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With all the ongoing debate over desktop environments here in the Linux blogosphere, there's never any shortage of discussion of the GNOME project, even on an ordinary day. Last Tuesday, however, was no ordinary day -- at least, if a certain blog post was anything to go by. "The idea of GNOME OS has been around for a couple of years," wrote GNOME UX designer Allan Day in said post.

With a small tweak, the latest VLC 2.0.x should be able to play most Blu-rays released before 2012 (it doesn't work for Blu-rays that use BD+).

If you are planning to buy one of the new Apple MacBook Pro notebooks with a Retina Display for use under Linux, hold off on your purchase. Running the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux isn't a trouble-free experience and after using even the latest development code and jumping through various hoops, Linux on the latest Apple hardware is still less than an ideal experience. Linux support will improve for the Retina MacBook Pro in the coming months, but it's not likely to see any proper "out of the box" experience until next year.

Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple, Oracle is now turning to hardware acceleration to speed up Java by harnessing the emerging potential of the GPU. The OpenJDK project’s Hotspot group has said it will explore ways of speeding Java with a native Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that taps hardware acceleration.

Today, Debian celebrates its 19th birthday. To commemorate the occasion, parties have been organised all around the globe and users traditionally bake cakes to bring to these events

Zorin OS is an operating system designed to make the "Gateway to Linux". This is because it has a familiar Windows interface, complete with panel customizations, start menu, and even a Look Changer to change the Windows style. Everything works out of the box in Zorin! All the applications you will ever need is available.

With Debian’s 19th anniversary approaching, I thought it would be nice to look back at dpkg’s history. After all, it’s one of the key components of any Debian system.The figures in this article are all based on dpkg’s git repository (as of today, commit 9a06920). While the git repository doesn’t have all the history, we tried to integrate as much as possible when we created it in 2007. We have data going back to April 1996…

"I watched Carmack’s keynote ... all three hours and thirty-six minutes of it. Twice. And took notes. The first thing that needs to be said about the above quote is it’s actually by Josh Walrath, Managing Editor of PC Perspective, not Carmack."

phpvirtualbox is a web-based VirtualBox front-end written in PHP that allows you to access and control remote VirtualBox instances. It tries to resemble the VirtualBox GUI as much as possible to make work with it as easy as possible. It is a nice replacement for the VirtualBox GUI if you run VirtualBox on headless servers. This tutorial explains how to install phpvirtualbox on a Fedora 17 server to manage a locally installed, headless VirtualBox.

Google has announced a new offering called the Prior Art Finder, in which it tries to help anyone find prior art on patents. When you view a patent via Google's patent database, there will now be a button you can click, which tries to take terms from the patent, and displays a variety of related info from the date that the patent was filed:

If you’re like me, you have an excessive number of old PCs lying in your basement or in a storage room. Time to throw those old PCs in the recycling bin? But what if you can’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to those machines forever? Fret not: Using a few open-source tools, you can immortalize those retired PCs as virtual machines without having to hold on to the actual hardware. Here's how.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from August 28th - August 30th, 2012.

A digital clock is actually nothing special, most distros include one by default. However, in this article, I will show you how to get a continuous digital clock in the terminal. The basic command you can use to display date and time in the terminal is "date". When you open the terminal and run "date", you will have an output of the current date and time. To abbreviate the output to display the time only, you can add a tag (like "+%r" or "+%T") to the "date" command.

The Document Foundation has announced earlier today, August 15th, that the sixth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.5 open source office suite software is available for download.

The team behind Calligra, the graphic art and office suite for KDE, created from KOffice, has just announced the release of version 2.5 of its suite. This release has many new and improved features, and may be especially useful for people who want strong graphics and diagramming features in a suite of applications that includes productivity apps such as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

Hey there, Linux gamers! There’s a new Humble Bundle for Android, and Linux, and Mac, and Windows, available for purchase right now, offering five entertaining games for all ages.

Now that the New Zealand courts have the case, it appears as if the Megaupload king might, with luck, escape extradition to the United States. Even so, it’s doubtful his servers and data will ever be returned. Legitimate customers still can’t access their data, which remains in U.S. government hands. Dotcom, however, acts as if he’s holding a winning hand, having recently announced to his Twitter followers that he intends to launch a new service, Megabox, later this year.

Canonical had earlier released Ubuntu with two different Unity shells, a normal default Unity 3D as well as Unity 2D for old low spec computers without 3D acceleration. But from Ubuntu 12.10, the 2d shell will no longer be available.

In this article I argue why Ubuntu 12.04 is the best desktop available on any FLOSS platform.

Committers can submit patches directly to the Apache CloudStack (incubating) repository, but non-committers need to follow a few more steps. Don't worry, it's easy. Here's how.