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This week saw the open source release of the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) under the LGPL licence. We’re going to take a quick look at what the release offers and get a few words with Peter Howkins, who along with Jon Trulson, is an administrator for the project.

In my day to day work I come across a lot of tasks that I actually "hate" to be honest. Most of these tasks consist of things that are repetitive and take up a lot of time. A co-worker of mine once told me, "if you have to do a task more than once, automate it!". This is one piece of advice that intrigued me. Ever since that day I have been thinking about automation and how to make processes flow smoother than they did before. But the main question always is, what tool are you going to use for that?

It should come as no surprise that Linux has a substantial presence in the scientific community. Solutions abound from high-performance computing clusters to visualization software. There's even an entire Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux targeted for scientific computation, appropriately named Scientific Linux.

Microsoft is insisting that users and vendors do things its way with Windows 8 and some of them aren't going to take it anymore.

Celestia is a captivating space navigator that allows you to explore and discover our known universe in three dimensions. Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond our galaxy using zooming, point and go and time accelerating / freezing features.

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argues Brian Christian, chief technology officer of Zettaset.

The Open Group, the steward of the UNIX standards, has open sourced the CDE classic desktop for Unix under the LGPLv2 licence. The Common Desktop Environment and the Motif toolkit on which it is based, itself open sourced in 2000, became the de facto standard for Unix desktops in Unix's commercial hay day in the 1990s. CDE broadened the concept of simple window managers configured by means of text files which had previously dominated the Unix world; it included a desktop offering integrated applications and graphical configuration tools.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a CentOS 6.3 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

A couple weeks ago on an unrelated review, I remember a commenter asking if I could review a Linux distribution called Stella. It seemed interesting, but I didn't think much of it until the last few days when its release of version 6.3 made news on several major Linux news sites. At that point I knew I should check it out, so here it is. (Also, if Tennessee Williams were alive today, I think that "A Linux Distribution Named 'Stella'" would have made a great title for one of his plays. Yes, I really did have to make that pun, and it won't be the last time either.)

For years, there has been one constant for users making the switch to Linux: gaming was going to be a thing of the past. Not that people haven’t tried, of course. Software like WINE (with its gaming spin-offs like Cedega and PlayOnLinux) have made it possible to run Windows games on Linux with mixed results.

The boot took forever. Several times I thought the system had stalled, then the progress bar would creep ever so slightly forward. After more than a few minutes I was prompted for the keyboard language, so I used the USB mouse I attach to the laptop whenever I’m at home and selected “English.” After another two or three minutes the desktop started showing up, piece by piece, but still very slowly. I killed time by playing with the mouse a bit, watching the cursor play across the screen. Unfortunately, when the installation was complete, the mouse and keyboard suddenly quit working. With no way to address the system, I took it down cold with the power button and rebooted. Again, it took forever to load and I lost use of the mouse, trackpad and keyboard the instant the boot was complete. This was only a minor inconvenience. I’d soon get help on the PCLOS forums and would have this problem fixed in short measure.

Google has been forced to temporarily deactivate a security feature in Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) intended to make it harder to pirate paid-for apps. The feature resulted in some purchased apps no longer working after devices on which they were installed on were restarted, requiring the user to reconfigure or even reinstall them. According to a bug report on Google Code, affected apps include several live wallpapers and applications with widgets or access to Google's account system.

Following the Qt 5.0 release, developers of this open-source tool-kit will aim to issue feature updates on a six-month cycle. Joao Abecasis reignited the discussion today concerning setting up time-based releases for Qt. "While releasing Qt 5.0.0 is an ongoing process, I think this is a good time to start planning future releases (5.0.1, 5.1.0, etc.) and, most importantly, we need to discuss *how* we'll get them out on time. With the setup we now have we should quickly move to a strict time-based release schedule. A predictable schedule allows all interested to align with the project and contribute to make the next release the traditional Best Release Ever (tm) of Qt."

This tutorial explains How to install and configure Munin on ubuntu server 12.04 LTS, With munin you can easily monitor the performance of your Ubuntu Server stats, networks, running apps on a simple to read website.

Wired reporter lost almost all of his data. Hackers needed 45 minutes to take over multiple cloud accounts. They also deleted the data on his Apple phone, tablet and laptop. A good, honest review on how he was hacked and the importance of isolating account access.

Samsung on Monday announced that its Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, which primarily uses a stylus for input, will hit the market this month. The Galaxy Note 10.1 has a 10.1-inch screen, a 1.4 GHz quad-core processor, and a multiscreen feature that lets users run two applications simultaneously.

Now that Rhythmbox is once again the default music player in Ubuntu, AskUbuntu moderator fossfreedom has created a PPA for various Rhythmbox plugins that many Ubuntu users might find useful. Among the plugins included are: Equalizer, Jump-to-Playing, Tray Icon, Microblogger, Tablature plugin, JumpToWindow and more.

The feature freeze and branching of Fedora 18 is scheduled to occur tomorrow. The FESCo meeting happened today where a few of the last features were approved for the Spherical Cow release...

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on August 23rd - 24th, 2012 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

PoliArch 12.05 is released. PoliArch is an Italian distribution and live CD featuring a number of system rescue and data recovery tools. It is based on Arch Linux.