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Open source communities have always been my place to learn. read more

The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, had the pleasure of informing Softpedia today, March 25, about a new product that is set to be released sometime in the near feature, called LibreOffice Online, which aims to become a free alternative to Google Docs and Office 365.

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. Here are the five things for March 25th, 2015.

Xfwm4-Composite-Editor is a tool that enables easy access to various settings pertaining to the Xfce window manager in a graphical application with a simple interface.

Yes, you can open up your Dropbox account in a web browser and manage your files and folders. But that isn't nearly as efficient as having the ability to interact with Dropbox from within a file manager. Up until now, with ChromeOS, that wasn't possible. But thanks to developer Yoichiro Tanaka, Dropbox integration is here.

The New York Times IT team doesn't spend a lot of time debating the issue of open versus proprietary.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Black Lab Linux 6.5. With this release we continue to enhance and improve Black Lab Linux for public consumption. While the base is the same, the Open Distribution Release comes in 4 flavors. GNOME, MATE, XFCE and KDE.

SingleHop, which provides private cloud hosting, has added a disaster recovery service that it says delivers scalable, on-demand, cost-efficient data backup and recovery.

MuseScore is a free, open-source music notation and composition application built using Qt 5, with access to thousands of music sheets, an integrated sequencer to allow for immediate playback and many more features. Version 2.0 was released today, March 25, and it represents a milestone release in the development of MuseScore.

HAProxy(High Availability Proxy) is an open-source load-balancer which can load balance any TCP service. HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution that offers load-balancing, high-availability, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly well suited for very high traffic web sites and powers many of the world's most visited ones.

Human rights NGO Amnesty International, a movement of more than seven million people, released its Annual Report for 2014-15 at the end of February. This 500+ page print book is published simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, and translated into 12 other languages by local teams. It is composed of 160 detailed chapters written by regional experts on the human rights situation in most of the countries of the world. read more

I can’t recall the exact time I learned about open source software, but I can certainly narrow down the place. I quickly realized how transformative it could be. In 1996, I was sitting in the tech support department of a large ISP that provided hosting and connectivity to the Fortune 1000. Most of our servers ran Solaris, floppy disks arrived via snail mail, and we applied security updates manually adhering to a regime of updates and invoices prescribed by Sun Microsystems. It was a huge change from my university career of dumb terminals and mainframes.

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, more and more tech companies are providing their users with transparency reports that detail (to the extent they're allowed) government requests for user data. Amazon -- home to vast amounts of cloud storage -- isn't one of them.

After my project to control my Christmas Tree lights with my Raspberry Pi, what would be my next project? I eventually landed on tinkering with Pi Musicbox, a spin of Raspbian with Mopidy that allows users to play all sorts of streaming services—like Spotify, TuneIn, SoundCloud—and local sound files on a 'headless' Raspberry Pi. In this guide, I'll show a bit of the work I had to do to get Pi MusicBox working to my satisfaction as well as some of the issues I'm still dealing with. read more

Many Linux admins rely on a centralized remote monitoring system (e.g., Nagios or Cacti) to check the health of their network infrastructure. While centralized monitoring makes an admin's life easy when dealing with many hosts and devices, a dedicated monitoring box obviously becomes a single point of failure; if the monitoring box goes down or […]Continue reading... The post How to set up server monitoring system with Monit appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to monitor Linux servers with SNMP and Cacti How to install and configure Nagios on Linux How to configure Nagios for audio alerts and mobile notifications How to monitor and troubleshoot a Linux server using sysdig How to set up a cross-platform backup server on Linux with BackupPC

The GParted team is proud to announce a new stable release of GParted Live. This live image contains GParted 0.22.0 which now supports reading and writing file systems to disk devices without partition tables, in addition to supporting GPT partition names. Items of note include: based on the Debian's 'Sid' repository as of 2015-03-23; now uses systemd which is the new default system init on Debian; includes GParted 0.22.0: adds read and write support for unpartitioned whole disk devices; adds read and write support for GPT partition names. This release of GParted Live has been successfully tested on VirtualBox, VMware, BIOS, UEFI, and physical computers with AMD/ATI, NVIDIA, and Intel graphics.

Rethink Robotics’s one-armed, Linux- and ROS-based “Sawyer” manipulation robot is smaller, faster, stronger, and more precise than the earlier Baxter. When MIT spinoff Rethink Robotics announced the $25,000+ Baxter manipulation robot in 2012, it inspired a whole new category of small, relatively low-cost robots for light manufacturing and product assembly. The fixed, two-armed, “collaborative” robot […]

Activities are virtual desktops. They share a common panel and menu, but each has its own layout and selection of items on the desktop. In addition, each has its own virtual workspaces and wallpaper.

When it comes to picking a programming language to use when teaching people how to program, there are many, many options. Scratch is a good choice when teaching the basics because of its drag and drop building block method of programming. Python or Ruby are also good choices—both languages have a straight-forward syntax, are used in major real-world projects, and have excellent communities and supplemental projects built around them. Or there is Java, Objective-C, and C#, which are solid programming languages and marketable job skills. Honestly, they are all good choices, but when it comes to teaching programming in an academic setting, are they really the best way to go about doing it? read more

Patent trolls -- sometimes known more politely as "Non-Practising Entities" (NPEs) -- probably have few fans among Techdirt readers, but there are some who try to justify their activities. Here's how the argument usually goes: