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In most cases, “online tours” fall short of seeing the real thing. They’re convenient, but I can’t imagine many people buy a house or choose a college after only visiting them virtually. But when it comes to picking an operating system, online previews can work quite well, as the Ubuntu team’s online tour site exemplifies. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s worth a look — even if you don’t use Ubuntu.

In recent months there has been an initiative underway called Rootbeer, which is a GPU compiler for Java code. Rootbeer claims to be more advanced than CUDA or OpenCL bindings for Java as it does static code analysis of the Java Bytecode and takes it automatically to the GPU.

Cloud computing has made great strides over the past two years as more companies enter the market and open source projects emerge. But the industry is still young and the current model in which each vendor has its own solution is creating “layers from hell” for the end user, says Kyle MacDonald, vice president of cloud at Canonical.

Building web scale applications means building systems that can survive any number of horrible things happening to your hardware or software. It means eliminating single points of failure, it means scaling horizontally, as well as vertically, and it means being able to respond to influxes of traffic without buckling under the weight. Increasingly, building web scale applications also means handling terabytes, or even petabytes of data; this is where the Apache Hadoop project comes in.

From my point of view, Fedora 17 KDE is worse than version 16 of the same operating system.

The time has come to refresh our security tool arsenal - BackTrack 5 R3 has been released. R3 focuses on bug fixes as well as the addition of over 60 new tools – several of which were released in BlackHat and Defcon 2012. A whole new tool category was populated - 'Physical Exploitation', which now includes tools such as the Arduino IDE and libraries, as well as the Kautilya Teensy payload collection. Together with our usual KDE and GNOME, 32/64-bit ISO images, we have released a single VMware Image (GNOME, 32-bit).

At this year's annual SIGGRAPH conference Valve has talked about OpenGL on Linux. In this talk the company reported on the progress of porting games to Linux and showcased the very successful porting of Left 4 Dead 2 on Ubuntu to the conference participants.

Old stuff rock again! The Hipster community is growing, Amiga is proposing a new computer (running Linux), vintage cars are trendy, etc. To follow the stream, nothing can beat the emulation of old games. Take a break from the most recent FPS and go back to the origin. What made video games what they are today? Story, game play, graphics, soundtrack? The best way to remember is to play again. And why not start with DOS games?

As most Ubuntu users will know, Ubuntu 12.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. As an LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin), released on 26 April 2012, is scheduled to receive updates and support, for both the desktop and server versions, until October 2017. What many Ubuntu users may not know is that Ubuntu 12.04 will see maintenance releases over this period. The first of those, 12.04.1, is due on 16 August.

For years now, in the field of robotics, open source platforms have been ushering in all kinds of innovation. And among the commercial companies focused on open source robotics, none is as prominent as Silicon Valley-based Willow Garage. Scott Hassan, a Google veteran, founded Willow Garage in 2006 as a well-funded robotics research shop. In addition to building innovative robots and robotics platforms, Willow Garage helped organize the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).

Dave Mason of Mozilla talks about a possible replacement to "Gecko" and what makes Firefox better than other browsers.

Yesterday - after only 7 years - Microsoft announced that its next version of Office will fully implement a standard that the vendor spent three years battling to get the world to adopt.

VMware continued its embrace of open source software with its recent acquisition of open source and virtual network provider Nicira. The move continued VMware's aggressive M&A strategy and its effort to transition from proprietary software and virtualization to a broader market and cloud computing, largely through open source software.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.1 on a headless Fedora 17 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

Using Qt Cordova, a developer is creating an application which will let Tizen specific applications run on Nokia's N9 and N950 MeeGo smartphones

QNX licences up for grabs to anyone with a chequebook Troubled phone biz Research in Motion wants to license its new BlackBerry 10 operating system to anyone who can afford it in the hope of climbing out of its rut.…

Join the Reg readers' debate: 20 August 20, 1pm BST Live Chat Got any plans next weekend? Cancel them. Tell your partner to finally catch up with those old university friends, get a cat sitter in, and order a pizza.…

REST, or Representational State Transfer, is a distributed communication architecture that is quickly becoming the lingua franca for clouds. It's simple, yet expressive enough to represent the plethora of cloud resources and overall configuration and management. Learn how to develop a simple REST agent from the ground up in Ruby to learn its implementation and use.

Always a popular operating system, Linux has been getting a lot more buzz lately. All of this new news has helped to propel Linux operating systems to the public eye, and awareness of this system’s existence is now starting to spread beyond technology enthusiasts and computer coders.