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A detailed overview of an infrastructure to build a FOSS cluster for high availability (HA).

If you are a regular user of Windows or Mac OSX, you will feel like being lost in a strange world in the first time you install and try Linux as the operating system for your computer. In this article, I will show you some tips to help you get accustomed to the magnificent world of Linux as a beginner.

The jury is out on the issue of patent infringement, and the instructions issued to the jury (1153 [PDF; Text])are more favorable to Google than originally drafted. Gone are the references to "blind willfulness" and included are the definitions more favorable to Google than to Oracle. The Special Verdict Form (Text) is shortened as well given that the parties stipulated to indirect infringement on a finding of direct infringement.

The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 13 ‘Maya’ RC. Linux Mint 13 features the choice between a productive, stable and mature MATE 1.2 desktop and the brand new modern-looking and exciting Cinnamon 1.4.

It's always easy to shy away from the latest buzzwords and pass them off as the passing fancy of the day, but gamification can drive usage for your software or service. You just have to be clever about how you implement it.

There are nearly 4,000 different types of devices running Android, OpenSignalMaps has found. More than 1,300 of them have custom ROMs that tweak the android.build model. Android brands are almost as diverse as the models, OpenSignalMaps discovered. Further, the application programming interface level, meaning the Android version, has also become more fragmented over time.

A well known company, Valve, that distributes nonfree computer games with Digital Restrictions Management, recently announced it would distribute these games for GNU/Linux. What good and bad effects can this have?

DRM turned a 10 minute purchase into a 2 and a half nightmare (and counting). I wanted to buy a book: I ended up in a journey which made it dead clear that in a sane world, there is absolutely no space for DRM-protected contents. The only real warning I have about this article is that it may make you feel sick.

Are you looking for a job? Well, if you're a good designer, live in London, UK, and you want a job at Canonical, now it's the right time to apply for one of the many positions offered by the company behind the popular Ubuntu operating system.

When Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was released last week -- the first OpenOffice release under Apache - I *guessed* that it was likely a better fit for Windows and Mac users than for Linux users. As it turns out, after a week of availability, that's exactly the case.

The Release Candidate of Linux Mint 13 was announced on May 16th, it is powered by Linux kernel 3.2 and based on the recently released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

Would a rose by any other name still smell as sweet? Or would it, perhaps, end up sweeter? That, essentially, is the question at the heart of the forking process, which in turn is at the heart of a key situation today. Namely: Now that we have LibreOffice, do we still need OpenOffice as well? In the wake of Apache OpenOffice's new update, that's been the question du jour down at the Linux blogosphere's Punchy Penguin Cafe.

File Thingie is not the sleekest or feature-richest web-based file manager out there, but it's a perfect fit for those who need a no-frills solution that is easy to deploy and use. This is not to say that File Thingie skimps on features. All the essential functionality is there, including the ability to upload multiple files in one go, support for users and groups, file access control based on black and white lists, and more.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

Going back to last year there's been the "Glamor Acceleration" project out of Intel to accelerate the 2D operations within X using OpenGL on Mesa. This is similar to the Xorg state tracker approach and while it's not yet enabled by default, Intel OTC developers have been making much progress in recent months. In this article is a look at the recent Glamor update while comparing it to the stock Intel UXA acceleration as well as to the other experimental acceleration option: Intel SNA.

Linux Mint 13 has jumped straight to a release candidate, hot on the heels of Ubuntu 12.04s release, and with a controversial switch to Yahoo search…

I think it's fair to say that Porteus is optimized to run from a CD or USB flash drive, but it's also just as easy to install Porteus on a hard drive for use as a primary OS. In fact, it will probably boot and run even faster this way. One of our chief goals in developing Porteus is...

The Xfce 4 desktop offers a vast array of customization options that will leave your desktop looking nothing like the default. Take advantage of all the excellent graphical user interfaces offered for all of your options, settings, and preferences.

If the steadily growing user base and market share of Skype are any indication, the service, which is now nearly a decade old, will remain widespread on PCs, smartphones and other devices for a long time to come. But for Linux users, the future of Skype support is appearing a bit less certain. Will Skype still run on open source platforms five years from now? Here are some thoughts.

As a company, Inktank, one of the open source ecosystem’s newest commercial enterprises, is only days old. But it has already made a determined foray into the Linux server market with the announcement this week of integration of the Ceph distributed file system into Ubuntu 12.04. Here’s the scoop, and what it says about both Inktank and Ubuntu.

Two years after its initial attempt to sell Nexus smartphones directly to consumers flopped, Google is apparently trying to revive the strategy. This time, though, it's added a few new touches. It's going to work with up to five device manufacturers at a time to create a portfolio of Nexus-line devices that include smartphones and tablets.