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You know a science story is big when an experiment gets first or second billing on the main evening news—and it’s not even a slow news day. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is up and running as I write and as far as I can tell I’m still here, so it looks like the doomsayers were a little premature. Unless I’m writing this piece from the far side of the singularity of a black hole in a parallel universe. The LHC is an huge experiment (a snip at $10 billion) to explore the very small and very energetic sub-atomic world to verify, amongst other things, if the Higgs Boson really exists. That will be a monumental triumph for science and the human spirit. I have always been fascinated by particle physics, despite by academic background in the Humanities and I will be following the progress at CERN with great interest. I am particularly pleased too because free software will be at the heart of this colossal human endeavour. GNU/Linux has been, is and will continue to power CERN’s efforts. This is a wonderful opportunity to tell the world that Windows doesn’t rule the roost. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

Linux is a very strong platform for budding artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.

Recently, I collected some data from Sourceforge, hoping to find evidence for the importance of copyleft. But I found something surprising: although there’s plenty of evidence that many developers believe in the power of copyleft, the one measure I could derive of how much copyleft actually works showed that copyleft made no difference whatsoever! If true, this means a lot of free software’s social theory is wrong and many things will have to be re-thought. Terry Hancock at Freesoftware Magazine has a left-field take on copyleft. It's not all it seems apparently. Read the full article at FSM

Richard Stallman wants to popularise the term GNU/Linux instead of using the currently popular term Linux. He correctly states that the term Linux, besides being thoroughly inaccurate, totally fails to introduce new users to the legal and philosophical concepts that underlie the basis of the GNU/Linux OS; but is it feasible to make such a change at this late stage? Some weeks ago, trolling through prospective articles for Free Software Daily, I encountered a blog, describing the evolution of “Linux”. It was aimed at Newbies. The blog correctly described Linus Torvalds as the creator of the Linux kernel and a few more recent developments, but that was it. No mention was made that Richard Stallman actually created much of what is now called “Linux”, no mention of the GPL, or how it works, no mention of the copyleft legal concept and no mention of other responsibilities placed on users and developers. All of Richard Stallman’s worst fears confirmed in one blog. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

In his screencast, Douglas Napoleone programs a simple music database by using the Python Django framework. In its now available second version, Napoleone demonstrates how it works in the roughly two hours of the video.

Firefox is the most popular browser on Linux, being the browser of choice for over 70% of the Linux users. I this article I explained 5 of the most useful and used tips in Firefox, together with screenshots where I considered necessary. Most of them are related with the about:config variables, but I also provided a graphical way of doing things where it was possible.

Distinct personalities in real and imagined worlds collided recently at the fourth annual Second Life convention in Tampa, Fla. That was only the beginning of the confusion for those outside Second Life, the virtual online community that is anything but confusing to those immersed in the virtual world.

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure project has long been working toward improved 3D graphics support in free operating systems. It is a crucial part of the desktop Linux experience, but, thus far, DRI development has been done in a relatively isolated manner. Development process changes which have the potential to make life better for Linux users are in the works, but, sometimes, that's not the only thing that matters. The DRI project makes its home at freedesktop.org. Among other things, the project maintains a set of git repositories representing various views of the current state of DRI development (and the direct rendering manager (DRM) work in particular). This much is not unusual; most Linux kernel subsystems have their own repository at this point. The DRM repository is different, though, in that it is not based on any Linux kernel tree; it is, instead, an entirely separate line of development.

This is the ninth article in a series on common usability and graphical user interface related terms. On the internet, and especially in forum discussions like we all have here on OSNews, it is almost certain that in any given discussion, someone will most likely bring up usability and GUI related terms - things like spatial memory, widgets, consistency, Fitts' Law, and more. The aim of this series is to explain these terms, learn something about their origins, and finally rate their importance in the field of usability and (graphical) user interface design. In part IX, we are going to talk about the menu.

This guide explains how you can install Drupal 6.4 on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. Drupal comes with an .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules (for Apache) that do not work on lighttpd. Without this .htaccess file it is not possible to have clean URLs in your Drupal installation. Fortunately there is a way to make lighttpd behave as if it could read the .htaccess file.

I have been talking about Ubuntu for a number of articles now and how easy it is to use. In this article I will look at the next two upcoming versions and investigate what they have to offer. Ubuntu, unlike other Operating Systems which could be mentioned, strive for a predictable release schedule. They have only missed it once in eight releases and then only by two months. A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months in April and October. The naming convention is associated with the year and the month that it is released. 8.04 was released in 2008 in the 4th month, April. The previous release was 7.10 in October 2007.

This article is very different from the others. Why? Just because it is not written on a paper but a video. It tries to show the user a simple short view at Fedora in a real example. From that look the user could decide if that operating system is for him/her or not.Fedora is brilliant GNU/Linux distribution but when the user tries something for the first time there are always some precautions and doubts about that thing. And if that thing does not satisfy the needs of the user then it would be immediately blamed and wiped out of the hard drive. The current article aims to save you that spent time and troubles. A simple look and just several minutes would be spent instead of hours in installation, configuration and searching of the right answers.

Today, I found a little RFC for you that isn't just funny (and an "official" April Fool's Day joke), but is actually real and can be found on the official IETF RFC Page. This RFC (RFC 3093) is a request for comments on the, then, newly proposed Firewall Enhancement Protocol, which basically suggests a way to completely bypass firewalls, without compromising them, by allowing the tunnelling of any and every protocol under the sun through simulated HTTP sessions, which (it argues) should be allowed to pass without question :)

Here is a top Microsoft executive admitting that Mono is a patent problem for GNU/Linux. We also discussed the effects on OpenOffice.org back in 2006. Microsoft admitted this again on several occasions later on (even in 2008 when Brian Goldfarb accidentally confessed).

A new application programming interface released this week gives development and test teams the ability to link their ground-based test systems with virtual operating systems accessed through a browser. It all comes from Skytap, which earlier this year released Virtual Lab, a Web-based infrastructure that provisions virtual hardware, software, networking and storage in which to run and test applications.

F-Spot video tutorials outlining how to import photos, change views, add tags, edit photos, and add extensions like .zip exporting.

So, as a little digression from our normal content, I felt like writing a list of the top 10 reasons to work on open-source software…but being a born Californian, I felt I had to pay a little respect to my roots. So here we have the top 10 reasons to work on open-source…as said by, like, a dude from Cali.

Back in August we shared some of what we are doing to drive new graphics benchmarks on Linux through the Phoronix Test Suite. With that, we showcased Lightsmark 2008, which was ported to Linux for integration with the Phoronix Test Suite, and Unigine Sanctuary. Unigine Sanctuary showcased the latest work from Unigine Corp, which is a Russian development studio focused on creating cross-platform middleware for virtual 3D worlds. The Unigine Sanctuary demo was stunning, but introduced with the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 "Malvik" release last week was their latest technology benchmark. Unigine Tropics is an absolutely stunning test with impressive graphics capabilities and it really sets a new precedence for Linux graphics capabilities through its OpenGL renderer.

With KVM Virtualisation now under their banner, Red Hat is ready to take on the other company that owns virtualisation as well as operating system technology, Microsoft. Last week, for US$107 million, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, owners of the KVM Virtualisation product. The coupling of the Linux producer with virtualisation software positions Red Hat to move into the lead as a supplier of an enterprise level virtualisation solution.

"Speaking from China, Tux the penguin says "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" as the media continues to report that Lenovo is slaying the kernel mascot with the relish of a Canadians near a seal pup. iTWire digs a little deeper to reveal just WTF is really happening with Lenovo and Linux..."