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The purpose of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is probably obvious from its name -- but what does promoting free software mean in terms of everyday activity? Examining the roles of the organization shows how complex the FSF's advocacy role has become. It also reveals the range of services available to the free software community, and helps to explain how such a small group has had such a major influence on computer technology. As a 501(c)3 charity in the United States, the FSF is run by a board of directors. The current board includes FSF founder and president Richard M. Stallman and long-term member Henry Poole, but, in the last few years, new faces have appeared on the board.

This tutorial describes how to install and run KDE4 applications natively on Windows. Windows 2000, XP, and Vista are supported. KOffice, Kopete, Amarok, Ktorrent, Konquerror, KDevelop, K3b, Kmail, Dolphin are only some of them.

What's that super-bright star in the western sky after sunset? Was the moon full last night? Is Mars visible now? What time will the sun set on Saturday? Do you ever look up at the sky and wonder about it? Your Linux desktop has lots of astronomy programs that can help you explore the night sky. This article will start with the one that's easiest to use: KStars. KStars is a nifty "planetarium program" that's probably available through your Linux distro. Don't let the "K" scare you off -- kstars works fine even if you're not running KDE.

An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA), aka e-mail reader is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail.

Intel is pushing forward with its Moblin mobile Internet and Linux project, focused on mobile and automotive Internet devices based on Atom processors. Its latest move is acquiring OpenedHand, which provides software development and consulting services, in addition to maintaining several ongoing projects focused on mobile and embedded Linux. OpenedHand's team maintains and contributes development efforts to the Matchbox window manager (on Nokia's devices), the Pimlico suite of PIM applications, Poky (an embedded Linux distro), and more. In essence, Intel gets a distributed set of open source applications and Moblin development resources in picking up OpenedHand.

Does Cisco's Buyout of PostPath signal a showdown against Microsoft Exchange? The VAR Guy doubts it. Here's why.

Intercepting Internet traffic and spying on the communication between two computers is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they've built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot. The software, for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they're trying to visit is authentic.

This month saw the release of LyX 1.6 release candidate 1. Occupying a position somewhere between a word processor and a mark-up editor, LyX is designed to meet the needs of professional and academic writers by allowing them to focus on their content rather than formatting and layout. It achieves this by eschewing some of the WYSIWYG conventions of a word processor. We've covered LyX in the past, so this time we'll focus on the enhancements that the 1.6 release brings with it.

At Akademy 2008, KDE Release Team members Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Müller discussed the future of KDE's development process. Describing the challenges KDE faces and proposing some solutions, they spawned a lot of discussion. Read on for a summary of what has been said and done around this topic at Akademy.

In general, once the FreeNAS server is configured and running, it doesn't really need much attention, it should just work. However, there are lots of different features which can be configured. In this article by Gary Sims, we will see how user management is done in FreeNAS.

Last week I discussed the SliTaz Linux distro and the use of QEMU to launch a virtual machine on Windows in which SliTaz or pretty much any other operating system can run. As always, your feedback didn't disappoint. Reader Art Gibbens wrote, "Thanx so much for the tip on QEMU. I also stuffed both a Knoppix and PCLinuxOS [ISO files] in the folder (separately - of course) and they both came to life. I had to tweak screen resolution in Knoppix and the login doesn't work in PCLinux, which I would think could both be rectified. Keep up the good work!"

There's a lot of buzz right now about Ubiquity: Mozilla's attempt to explore command-based interaction within Firefox. Users of other command-oriented interfaces like QuickSilver or Enso, will feel right at home with Ubiquity: you activate it within your browser with a simple key combination, and then start typing. Depending on what you type, stuff happens.

Java training and education has never been easy. Not only are the language and its third-party and community offerings constantly moving targets, each developer has his or her own preferences, plug-ins inventory and habits. What's more, the"book knowledge" gained in many course settings can vary wildly from what happens in the"real world" of communities and teams.

For online retailers cranky about a controversial new law in New York requiring them to collect sales tax on purchases shipped to that state, Newegg has an solution: don't do it.

This article shows how to run a file- and print-server for small and medium enterprises (SME) on one single Ubuntu 8.04 server. It is very easy to set up, and management is done with an easy-to-use web interface called eBox so once the system is set up, you can forget about the command line. eBox was developed to administrate advanced services for corporate networks.

Twitter is a social networking platform that keeps you in conversation by allowing you and your friends to follow each others' updates. The service lets users post and read 140-character updates, called tweets. With Twitter, you can do social networking on the fly, from your mobile phone or at your desktop, from a Web browser or a Twitter client. Twitter clients make the service more usuable by automatically checking for updates from your friends and allowing you to easily post your own updates. I tested four Twitter clients for Linux on a desktop running Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Why sell somebody else's product line when you can do a better job offering your own? That was the question that ultimately pushed Jan Hichert, CEO of Astaro, and two other cofounders to develop their own Internet security solutions for a market they viewed as needy of attention -- the small- to medium-sized business segment.

The Green Party has called for an overhaul of patent laws that would prevent software being patented. The party's policy on information technology was released by MP Metiria Turei. Ms Turei, who called for greater use of open source and locally developed software, says excluding software from patents would ensure others could develop ideas. Software would still be protected against piracy by copyright law.

Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is a follow up (and the finishing touch, I hope ;) to a whole slew of scripts we've written to mine the knowledge on tap at reference.com. If you missed any of the others, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to access the online Thesaurus and, of course, the online dictionary. This time we're breaking the chains and losing the albatross by finally attacking (with some level of precision) the Online Encyclopedia and producing a shell script does it as much justice as we could muster.

Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors.