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Programs and services are different kinds of entities. A program is a work that you can execute; a service is an activity that you might interact with. For programs, we make a distinction between free and nonfree (proprietary). More precisely, this distinction applies to a program that you have a copy of: either you have the four freedoms for your copy or you don't. An activity (such as a service) doesn't exist in the form of copies, so it's not possible to have a copy or to make copies. As a result, the four freedoms that define free software don't make sense for services.

The last few days have seen a depressing flurry of forum topics and blog posts about the supposed death of Slackware, evidenced (primarily) by the fact that Slackware.com has been down quite a bit recently (indeed, it is down at the time of this writing)...

Nokuntu (Nokia+Ubuntu) is Simply and User-friendly Apps for managing Nokia phones for Ubuntu and debian based distributions.

For my debian respin named "Terrible Linux" I'm developing a start/intro screen called "Terrible Start". I have released a test version which you can download an try out. I would like to get some feedback on how and if it works, and maybe feature suggestions and related comments you have about it.

MATE has come of age, with version 1.2 removing remaining GNOME references in this major update

Netflix has announced it's open sourcing its set of "Monkey" web site fault testing tools and you would be foolish to not at least check them out. These tools let you test your site under worst-case scenario conditions.

Regardless of how good they are, some Linux applications have very little appeal to all but users with specialized needs. That is not the case with Xournal. Even if you do not use a tablet for inputing notes, this app still lets you create with style. If you are looking for a very handy note-taking application, check out Xournal.

Nadim Kobeissi, master hacker, summoned for interrogation multiple times as a teenager by cyber-intelligence authorities in Beirut, Lebanon, sat in the backyard of a restaurant in Brooklyn, astounded that he was being treated to lunch..

KDE China User meeting On March 30th, a grand meeting called KDE China User was held in Beijing. This meeting provided KDE users, community members and technophiles with a nice "face-to-face" opportunity to discuss KDE's latest and cutting edge technology trends. Read on to find out what transpired at the meeting and what the future might hold for KDE in China. read more

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise pangolin in a few days will soon be released and new and cool apps keep being added to the Ubuntu Software Centre. Check out last month’s most downloaded free and paid apps.

The writer Toby Young tells a story about how the modern 100m race is run in primary schools. At the starting pistol, everyone runs like mad. At the 50m point, the fastest children stop and wait for the heavier kids to catch up. Then all the youngsters walk across the finishing line together, holding hands. I have no idea if this is true, but the media class’s newly acquired enthusiasm for teaching all children computer programming is very similar.

In the past I have written several howtos for remotely unlocking fully encrypted Debian installations. With the advent of Debian Squeeze, the developers have integrated a simple way to do so. Most stuff is provided directly by Debian itself - meaning you don't need 3rd party scripts anymore. However it still involves a few steps which I describe below. Also I provide you with a bash script that will do all the steps automatically.

For this tutorial I will use Gnome Shell 3.4 and its default theme, but this will work also on 3.2 and pretty much on any theme that doesn’t already use an image for Activities. You will need user-theme extension, gnome-tweak-tool, an image and of course GNOME 3.2+.

The Fedora Project announced yesterday, April 17th, that the Beta release of the upcoming Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle) operating system is available for download and testing.

Cairo-Dock 3.0 has been released, the new version comes with many new features and improvements, so the taskbar has been greatly enhanced, the Log out applet has been rewritten and more

Sometimes the best way to spice up a photo is to make it look faded, and digiKam makes it supremely easy to achieve this effect.

The GNOME Project, through Owen Taylor, announced last evening, April 17th, the immediate availability for download of the stable release of GNOME Shell 3.4.1.

Hibernate option is disabled by default in Ubuntu 12.04. Hibernate doesn't work in many cases with Ubuntu, so this decision was taken to avoid data loss/corruption that can happen when a user tries to hibernate his system. So if you are quite used to hibernate feature, you will have to rely on a workaround by manually editing some system files. There is no GUI option to enable/disable hibernate in Precise.

If you have not been following the saga of the Mageia Linux distribution then you are unaware that Mageia 2 is slated to be released on May 15th. At this point the distribution is in Beta 3 testing and then will have a Release Candidate out right around May 2nd.

Pinta cross-platform image editor based on Paint.NET has been released, come in version 1.2 . pinta is a Image Editor designed to serve as an alternative to more advanced applications like GIMP, for casual users