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In a recent post, I introduced an initiative, along with Dima Kassab, for teaching open source NoSQL databases. We collaborated to prepare course materials for three NoSQL databases to 22 students at the Informatics Department of SUNY Albany, and we made all those material available under a Creative Commons by Attribution License.

Red Hat has announced that they've initiated a new project to bootstrap Fedora on the ARMv8 64-bit low-power architecture...

Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. This edition looks at the latest E17 alpha, Bio-Linux 7, the first point update to Wayland 1.0, a MINIX 3 job opening, and WordPress's latest supported payment method.

Today I was in need to install 1 single package from the unstable release of Debian in a server installed with the stable release, so what’s the best way to get this done? For this example I’ll use the package drush because there are a lot of differences in the versions between the different release of Debian.

Frank let us know that Steam For Linux Beta is now open for another 5000 people!

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 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.

The Gdev open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time implementation is still being actively developed while PathScale's "PSCNV" fork of the Nouveau driver hasn't seen new commit activity in months...

It's that time when many of us begin to reflect on what we've accomplished over the past year. It's also a great time to think about how others have helped us finish those projects and achieve our goals. To help say "Thank You," the opensource.com team has added several new eCards to our resource section. We hope this is an easy way to thank your open source colleagues and friends—the ones that make this community so awesome.

Software patents have long been contentious things, but patents in other areas of science are also becoming frequent subjects of editorials and court cases, with biotech and genomics making it to the Supreme Court. Now, if an editorial in Nature is to be believed, nanotechnology is set to become the latest patent battleground.

Joshua Pearce is a professor at Michigan Technological University, and he very explicitly argues for taking an open-source and open-access approach to nanotechnology research. But he also goes well beyond that, calling for a patent moratorium and a gutting of the law that governs tech transfers from government-funded university research. At stake, he argues, is the growth of a field that could be generating trillions of dollars of economic activity within a few years.

Gnome Team awakens, coffee is smelled.

Bio-Linux 7 is a full-featured, powerful, configurable and easy-to-maintain bioinformatics workstation. Bio-Linux provides more than 500 bioinformatics programs on an Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS base. There is a graphical menu for bioinformatics programs, as well as easy access to the Bio-Linux bioinformatics documentation system and sample data useful for testing programs. Bio-Linux 7 adds many improvements over previous versions, including the Galaxy analysis environment. There are also various packages to handle new generation sequence data types. You can install Bio-Linux on your machine, either as the only operating system, or as part of a dual-boot setup which allows you to use your current system and Bio-Linux on the same hardware.

Earlier this month it was decided that GNOME 3.8 would get rid of the GNOME Shell Fallback mode used for running the desktop environment in a way similar to the GNOME 2 "classic" environment while also not requiring any 3D GPU/driver configuration. Earlier today there was basically a call for forking the GNOME Classic/Fallback code so it could live on, but now it's been announced that some of the user-interface/experience elements will be brought to the GNOME 3.x world in a manner that's more easy for users to optionally enable...

In Stallman's view, the idea that society might be able to eliminate "bad patents" while keeping good ones is a kind of Jedi mind trick. Offering patents as a reward for software development—a system where the prize is a right to shut down someone else—is fatally flawed.

Last week the council revealed it was contemplating the switch when it said that its hopes and expectations for OpenOffice in 2007 were not fulfilled. Continuing to use the outdated OpenOffice 3.2.1 in combination with Microsoft Office 2000 would lead to more aggravation and frustration on the part of employees and external parties as well as performance impairments, the council said.

The Linux Foundation's promised workaround that will allow Linux to boot on Windows 8 PCs has yet to clear Microsoft's code certification process, although the exact reason for the hold-up remains unclear. As The Reg reported previously, the Secure Boot feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) found on modern Windows 8 PCs will only allow an OS to boot if its code has been digitally signed with a key obtained from Microsoft.

But the German government has made an official statement on Secure Boot (and Trusted Computing). Since it’s just a position statement, it does not count as a legal challenge to Microsoft, but it’s s start.

Marc Espie, a senior OpenBSD developer says that upstream vendors of free and open source software are adding in changes without any thought of whether downstream users could adapt to the change. And he has warned that this would hurt smaller players by not allowing them to keep up with the changes. Basically what is happening is that numerous changes are being made to Linux and smaller projects like OpenBSD cannot keep up with the changes, all of which, are not strictly necessary.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on December 8th - 9th, 2012 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

Today KDE released the first beta for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: November 21, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced volunteer awards for Anselm Lingnau of Linup Front, Weiterstadt, Germany and Michael Gisbers of Linux-Schmie.de, Oberhausen, Germany in recognition of their contributions and commitment to LPI's Linux Essentials program. The two volunteers were amongst 70 Linux professionals and 56 IT organizations and academic institutions who assisted in the exam development process for Linux Essentials (http://lpi.org/linux-certifications/introductory-programs/li...).