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The Linux team at Valve is looking for beta testers for the Linux version of Steam. A comment about it was discovered on the Valve's Linux Blog, according to which everyone wishing to participate in the beta program should express interest in a comment on the Valve's Linux Blog or in an e-mail written to valvelinuxteam@valvesoftware.com. Here is the text of the Valve's comment:

There are many commands to view text files. The most used one is "cat" which is the most suitable to read small text files, "more" and "less" can be good options for large files. But if you are just interested in the beginning or the end of a large file, "head" and "tail" may be very handy for you.

Motorola has unveiled three new devices in its Razr smartphone line, touting extended battery life and larger screen size as their main selling points. All three will be available from Verizon Wireless later this year. They will come preloaded with various Google services, including the Chrome browser, Google Play, Google Maps, Voice Actions for Android and Google+.

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal beta 1 has been released today, introducing many changes which include new Unity features, refreshed default theme, and much more. There were also some controversial changes like the removal of Unity 2D and the Nautilus downgrade to version 3.4.2. Read on to find out more!

One of the best things about Linux is that its distributions come in all shapes and sizes. There’s a distro for every taste and skill level. Below is a list of some of the most popular Linux distributions. Be sure to check them out and let us know what you think. If you’re familiar with these distros, feel free to tell us about your experiences and share your recommendations.

Adobe Flash Player 11.2.x is the last release available for Linux, future versions only being available through a new API called "Pepper" as part of Google Chrome. If you want to use the latest Flash Player 11.3.x in Linux, but with Chromium, not Google Chrome, here's what you must do.

They say everyone has a story to tell, and certainly Linux geeks are no exception. So it was with great anticipation that Linux Girl came upon an "Ask Slashdot" posting recently titled, "How Did You Become a Linux Professional?" "I'm interested in taking my skills to the next level -- and making a career out of it," wrote blogger ternarybit.

It was five years ago today that AMD's open-source strategy for Linux graphics driver support was publicly unveiled. On 6 September 2007, one day after unveiling their new Catalyst/fglrx Linux driver, is when AMD lifted my embargo that allowed me to exclusively explain their open-source strategy in detail.

This tutorial shows how you can serve CGI scripts (Perl scripts) with nginx on Ubuntu 12.04. While nginx itself does not serve CGI, there are several ways to work around this. I will outline three solutions: the first is to proxy requests for CGI scripts to Thttpd, a small web server that has CGI support, while the second and third solution are very similar - both use a CGI wrapper to serve CGI scripts.

Slowly but steadily, Ubuntu is catching up with its competitors. The Canonical-made distro is getting better and better with every release. Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” managed to silence some of the Unity critics to a large extent. And though, work still needs to be done to take on the mighty warriors at Redmond, it seems that Shuttleworth’s untiring endeavors have started coming to fruition. Ubuntu 12.10 recently baptized as Quantal Quetzal is already looking promising.

While the Catalyst Linux graphics driver was overhauled five years ago, not everyone is satisfied with the closed-source AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver. Here's some interesting comments by a prominent Linux developer and his less than stellar Catalyst experience. Some interesting Linux graphics driver comments were shared this week in an email by a prominent open-source developer who's been involved with Linux since 1996 and is responsible for one of the window managers. When I was liaising between this developer and a prominent game company, he shared some interesting driver comments, which he's allowed me to republish on Phoronix.

There's an interesting paradox in many social cooperations that is readily observable in open, participation-driven creative projects (for which open source software is often held up as the poster child): nobody will do it for you. In F/OSS, that assumption translates to things like "nobody will write the patch for you" or "nobody will fix that bug for you". It turns out that this is the only safe assumption to hold. But that idea flies in the face of reality: tens of thousands of bugs are fixed in Free software code bases around the world every year; huge numbers of features are added to free software code bases on a regular basis. Yet most of the people who use Free software did not perform any of the work that went into it, and those of us who do put effort into it are never responsible for more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the global result. So obviously people will and do make things for us. I have DVDs full of the stuff; I use it on all the computing devices I own every single day. You probably do as well.

PS: A little update on Vivaldi

For those of you who are chomping at the bit, biting your nails and ruthlessly washing your cars over and over again in anxious anticipation of Steam for Linux, we’ve got good news for you. Database hacker Marlamin uncovered the first evidence of a Steam for Linux build on Steam’s servers using using CDR Steam database parser. Steam’s beta carries an app id of 16549 and was uploaded just today.

With Android controlling the vast majority of smart phone marketshare, logic would dictate that developers would follow the eyeballs, but in fact, several studies suggest that developers follow the money -- and iOS has proven much more lucrative.

RapidDisk LX is a custom and minimal Linux distribution intended to provide RapidDisk (advanced Linux RAM disk modules) functionality as target block devices over iSCSI. Now on Kickstarter: RapidDisk 2.0, an x86_64 port!

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction's most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you're not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service Ustream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, "The Doctor's Wife." Where Gaiman's face had been were the words, "Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement."

You may think or imagine that customizing GTK themes requires special knowledge and a lot of time, but with my new tool it just got easier than ever! Here is a gtk theme configure tool that allows users to change some basic elements of a GTK theme (both GTK2 and GTK3) using a simple interface. You can select the colors of panels, menus and background and revert the changes with the pressing of a button. The toggle switch allows to just turn off the custom widgets without loosing the saved customization.

We are proud to announce the general availability of OS4 OpenDesktop 1.0. OS4 OpenDesktop is a 32-bit offering that runs on all legacy 32-bit hardware as well as the newer ultrabooks and netbooks. With this release we focus on mobility and cloud computing. Along with this release the system comes with Audacious, Totem, and Google Chrome. Some of the web applications that come bundled with the system are: Angry Birds, Pandora, Netflix, Flixter, GMail and offline GMail, Google Drive, eBuddy, Weather Channel, Google Books, Google Music, Google Calendar, New York Times, Hotmail and WebCam toy.

After being in development for the past half-year, and at a time when much of the ongoing Linux desktop activity for the display server/stack is being focused on Wayland, X.Org Server 1.13 was released this evening. For a change, X.Org Server 1.13 does actually pack a number of promising new features...

We're entering the age of open source spectrometry, where the very chemical makeup of substances can be analyzed, compared, and improved. Is this the truest form of open source?