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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.

SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") is a new networking protocol whose goal is to speed up the web. It is Google's alternative to the HTTP protocol and a candidate for HTTP/2.0. SPDY augments HTTP with several speed-related features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. To use SPDY, you need a web server and a browser (like Google Chrome and upcoming versions of Firefox) that both support SPDY. mod_spdy is an open-source Apache module that adds support for the SPDY protocol to the Apache HTTPD server. This tutorial explains how to use mod_spdy with Apache2 on Debian Squeeze.

Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, April 19th, that the codename for the upcoming Linux Mint 13 operating system will be Maya.

Red Hat, Inc. is the clear leader in the Linux market. It has the strongest, commercially supported Linux distribution and the best-performing virtualization solution for servers and desktops. It is the first billion dollar open source company in the world and is the most successful Linux company thanks in part to its dedication to the open source community and free software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), its flagship Linux product, is the one to watch in the data center for enterprise-level workloads including databases, application delivery and virtualization.

News about the lawsuit between Oracle (which owns Java) and Google (which uses aspects of Java in Android) are resonating far and loud at the moment. At this point in the article, I should summarise the story: the trouble is that a summary at this point is impossible. The main problem is with Oracle, and their inability to understand free software.

I've been distro-hopping/shopping lately, and last night it was time for CrunchBang Linux, a Debian-based distribution that uses a very nice implementation of the Openbox window manager. CrunchBang is appropriately minimal but with its Debian underpinnings can be just about anything you want.

Last month we had the chance to review Yubico’s YubiKey, a low cost, high accessibility authentication token that is aiming to change the way individuals connect with their online services. We came away very impressed, and...