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The decision taken by Mandriva SA, the French company that produces the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution, to base its workstation and server products on two different codebases is a pragmatic one, based on the state of the two codebases.

For those interested in reverse-engineering USB keyboards (or other input devices), there's a short yet effective guide by Julien Danjour for reverse-engineering a Logitech keyboard in order to provide Linux support...

The second and final release candidate for version 4.9.0 of the KDE Software Compilation has arrived right on schedule, ahead of the final release planned for early August

Release Candidate for openSUSE 12.2 has just been released, taking one step closer to a stable release after the recent shake up...

OS4 12.5 has been designed from the ground up to satisfy the needs of casual PC users all the way to the professional user. It is available in 32 and 64 bit releases. Built for the professional: With OS4 you have a quality multi processing core in your system, and with support for 3D graphics and audio, everyone from the digital animator, video editor, musician all the way to the researchers studying DNA sequencing to working in clusters, OS4 will fit your needs. With a fine set of standard applications, to the extensibility of installing thousands of more applications, OS4 was built for you.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 12.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

When Microsoft killed Windows Small Business Server (SBS) ahead of the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC12), The VAR Guy wondered: Can Linux somehow invade the small business server market in a big way? After a week of thought, The VAR Guy seriously doubts it. Here’s why.

Windows may still be the default operating system on the vast majority of mainstream PCs thanks to Microsoft's many longstanding OEM partnerships, but that's not to say it hasn't been possible for some time to buy desktop machines with Linux preloaded.

Stability enhancements and bugfixes thanks to a large, diverse and rapidly growing developer community Improvements in Calc, Impress, font handling and compatibility to third-party formats. This release fixes a number of bugs and further improves the stability of the software, making it the best version available for corporate and enterprise adoption. Among the changes are improvements in Calc, Impress, in the handling of fonts as well as enhancements with regards to importing and exporting third-party formats.

Google’s Chrome Web Store is getting some really nifty apps, and I will be writing about them at a regular basis as I plan to spend most of my ‘Internet’ time on the Chromebook and see if it can be a great device for writers and journalists.

RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) web based online game. The game can run in a browser, but there are also downloadable clients for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux. However, there is an unofficial Linux port of the Windows RuneScape client (the game launcher is opensource, the client file jagexappletviewer.jar is closed source, but it's allowed to be used in ports if anyone decided to make one) which includes fixes and performance tweaks along with working language settings.

The developers over at Ubuntu One have today announced tat they are removing Facebook contacts import and sync as an option from the dashboard. Don’t worry if you’ve been using it though – while you won’t be able to sync new details to any existing contacts, you will be able to edit or delete them.

The GNU/Linux ecosystem is blessed with many tools to clone a hard drive image which can be used to reinstall your Debian-based distro in an emergency or duplicate on another machine, but sometimes you might want to do a clean install of Ubuntu on another machine and then add in the extra software you installed in the original distro. For that you need a combination of Synaptic, the GUI frontend for apt-get and a little command line magic.

Do you ever have that moment when someone asks you for a recommendation on a book, and when put on the spot you spin around in your office chair, scan your ever-growing library of books that you bought over the years of IT experience but either:A. Never read? B. Flipped through but never finished? C.Passed out halfway through the first chapter? 

If its dimensions were more compact, you could call it the latest Android tablet, but at 21.5 inches, the FT103 SmartDisplay from KOUZIRO Corporation of Japan does not readily fit into that popular mobile device category, even though it has all the other trappings of one.

While I've never been giddy with praise over a project-planning application, GanttProject has enough going for it for me to consider using as a regular go-to planning tool. Its user interface is structured clearly so it is easy to understand. GanttProject lets you break down a project into a tree of tasks and assign available human resources to work on each.

Terminology is a new terminal emulator. In fact as of the 12th of July 2012, it is only 1 month old, so all you see here is the result of some off-and-on work over approximately a month (so not full-time effort). This is an indicator of what is possible to do with EFL with some knowledge and effort in a fairly short space of time. This time included having to learn how terminal emulation works, pty's, escapes and so on and actually make a large selection of terminal applications work, so it's not perfect, but it's getting there.

UPDATED--In the wake of the Flame malware attack, which involved the use of a fraudulent Microsoft digital certificate, the software giant has reviewed its certificates and found nearly 30 that aren't as secure as the company would like and has revoked them. Microsoft also released its new updater for certificates as a critical update for Windows Vista and later versions as part of today's July Patch Tuesday (Secure Boot, anyone?--TC)

NitroShare is an application that works on Linux and Windows which can be used to easily send files to other computers on the same local network. It supports drag'n'drop, sending folders, file compression, comes with Nautilus integration and more.

Summary: A new cross-platform Trojan downloader has been discovered. It detects if you're running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, and then downloads the corresponding malware for your platform.