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After nine months, an open secret can finally be acknowledged: The OpenGL code that is responsible for 3-D acceleration on GNU/Linux, which was released by SGI in 1999, has been running on licenses that were accepted by neither the Free Software Foundation (FSF) nor the Open Source Initiative. Today, however, the FSF has announced that the licenses in question, the SGI Free License B and the GLX Public License, have been rewritten after months of negotiation between the FSF and SGI. The problem is now resolved, and the result is a code contribution that the FSF ranks as one of the greatest given to the community by a proprietary company.

After two years in development, VLC, the universal media player, has moved from the 0.8.x versions to version 0.9.2. The release, named "Grishenko", is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other operating systems, is available to download from the Videolan web site. The most visible new feature in the Windows and Linux versions is a new user interface. The new interface uses Qt4, replacing the previous wxWidgets-based interface as the default interface and allowing for better internationalisation and a richer set of graphical controls.

Since the Power Macintosh G4/466 has enough space for four hard drives, I decided to put a second one in the box. I set the second drive's jumpers to make it a "slave." Then I used an extra IDE cable as an "extension cable" so I could plug the second IDE input from the too-short motherboard cable into the second drive. I booted into Debian Etch, ran the GNOME Partition Editor to create an ext3 filesystem on the backup drive, then mounted it and did a few tests with rsync.

The Open Prosthetics Project (OPP) has applied the"open source" model-long used in developing "community-based" software to the design of inexpensive prosthetic hands and arms that a small demand can still support. The designs are free for anyone to use. A community of engineers, designers and innovators is collaborating online to make better prosthetic hands and arms for amputees. One of the lead engineers lost his own arm in Iraq.

Networking giant Cisco Systems said Friday that will acquire instant-messaging software maker Jabber. Terms of the pending deal were not disclosed. Denver-based Jabber makes an open source instant-messaging software that supports an assortment of devices across a business' IT network.

Digital media files are more useful and accessible when tagged with metadata -- that is, descriptive information about each photo that either can be embedded inside images themselves or stored in external databases. ExifTool is an efficient, flexible, and portable way to manage image, audio, and video metadata under Linux. In this article we'll see how to use ExifTool to manage EXIF data inside JPEG files.

T-Mobile USA has been beefing up its nascent 3G mobile wireless services network, announcing that 3G will be ready to run in 21 markets by the middle of next month and will reach 27 major markets by the end of this year. The company says the planned expansion will deliver T-Mobile 3G services to more than two-thirds of the company's current data customers -- but T-Mobile will continue to expand throughout 2009.

Paul Ferrill takes a look at the new, more powerful Asus EeePC 1000 from ZaReason, customized with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Do a beefier CPU, more RAM, and goodies like a Webcam, Bluetooth,and a larger solid-state hard disk play well with Ubuntu?

You know that traditional desktop computing is a dying technology but is VDI really the answer? Is it the long-term answer? The answer is no.

IT organizations that feel safe from open-source licensing violations might be wise to check their code anyway, because open-source components are rapidly seeping into applications by way of offshore and in-house developers taking shortcuts, as well as a growing population of open-source-savvy grads entering the workforce. "With all of these new aspects, open source is something companies are going to have to get their heads around," says Anthony Armenta, vice president of engineering at Wyse Technology Inc., a maker of thin clients.

Symbian has told the world that as open source operating systems go, Linux is unfit for mobile phones. "There’s been a lot of misleading information over the years...about the fitness of Linux for the mobile space," Jerry Panagrossi, vp of Symbian's North American operations, told industry insiders this morning at the GigaOM:Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 was a feature known as BulletProofX, which provides a fail-safe mode that is by default used when the X server fails to properly initialize. In this original implementation, it would default back to using the VESA display driver with 256 colors and then proceed to run the displayconfig-gtk utility. While this is nice for the end-user as it keeps them from touching a terminal to debug an X server problem, for experienced users it inhibits them from easily debugging the problem. This Canonical implementation also had frustrated other users. However, with the forthcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release, it has received some much-needed improvements while making BulletProofX more simple.

The next version of VMware's flagship virtualization management software, VirtualCenter Server, will work with Linux and the iPhone, the company's chief technology officer has announced. The VMware VirtualCenter Server update will run on Linux and will be supplied as a virtual appliance, which is a ready-to-run virtual machine that has been preconfigured with all the necessary software, Stephen Herrod said in a keynote speech at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.

The is a clear pattern to open source's continuing rise. The first free software that was deployed was at the bottom of the enterprise software stack: GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND. Later, databases and middleware layers were added in the form of popular programs like MySQL and Jboss. More recently, there have been an increasing number of applications serving the top of the software stack, addressing sectors like enterprise content management, customer relationship management, business intelligence and, most recently, data warehousing.

Have you ever wanted to ssh to your Linux box that sits behind NAT? Now you can with reverse SSH tunneling. This document will show you step by step how to set up reverse SSH tunneling. The reverse SSH tunneling should work fine with Unix like systems.

55,000 Sugar/GNU/Linux XO machines are being shipped every month to kids all over the world. This is a generation getting ready to break the bonds of digital dependencies and building a commons for themselves on free and open source software and open content and standards. In the meantime, Microsoft announced a pilot study to run Windows XP on these very machines.

Dirac is a video codec data compression technique first developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that is under Mozilla Public License Version 1.1.

You may not know this, but Albert Einstein wore an editor's hat at Encyclopedia Britannica, as did George Bernard Shaw and more than 80 Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. But it's that other encyclopedia, the online one, where vandals and anonymous editors allegedly run rampant, that's been getting all the attention lately.

The Hanlin eReader V3 from Tianjin Jinke Electronics out of China claims to provide a month of use between battery charges. By then 10,000 pages of reading should have been possible – provided you have the requisite time and patience.

Thin clients reduce hardware costs, offer added security by stripping away storage options, and ease management tasks by storing all configurations on a centralized server. Citrix provides a good solution and is a dominant player in this arena with Citrix Presentation server, but that comes at a price -- about $1,000 for five concurrent connections and about $200 to $300 for each additional concurrent client connection. However, taking the thin client route does not have to be that expensive: openThinClient is an open source thin client server that is absolutely free.