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This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 12.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Please note that Ubuntu Studio 12.10 uses XFCE as the default desktop environment.

The move away from open source solutions by the German city of Freiburg didn't seem to add up. With some help from German friends I've dug into the report - and it is indeed suspect. We recently saw the news that the German city of Freiburg had decided to end its open source migration and instead switch to using Microsoft products again. The rationale provided seemed curious to me - after all, at the same time the German city of Munich announced total savings amounting to €10 million from its own successful and ongoing migration. What seemed odd was there was no account of how they changed course to make the migration succeed. Munich learned lessons from early challenges and updated its strategy in order to succeed. But not Freiburg.

Today, Mozilla and the Eyebeam Art + Technology Center are pleased to announce the recipients of the first-ever Open(Art) Fellowships. Together, these creative technologists will be exploring the frontier of art and the open web as part of our new Open(Art) program.

A full review of Ubuntu 12.10, including a gallery of images.

December 5, 2012. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the last in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.4 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.9.3 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

In this article I'll show you what's umask and how to use it to get the right permissions on your files. umask (user mask) is a command and a function in POSIX environments that sets the file mode creation mask of the current process which limits the permission modes for files and directories created by the process. A process may change the file mode creation mask with umask and the new value is inherited by child processes.

So here is the current list of games that are for sale, time to grab yourself a bargain. If I have missed any please let me know and I can add it to the list. I will try to keep updating the list over the holiday period.

Blackberry has been losing market share for years and there's really no good reason to believe that the release of Blackberry 10 is going change that.

Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint 14 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits — Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others — on which so many graphical applications already depend?

The most sophisticated virtual human brain so far has been reported in the current issue of Science. It is impressive.

LXer Feature: 05-Dec-2012

This is an important correction to "Linux Has Not Won, Microsoft is as Dangerous as Ever, Fie on Secure Boot" that explains correctly how the Platform Key works.

Vaadin, the company behind the GWT-based web framework of the same name, has published a report on the future of Google's Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based web framework that includes a Java-to-JavaScript compiler. Google had appeared to scale back its own GWT development efforts following its shift in focus towards Dart as an alternative to JavaScript and, earlier this year, had promised to create a more open development process. This resulted in the formation of a steering committee, which includes Google representatives as well as developers from Red Hat and Vaadin and which will be responsible for the future development of GWT.

Puppy Linux lead developer Barry Kauler has announced the release of Slacko Puppy 5.4. The Puppy Linux family sets out to create small, lightweight, live-CD versions of various Linux distributions. Slacko Puppy, as the name suggests, is built from Slackware, specifically the packages of Slackware 14, and is binary compatible with the venerable distribution. This gives users access to Slackware repositories in Slacko. The Slacko Puppy distribution is one of the more popular offshoots of the minimal Puppy Linux distribution, or as Kauler puts it: "one of our flagship puppies".

The Document Foundation announced a few minutes ago, December 5, that the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.6 open source office suite is now available for download for Linux, Mac and Windows platforms.

Let's say you're a big company in a competitive industry. One who innovates and succeeds by creating software. Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code. Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense. The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive. You’re an executive at this company. Creating the software was your idea. You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database. This tutorial is based on Ubuntu 12.10.

Continuing our series of posts concerning the Republican Study Committee report on the problems of the copyright system and how to fix them (which it quickly retracted under industry pressure), today we're going to explore the second "myth" that author Derek Khanna helped debunk: that "copyright is free market capitalism at work." We've already covered the first myth, about the purpose of copyright, as well as responded to various responses to the report by copyright maximalists.

MariaDB, the MySQL fork database management system, is throwing down the gauntlet to Oracle by forming a foundation to promote its alternative DBMS software.

It's out! Slacko is one of our flagship puppies, built with the latest Woof from Slackware 14.0 binary packages. It is all-puppy right through, with the advantage of binary compatibility with Slackware 14.0 and access to the Slackware package repositories. Changes: significant improvements in using the Aufs layered file system; improved automatic detection and configuration of analog and 3G modems; Samba printing issues resolved; the X.Org wizard has improved detection and configuration options.