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Open-source poster child Linus Torvalds, who kickstarted development of the Linux operating system kernel, has been nominated for the €1m Millennium Technology Prize - but says he's "no visionary" and is surprised Linux has been so successful. Torvalds and stem cell engineer Dr Shinya Yamanaka are finalists for the gong - one of the world's top awards for science and handed out once every two years by the Technology Academy of Finland. The award, worth £817k ($1.3m), recognises technology innovations that improve the quality of human life.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 11.10) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work.

Robert Shingledecker announced earlier today, April 20th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Tiny Core Linux 4.5 RC2 and Tiny Core Plus Linux 4.5 RC2 operating systems.

Do you think the wrist watch era is over and soon the wrist watches will be doomed to the graveyard of floppy disks, cassettes, tape recorders etc., as mostly people use their mobiles and smartphones to check the time? Think again! The era isn’t over, it’s time for smartwatches! Meet Pebble, a tremendously customizable smart watch that integrates perfectly with your Android and iPhone. Read on for more exciting details.

After Red Hat Legal caused a delay in the Fedora 18 code-naming process, the list of possible code-names for this "Beefy Miracle" successor have been narrowed down to eight. As expected by now, all of the names are quite peculiar and the Fedora board is trying to decide whether to even continue this code-naming process...

When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started poking around the Linux market way back in 1998 or so, he turned to Wim Coekaerts for help. Fast forward to the present, and more than 8,500 customers run Oracle Linux. Here's what's next.

The Mele 1000 is powered by the Allwinner A10 chip, a 400-pin, 1.2GHz Cortex A8 ARM core with a MALI400MP OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU. The A10 chip also boasts 2160p hardware-accelerated video playback.

You know what I'm doing? Using the Epiphany Web browser that ships with GNOME. In my case, that's GNOME 2.30.2 in Debian Squeeze. Why? I've been having trouble with one of my most-used web-delivered apps in Firefox and Google Chrome.

The opening statements having been made, and it is worth a look at some of the slides presented by each of the parties regarding the use of the Java API specification (i.e., the narrative telling you what needs to be in an API implementation) and the claims of each party. There is a clear disconnect between what Oracle claims and the practices that Sun and now Oracle follow when it comes to the Java API specifications, and it shows up graphically when one looks at the following slides and then looks at the actual Java API specification license. Let's start by looking at the Oracle slides.

After looking recently at the impact on performance and power consumption of various Linux desktop environments running under Ubuntu 12.04 (Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox), there were requests by many Phoronix readers to look at the impact of KDE on 3D gaming. KDE's KWin compositing window manager offers several options that can be easily changed that have a direct result on the Linux system's performance for full-screen OpenGL games.

The Google engineer who wrote a contentious email that Oracle is hinging part of its Java patent case on has said that his words are being misconstrued. Timothy Lindhom, a former Sun engineer who joined Google in 2005, wrote an email in 2010 to Andy Rubin, head of the Android team, saying he had been asked to look into alternatives to using Java in Google's mobile operating system.

You know what sucks worse than Java alternatives? Java patent infringement lawsuits.

The prestigious Millennium Technology Prize has selected Linus Torvalds as a laureate, a front-runner for the bi-yearly award for important innovations in tech...

Larry Ellison might have opened up a hornet's nest for developers this week when he testified that he didn't know if Java was free or not. If he doesn't know, who does? And what are the implications for developers if it's not?

In my previous column, I described the success I've had with using VP8 for compressing the video for the Lib-Ray main feature multimedia file. At the end of that process, though, I still have a silent film. We also need to get the audio, and make a decision about the format. WebM calls for Vorbis sound, which probably makes sense for internet downloads, but this is where we part ways -- for my application, bit-perfect audio with FLAC seems to make more sense, at least for the main audio tracks (Vorbis is still in the picture for things like commentaries).

w3m is simple Text-Based Browser support for SSL Connetions, Tables, and frame color and inline images on suitable terminal.

"Florian Mueller has confessed - in the interests of being 'transparent', he says - that Oracle has hired him, for his analysis of FRAND issues." A perfect match, don't you think?-- TC

The third and final beta edition of Mageia 2, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Desktop, has been released. The first and only Release Candidate is expected on May 2, with the final, stable edition slated for release on May 15. So, what does this release has to offer? Aside from the usual new features and bugfixes, Mageia 2 beta 3 features a new desktop design.

I've been careful with this particular Debian Squeeze installation on my Lenovo G555 laptop, and it's been running pretty much every day since late November 2010. And it's now April 2012.

Arx Libertatis, a free and open source project that ports popular first person 3D RPG Arx Fatalis to Linux, has got its first stable release. There is a PPA for Ubuntu, portable binaries and packages for your favorite Linux distributions, so installation is simpler than ever and no need to compile.