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The new voting machines to be used by the government of Flanders, Belgium, will use the Linux open source operating system, according to a report by Binnenband, a magazine targeting Flanders' public administrations. The machine itself contains no software at all, no hard disk and only a few bytes of flash memory. For each election, a tailored Linux operating software and the list of candidates is loaded on a USB drive.

Many tell me that the default search tool, Kfind; is just spiffy.

No it's not. Putting in the search string "music" and setting it up to search my home folder should have a least triggered a response for the music folder within Home.

It didn't. It told me there was nothing referring to "music" in my home folder.

Uh, yes there is.

Kfind insisted that there wasn't.

We are still at odds over this. But more so, I need a good search client for my desktop. Kfind is Kfired.

Yesterday, July 24th, Andrew Gillis announced the release of VortexBox 2.1, a Fedora-based operating system that turns any computer into a music server or jukebox. The new version comes after six months of hard work and includes important updates and various neat features.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from August 1st - 3rd, 2012.

Here is another wonderfully simplified way for less advanced users to get a taste of Arch Linux. This time I will be looking at the powerful but less-known Bridge Linux distribution. With Bridge Linux it seems that very little has been neglected, and of course there is no shortage of variety. You can try Bridge Linux with Xfce, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, KDE, or the lightweight LXDE desktop.

This doesn’t bode well for Nokia, which has gambled it’s future on Windows, or Microsoft. Both companies would like us to believe the move was brought about by Redmond’s recent announcement there will be no upgrade path from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 when it’s released in a few months time. The truth seems to be that consumers simply aren’t interested in portable Windows devices, despite the gee-whiz advertising that’s been showing up on network TV recently.

One of the planned highlights for this year's LinuxCon Europe 2012 is a panel discussion between Linus Torvalds and Intel’s Chief of Linux and Open Source Technologies, Dirk Hohndel, on the latest technical advancements in the kernel. The event is to be held from 5 to 7 November in Barcelona and will also feature a keynote by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth; he will be talking on how his distribution is changing user experiences on the desktop and on servers.

In a FESCo meeting held on 23rd July, Fedora's Engineering And Steering Committee members have decided to include UEFI Secure Boot in Fedora 18. Codenamed Spherical Cow, this release is scheduled to be out this November. Only two votes out of nine were against inclusion of secure boot.

The highly anticipated Arduino Leonardo, the powerful new microcontroller, is now ready for commercial consumption

Law enforcement has virtually unlimited ability to make requests to see electronic information without a warrant, and this power, while certainly disturbing from a civil liberties perspective, can also cost you money in time and resources responding to requests.

The video calling service Skype recently made a change to how it routes calls. Yawn, right? But here's where it get a little juicier: Hackers and bloggers are saying the changes, which push some of the video calling process onto Skype's own computers instead of onto random machines on the Internet, could help the app spy on users' calls, presumably at the request of a court or government.

Background Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. It is an easy way to get the latest code without having to build the entire KDE-SVN tree and maintain the checkout. Project Neon is unstable, but it installs alongside stable packages. It is suitable for contributors such as new developers, translators, usability designers, documenters, promoters, and bug triagers. With Project Neon, people can experiment freely without risk to a working KDE environment.

Transmission 2.61, the open source, cross-platform and famous BitTorrent client used in many of today's Linux distributions, has been released last evening, July 23rd.

LPinguy 12.04.1 is released. LPinguy (Light Pinguy) 12.04 is based on Ubuntu 12.04. LPinguy has both preconfigured GNOME Classic and Enlightenment desktop.

I just tried Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon today and realized that when you right click on the desktop, there is no option to create a launcher. Of course, you can just drag the applications in the menu to the desktop to create the launchers but this is not very efficient in case you want a custom launcher.

Claiming that Linux users are different reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's comment that "the rich are different from you and I" and Ernest Hemingway's alleged reply, "Yes, they have more money." After all, computer users are computer users. A few geeks may argue over the differences in operating systems, but aren't average users more interested in simply getting work done?

How do you create a business that's profitable based on free software? Paul Salazar explains 4 insights to selling and marketing open source software.

Once the Power Pwn is deployed, if it engages network access control and runs in stealth mode, it is essentially undetectable, "but we would hope that people would be able to walk around, look around, and question things in the environment," said M. Anthony Hughes, customer development manager at Pwnie Express. That difficulty of detection has raised fears about its being a useful tool for hackers.

Peppermint OS Three the newly released lightweight distribution based on Lubuntu 12.04 focuses on machines that have low resources and also uses a lot of cloud based applications.

Oracle will not pursue any further development of the object-oriented programming language Fortress. The database maker had acquired the research project when it took over Sun in 2010. The announcement was made in a blog post by Guy L. Steele, a member of Oracle's Programming Language Research Group, which has been largely responsible for designing, developing and implementing Fortress. Steele stresses that ten years is a long time for a research project, most of which last for just three years, according to him.