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We are pleased to announce the 10th Anniversary Linux Symposium will be held from July 23 ~ 26, 2008 in Ottawa, Canada. The Symposium will also feature multiple keynote presentations, in depth tutorials, birds of a feather sessions, papers on the most current topics in Linux and Open Source, mini summits open to related Linux and Open Source projects to be held in the day(s) before the Symposium and speakers from outside the industry who will share their experiences with Linux and Open Source and its impact.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Supporters of the open access movement (OA), the open-source-inspired community that promotes free access to academic research, are disappointed but not discouraged by the defeat of a bill that would have required research published by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States to be available to the public. Instead, they see the bill as an important step in raising awareness about OA among American legislators and the general public. Nor do they rule out the eventual passage of the OA provisions.

Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming. Work on the new Linux theme has progressed rapidly in the past month, and the earliest pieces are now included in the latest Firefox 3 nightly build. We took a good long look at the new theme—called Gnomestripe—and we like what we see.

There are three well-known open source clients for managing PostgreSQL databases: psql, pgAdmin, and phpPgAdmin. If you use Postgres in a collaborative team, however, you should get to know phpPgAdmin, which is expressly designed for such environments. It lets users and administrators create user accounts, databases, tables, sequences, functions, and triggers. PhpPgAdmin is a Web-based application written in PHP that can manage one or more PostgreSQL databases. It is 100% compatible with PostgreSQL. It performs all the standard Data Definition Language (DDL) and Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements. It can back up and restore an entire cluster, and can manage a Slony replication cluster, all in an easy-to-understand interface.

Do you ever get tired of listening to gamers who insist that all the best games are for consoles or Windows, so why bother with GNU/Linux? Do you have colleagues who maintain that GNU/Linux is suitable only for serious work, and that games are frivolous and unimportant? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people go on about how expensive games are to produce, and how they just couldn’t possibly work under a GNU license. My two favorite genres of computer game are graphical adventure games (GAGs) and computer role-playing games (CRPGs). For this article, I’ve chosen to focus on free software CRPGs currently available for GNU/Linux.

Linux has already permanently changed the enterprise desktop landscape, and is set to grow further, according to a new report from Forrester Research. The report, How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System, published this week, predicted that the days of ever more strict standardisation on the Windows platform are effectively over. Linux will only become a stronger force in the enterprise, according to Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray.

Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. The project marks the first application that Sun has put under the GPLv3. Rich Green, executive vice president for software at Sun, told vnunet.com that the licence was a "first step", suggesting that the company could pick GPLv3 for other projects in the future.

Last week I wrote about transparency as an open source value. Today, in the second of this informal series, I want to discuss the value called consensus. Consensus is an essential open source value, and a value which distinguishes open source from the proprietary models which came before it. Every successful open source project I know operates through consensus. Orders aren’t given, instructions are worked out. Raised voices, fists hammered on tables, these lead to code forks, and to volunteers abandoning a project. Successful open source entrepreneurs do their work through consensus. They listen to the people under them, and they seek shared responsibility. The best will say “we” did what works but “I” take the blame for what goes wrong.

In the 2007 Desktop Linux Survey, VirtualBox ranked number 3, after Wine and VMware. As for me, I used VirtualBox OSE almost exclusively when taking screenshots for my reviews. It's fast and easy to use! In this mini how-to, I will also show you some interesting screenshots.

The Krita donation drive has succeeded beyond the expectations of the Krita developers. Donations from all over the world made it possible to buy two Intuos graphics tablets and two art pens for the Krita developers to test their software with. The Krita developers are very grateful to the community for making this possible. The Intuos tablets and art pens make it possible to develop brushes and tools that make use of advanced features such as tilt and rotation for Krita 2.0.

Red Hat plans to begin a private beta test of new open-source messaging software next month, hoping to shake up a section of the server market currently dominated by proprietary rivals and give the Linux seller a new revenue source.

The Free Software Foundation has confirmed that Xming developer, Colin Harrison, has overreached his limits by attempting to impose additional restrictions beyond the requirements of the GNU GPL and LGPL.

In response to one of my Everex articles, commenter Alan Rochester clued me in to the Canada-based Linux store, which is offering a somewhat similar $199 PC preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10.

DivX, Inc. today announced it has acquired MainConcept AG, a leading provider of H.264 and other high-quality video technologies for the broadcast, film, consumer electronics and computer software markets. The acquisition is a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $22 million with additional payments of up to approximately $6 million upon the achievement by MainConcept of certain product development goals and certain financial milestones during 2008.

Today I am looking at the new release of StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5.0.1. This OS is a RedHat clone based on it's source packages. Images will guide you through the install process.

The first edition of this book got very good reviews and usually that means that unless something is drastically different about the second edition or it didn't keep up with the technology, it'll be a success, too. It's been seven years since the first edition came out which is reason enough to publish this updated title. This book comes off as cool in a couple of ways right off the bat. First of all, it's vendor-neutral...

Right after Halloween, Wal-Mart introduced Everex's Ubuntu Linux-powered TC2502 gPC for a list price of $198. Two weeks later, they're sold out. Everex tells DesktopLinux that more will be coming though. Wal-Mart only bought an initial run of approximately 10,000 units. For once, Wal-Mart's vaunted supply chain management system failed to predict just how popular an item would be. Wal-Mart offers a similar Everex model with more base memory and Windows Vista Home Basic called the Everex Impact GC3502 Desktop, for $100 more. Wal-Mart still has plenty of those.

This time last year, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network launched at OpenWorld to much fanfare. It was supposed to be a Red Hat killer. It has had as much impact upon Red Hat has a dead sheep. Larry Ellison says this is going to change. During his OpenWorld keynote this year, the Oracle CEO said the company means business next year. Oracle VM server virtualization, launched this week, will "differentiate ourselves from Red Hat", he proclaimed. And "going into the second year we will have sales with support and engineering, and we will grow faster."

Back on September 6th of this year AMD shocked the open-source community by committing to the development of a new open-source display driver (this driver is now known as RadeonHD) and that they would be providing specifications to the development community. A week later, they set precedence by not only releasing the documentation to the developers but to the everyone! Their first batch of documentation covered the basics for the RV630 and M56 GPUs and was released freely to the public without any Non-Disclosure Agreement! However, they still have much more GPU documentation that has yet to be released. Some simply believe AMD is doing this as a publicity stunt, but today we have new details to share as they prepare for their next GPU documentation release.