed?

About 30 years ago, we Earthlings sent a probe to check out Mercury, the tiny planet closest to the sun, and concluded that it was just a big hot rock. But after poking around on the moon and Mars for a few decades, we decided to take another look at Mercury.

Support for transparent decompression of files on optical media has been part of the Linux kernel since version 2.4.14. Here's how you can take advantage of this support when you burn your own optical media by using the mkzftree tool and the -z option to genisoimage. These commands compress files using zlib, which uses the same algorithm as gzip. Using the transparent compression Rock Ridge extension can allow you to fit much more data onto a DVD.

The Bash shell is famous for having more great features and shortcuts than we can ever learn. Juliet Kemp shares some shortcuts to speed up common tasks.

If you want to keep tabs on your deadlines, you don't need a fancy project management application -- often, a simple spreadsheet can do the job. To see how, let's create a spreadsheet that tracks task deadlines, shows the current status of each task, and highlights scheduling conflicts. In the process we'll learn a few useful Calc techniques.

News emerged recently that Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) were working on their first IDE for Qt, code named Project Greenhouse. Today saw the release of the first technical preview under the name Qt Creator. The initial release is binary only, and under the terms of the Qt preview license, but the final release will be released with source code under a GPL compatible license. The initial release is available for Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Read on for a users review.

Intrepid Ibex, the codename for Ubuntu 8.10, has today finally reached the pinnacle, without hesitation. Although the new version of the popular Linux distribution hasn't won any new altitude records, it still brings along a number of interesting features to make life easier for users and administrators. High among these features are some rejuvenated programs.

Sun Microsystems came in just under the wire with its Solaris 10 10/08 update, squeezing it out on the last day of the month. The company had intended to do the launch a few days ago, but pushed it out to the other side of its Q1 financial results. The 10/08 update is not a major release, something that Sun has not put into the field since Solaris 10 came out in January 2005. Now that the OpenSolaris development edition of Sun's Unix is out, after a few releases of this development code, Sun is expected to take an OpenSolaris snapshot and take it inside the corporate firewall and harden it and test the living daylights out of it to make what Sun calls "Solaris Next."

To load Ubuntu Intrepid Server PV DomU via serial console "pvops" kernel and ramdisk usually gets copied to Xen 3.3 Dom0. Parameters specifying root file system at image device and hvc0 console are also supposed to be included into startup profile at Dom0. At the same time all mentioned parameters may be specified via new entry into /boot/grub/menu.lst located at DomU, been placed into corresponding entry kernel line of grub configuration file at DomU. File /etc/event.d/tty1 at DomU should be also modified to work for xen console instead of vfb. All written above is not CentOS 5.2 specific, because pygrub comes to the system with Xen 3.3 port , no matter is it Debian or Gentoo

After 2 years of operation, FSFE's Shane Couglan has built a network of 145 experts, organised Europe's first conference on free software legal issues, helped enforce the GPL, and published docs

In 2002, when Ron Huber Jr. and Chris Fuller joined Achieve Internet, a fledgling startup Huber's father launched a few years earlier to build Web sites, the pair was confident their previous business experience would be an asset in understanding other firms' needs and goals.

Today the new Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) has been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 8.04 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 8.10.

In the early days of desktop virtualization, there were few low-priced alternatives to VMware Workstation that didn't involve a steep learning curve. Even the freely available VirtualBox didn't affect Workstation's market domination and instead faced competition from the newly rebranded VMware GSX server, which was offered for free as VMware Server. Despite being an entry-level server virtualization product, many people used VMware Server on the desktop. Taking that into consideration, you have to look at the recently released VMware Server 2, from two angles -- as an entry-level server virtualization platform and as an alternative to desktop virtualization products like VirtualBox. With its performance and other improvements, it does enough to keep existing customers happy, but probably not enough to get others to switch.

Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix). This tutorial will explain how to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) released on the 30th of October 2008.By default Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will not offer a upgrade to 8.10. This is because the 8.04 LTS version is a long term support release and 8.10 is a regular release. Upgrades from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 are fully supported, of course, and easy to enable.

Earlier this week we published benchmarks of all Ubuntu releases from 7.04 to the release candidate and had found the performance degraded with time, at least with the test system we used. As part of our testing to explore this issue, we had repeated many of the same tests on Fedora with all of their releases going back to Fedora 7. Has Fedora's desktop performance degraded too?

Curiosity about computing’s future can be found in its past: The mighty Mainframe (MF) lives again.