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This obviously isn't a new question for us here at Techdirt. It's been a point of logical frustration for consumers that content producers often seem to want their output treated like property when it suits them, but as a service or license when it does not. This leads to, at the very least, the appearance of double-dipping on the part of content producers. For gamers, where used games are such an intregal part of the marketplace, the frustration often boils over. In my estimation, it's quite difficult to draw up a logical proof for limiting the rights to a product for the consumer while strengthening the rights for the producer. Such an arrangement is simply too one-sided in who is giving up whose rights.

The best Gnome 3 experience on BSD can be found where you'd least expect it. It is no secret that I am becoming quite fond of PC-BSD: it is stabilizing nicely and offers a feature-rich BSD at one end and an amazing selection of window managers at the other. One thing it's missing however is Gnome 3. Love it or hate it, Gnome 3 is boldly exploring "modern" desktop territory with the Gnome Shell which aggressively provides both elegant eye candy and swift navigation. Surprisingly, the best place to experience Gnome 3 on BSD is perhaps where you would least expect it: OpenBSD

I’m testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn’t do an install, though I’m certainly thinking about it. In this release’s GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications — all from GNOME proper — like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the “global” menu that pops down from the app’s icon in the upper panel. While not catastrophic, it is problematic.

The Cave is a new adventure game from Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert, and Double Fine Productions, the award-winning studio behind Psychonauts and Brütal Legend. The Linux release has been delayed for a week.

A wireless shutter trigger for a DSLR camera can come in handy in many situations. And if you already own an Android device, you don’t have to splurge on a dedicated remote trigger.

Matthew Garrett has written a new article summarizing the state of UEFI/SecureBoot on Linux. Overall, the situation isn't good if you're using hardware from one of three major vendors...

Bonding allows you to aggregate multiple ports, providing redundancy, fault tolerance and load balancing. There are various types of bonding available but i will show how to bond in mode 1 which is active-backup. If your interested in the other available types please refer to the documentation. In this setup i have two connections to different switches in case one fails the other takes over and services are not disrupted.

In December 2012, a number of vulnerabilities in MySQL and its clones were revealed. Two of the issues were dealt with by the MariaDB developers almost immediately, while others were left outstanding. Now, MariaDB developers have released updates which address the other issues.

PCLinuxOS KDE and KDE-MiniME 2013.02 are now available for download. These are 32-bit quarterly update ISO images which can also be installed on 64-bit computers. With respect to the previous KDE editions these ISO images have the following changes and additions: KDE 4.9.5, Linux kernel 3.2.1; latest full set of NVIDIA drivers; Konsole with additional root profile. KDE 2013.02 has all the additions from MiniME above and was built to provide a general purpose KDE desktop computing environment. The DVD includes popular tools for office, audio, video, graphics, and Internet applications (LibreOffice, GIMP, Skype, TeamViewer, Dropbox, VirtualBox, etc.), as well as additional drivers and tools to set up your hardware.

This is the second post in my series on developing GUI applications in Elementary using Python. Today we are going to continue building on the Hello Elementary example I started in the first tutorial.

Microsoft is once again trying to show it will play nice with open source by adding support to Git in the next TFS update

I’ve been quiet for a while, so it’s time to give an update about what’s happening with the Linux Foundation secure boot loader (Especially as this has recently been presented at LCA2013 [slides]).

Despite overwhelmingly warm feedback from pretty much everyone to my first review of Bodhi Linux almost two years ago, which pretty much sealed the deal, I decided to give it another shot. My label as an idiot, so to speak, notwithstanding, Bodhi has changed quite a bit since version 0.15. Now at increment 2.2, it continues its mission as a minimalist distribution based on Ubuntu.

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2013

SprezzOS 1 has emerged for general use. I'll explain here the motivations of the SprezzOS Project, how we're unlike other new distros of note, and why you ought watch us for Linux's most exciting developments.

Some Samsung laptops with UEFI will brick when you try to install Linux on them, others have problems, and the Linux Foundation is continuing to try to bring its fix for Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot out.

Matthew Garrett has written a new article summarizing the state of UEFI/SecureBoot on Linux. Overall, the situation isn't good if you're using hardware from one of three major vendors.

On Thursday morning, Linus Torvalds merged two changes into the main Linux development tree which mean that the samsung-laptop kernel driver will no longer be activated when Linux is booted via UEFI (1, 2). This should resolve the problem of some Samsung laptops being irreparably damaged when Linux is booted using UEFI. The does not, however, mean that the danger is past, as there appear to be other ways in which the sensitive firmware can be disrupted.

This week we look at cloud detractor's three levels of insanity, whether Chromebooks are ready for the enterprise and if the new open source smartphone operating systems on the way can be viable.

Whether or not desktop 3D printing is the forerunner of the "third industrial revolution," as Jeremy Rifkin and Chris Anderson have suggested, it's definitely one of the hottest tech trends around. Open source DIY hacker engineers, artists, and craft designers have led the surge on the low end while higher-end models are already being used in rapid prototyping and short-run, custom manufacturing.

EncFS provides an encrypted filesystem in user-space. It runs without any special permissions and uses the FUSE library and Linux kernel module to provide the filesystem interface. It is a pass-through filesystem, not an encrypted block device, which means it is created on top of an existing filesystem. This tutorial shows how you can use EncFS on Fedora 18 to encrypt your data.