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New features and other enhancements for the performance benchmarking of *BSD operating systems have been committed with the forthcoming release of Forsand...

In the more than 30 years that I have been involved with the tech industry I have seen a lot of strange things but none stranger than the events of today at the Linux Conference Australia. iTWire senior Linux writer Sam Varghese has been ejected from the conference. Why? Well, you may ask and then wonder what the Linux community in Australia has come to.

But note the phrasing above: “Dell is an important part of Microsoft’s plans…” Better vertical integration without having to pay the full price for ownership, the putative “several billion dollars” would give Microsoft a significant ownership, 10% or 15%. This is completely at odds with the buyout’s supposed intent: Getting out of the PC clone race to the bottom.

Or maybe there’s another story behind Microsoft’s beneficence: The investor syndicate struggles and can’t quite reach the $22B finish line. Microsoft generously — and very publicly — offers to contribute the few missing billions. Investors see Microsoft trying to reattach the PC millstone to their necks — and run away.

Hats off to Steve Ballmer: Microsoft looks generous – without having to spend a dime – and forces Dell keep making PCs.

Commodore OS Vision 1.0 Beta 9 has been released. Commodore OS Vision is a 64-bit Linux distribution, based on Linux Mint, created for Commodore enthusiasts purchasing Commodore USA hardware. These are essentially restore disks for pre-installed Commodore systems. Commodore OS Vision uses the classic GNOME 2 interface and features extensive Compiz/Emerald desktop effects. It includes dozens of games of all genres (FPS, Racing, Retro etc), the Firefox and Chromium web browsers, LibreOffice, Scribus, GIMP, Blender, OpenShot and Cinellera, advanced software development tools and languages, sound editing through Ardour and Audacity, and music composition programs such as the Linux MultiMedia Studio. It has a classic Commodore slant with a selection of applications reminiscent of their classic Amiga counterparts.

In the past I’ve posted an article about Anonymous browsing with Tor that can be useful when you use your favorite browser and you wish to stay anonymous thanks to the Tor software. Tor (short for The Onion Router) is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software directs internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers to conceal a user’s location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity, including “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages and other communication forms”, back to the user and is intended to protect users’ personal freedom, privacy, and ability to conduct confidential business by keeping their internet activities from being monitored.

This post is the first in a series I am going to be publishing about using elementary and python to develop applications. The first examples gets a functional GUI window in less than 50 lines including comments.

How can people be very concerned about government surveillance, and still trust a company like Microsoft? And if people are concerned about government surveillance, what about surveillance by private organizations? Has anybody looked into backdoors in Verizon’s Internet routers?

Linux gaming world is growing continuously since Valve has released Steam for Linux. Now Blizzard is intending to give Linux community some love. So Phoronix.com has an information from a trustworthy source that Blizzard is going to publish a game title for Linux later this year, but it's unclear what exactly it will be.

Ceph, the open source distributed file system that is playing an increasingly important role in the world of Big Data despite its young age, took another step into the cloud with the announcement of the general availability of the DreamObjects cloud storage system from DreamHost. The update follows a beta version of the service that launched last September, but brings with it expanded offerings and incentives.

15,000 Raspberry Pi’s provided to UK Schools as part of Google Giving

We are proud to announce the return of Firefox Flicks, Mozilla’s global video competition that invites Firefox fans and filmmakers to create short videos, or “Flicks,” that help tell the Firefox story. Last year was a huge success and we received more than 400 videos submission from thousands of filmmakers all over the world.

In 1996, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a unique search engine called "BackRub" that ran on the school's server. After one year, BackRub's bandwidth outgrew the university's needs. Its creators rebranded BackRub into Google, a respelled reference to "googol." It is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros.

OWASP Mantra-OS 12.04 is available. OWASP Mantra-OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution built for penetration testing and secure computing.

While digiKam is first and foremost an application for processing and organizing digital photos, it also features tools for working with film negatives.

My experience tells me there are a lot of people interested in trying open source, but they don't know where to start. And the perception that you have to write code to contribute to is a barrier to that curiosity. So, I've outlined 10 ways that anyone can get started with open source—no code writing involved. I welcome your ideas and additions, there are without a doubt more than 10 ways—let's get started.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the February 2013 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

The latest edition is Razor-qt 0.5.2. This article shows how to install it on Ubuntu 12.10 or any other edition of Ubuntu you might be running.

With the release of LGPL licensed C and Java connectors for MariaDB and MySQL in November 2012, a number of questions were raised in the community over the drivers' provenance and appropriateness of the LGPL licence. The H went looking for answers...

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache 2.4 webserver on a Fedora 18 server with PHP5 (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites. On Apache 2.4, we need Apache's mod_proxy_fcgi module to make it work.

While GIMP offers a wide range of tools for working with photos, it lacks one feature that is essential for serious photographers: the ability to automatically fix lens distortion. Fortunately, the GimpLensfun plugin fills the void quite nicely.