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Linux distro names started to get 'weird' when Ubuntu arrived on the scenes with Weirdly Wacky African-inspired Animal names. Other distros, notably Fedora have taken a more democratic approach where community members vote on the release name, but that could soon change.

Nothing boosts productivity like an application or piece of software that makes if very easy to get your computing tasks done without fighting your way computer all the way. And I am always in search of such applications. In the past few months, five such applications have come to my attention.

The final version of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) is not out yet, but the release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 operating system has been published on the Ubuntu Wiki.

TheCorpora has opened pre-orders for the Q.bo, the completely open source robot. Due out at the end of the year, there are several versions available for different enthusiasts

With the release of Ubuntu 12.10 due out next week, Mark Shuttleworth will soon be announcing the codename of the six-month successor to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which carries the codename of Precise Pangolin...

The 5-year-old subscription streaming video service known as "Hulu Plus" has doubled its subscriber numbers in the last seven months to more than 2 million, according to numbers bandied about by the company. Hulu is a joint venture between investors and television operators: Comcast's NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment and the Walt Disney Company. Competitors include Netflix and cable providers like Time Warner Cable.

I've brought shader support into the game engine, so that everything should look much more vibrant!

PlayOnLinux 4.0.17 has been released!

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.