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Scientists celebrated a breakthrough in their understanding of the human genome this month – the results of a large collaborative project driven by big data and built with Linux. ENCODE researchers mapped the DNA segments that regulate gene function. Source: Nature, "An integrated encyclopedia of DNA elements in the human genome." On Sept. 5, Nature and two other scientific journals simultaneously published 30 papers with the results of the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Project. The 5-year project involved nearly 450 scientists from 30 institutions around the globe and produced scores of data on how and when genes are regulated.

I'm up in Helsinki at the Open Knowledge Festival (which, tempting fate, uses the abbreviation 'OK Festival'). It's an interesting event, even if it does occasionally lapse into the quasi-religious atmosphere that often accompanies 'open' tech issues. Thankfully, there are those willing to ask heretical questions. Some of the most valuable discussions took place this afternoon, covering the thorny issue of open data's business case. Yes, many can easily agree that open is good, but how can it benefit the bottom line?

Humble Indie Bundle 6 has arrived, unexpectedly as usual. It brings with it what seems to be a positively epic lineup of indepenent games, including one blockbuster as well. Torchlight.

Along with RedHat, Rackspace and many others, Canonical has been steadily marrying its cloud strategy to the open source OpenStack platform. In February of last year, we discussed how Canonical was deepening its relationship with OpenStack, and it has kept doing so. Now, in a new blog post, Canonical's Mark Baker notes that Canonical has released the Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, an online software repository from which administrators can download the latest versions of OpenStack, for use with the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.

Evernote is a note taking service in which the notes can be text, images, voice memos, handwritten notes or file attachments. There are Evernote clients available for Windows, Mac OSX, Android, iOS and WebOS, but there's no official Linux client. On Linux, you can use NixNote (previously Nevernote), an unofficial Evernote client written in Java but if you want something lightweight, you should try Everpad, a new Evernote client that integrates nicely with Unity.

Get your first taste of the Spherical Cow, and help test the new features expected to come to Fedora 18, such as a new Hot Spot feature and updated Samba

Cinnamon, the GNOME Shell fork used by default in Linux Mint 13 (Cinnamon Edition), has reached version 1.6, getting many new features: a new 2D session, workspace OSD, new applets and lots more!

Humble Indie Bundle 6 has just been presented with 6 exciting titles. All the games are making their Linux debut and can either be downloaded directly from http://www.humblebundle.com and also can be redeemed in the Ubuntu Software Center or on Steam.

Join us for three days of inspired making, learning and celebration in London. Today we’re extremely proud to launch the new 2012 Mozilla Festival web site — and invite you to join us November 9-11 in London, UK. “We want … Continue reading

Announcing the Sound Update of the deceptively simple strategy game that puts you in the role of the evil villain. "Stop That Hero!" now features more minions to summon, more heroes to fight off, and more levels to challenge your ability to be an evil ruler. Available for GNU/Linux.

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 12.2 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.

One of the stumbling blocks in migrating to the Linux desktop is the mistaken view that you can't take it with you. Your data must remain captive to the Microsoft operating system. Not true at all. A related misconception that stalls many Windows users from adopting the Linux OS is the belief that when you buy a new computer or install Linux to an existing computer, you must give up one operating system for the other.

The Alpha release of the upcoming Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow) Linux operating system has been announced earlier today, September 18th, featuring KDE 4.9.

For those interested in Wayland, Qt, and 3D, there's an interesting new Wayland compositor out in the wild. This compositor renders a 3D maze using Qt and brings in some Wolfenstein 3D elements while allowing Wayland surfaces to be rendered on the walls...

Nowadays virtualization is for anyone and virtual machines run smoothly in every new hardware. However people seem to avoid it and there is an explanation. The “complicated” interfaces and the ignorance of the use-cases of virtualization. The possibilities of virtualization are endless and just one of them is to backup our files, databases and whatever else.

While Steam Linux Client is still being in development, there is an excellent digital game distribution service Desura available for the Linux gamers. Desura has been released for Linux one year ago and has even been open-sourced this year.

Ubuntu 12.04 includes a desktop interface that is a strong departure from previous versions. One of the most striking differences upon logging into the system is the launcher. The launcher is a vertical bar that, by default, resides along the left side of the screen. It is similar to the dock in Mac OS X and aims to make your user experience more efficient and intuitive.

To some people’s surprise, even open-source software has a license attached to it. And with that license comes a description and agreement for what can and can’t be done with the source code of any particular product or service. What exact license the specific open-source software lies under is generally up to the developer(s) and/or current maintainers of the original code.

None of my previous meetings with different OpenSuSE products finished well. Although I liked OpenSuSE 11.4 KDE more than OpenSuSE 11.4 GNOME, I still was not too happy with it. OpenSuSE 12.1 Li-f-e, which I reviewed few days ago, did not change my opinion in that area. In the meantime, I decided to give OpenSuSE 12.2 a go.

The developers behind the Superb Mini Server (SMS) Linux server operating system proudly announced earlier today, September 18th, the immediate availability for download of the Superb Mini Server 2.0.0 release.