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The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.

Developer Dmitry Grinberg has apparently managed to boot Ubuntu Linux up to the shell on an Atmel 8-bit microcontroller; this has led some to ask if he's a genius or a madman. Since normal Linux distributions expect to find a 32-bit processor and a memory management unit (MMU), Grinberg had to overcome several obstacles. For example, he didn't hesitate to write an ARM emulator (ARMv5TE) for the ATmega1284p, which is slightly overclocked at 24 MHz. The developer said that he chose ARM because he was already familiar with this technology and because Linux runs on ARM processors.

Need to keep files and documents in sync across multiple Linux machines? Bitpocket provides a no-nonsense solution to the problem. This tiny shell script uses the excellent rsync software to perform the syncing jiggery-pockery. This means that you can have one machine acting as the "main repository", and then have several "client" machines which will be able to sync with it. (This obviously means that all client machines will have the same files). Here is how you configure it.

In Spring 2011, I started a project to attempt to create a free-culture compatible / non-DRM alternative to Blu-Ray for high-definition video releases on fixed-media, and after about a year hiatus, I'm getting back to it with some new ideas. The first is that I've concluded that optical discs are a bust for this kind of application, and that the time has come to move on to Flash media, specifically SDHC/SDXC as the hardware medium. This is a more expensive choice of medium, and still not perfect, but it has enough advantages to make it a clear choice now.

SystemRescueCd is One of the most useful rescue disk for both Windows and Linux systems, Linux Live CD distributions that allow it to boot on both 32-bit or 64-bit Intel /AMD systems. SystemRescueCd is based on the Gentoo Linux distribution.

Of course, we wouldn't have had it any other way: we wanted to be fair, as pledged, so here is the vim article, which is a counterpart of our last one on how to make your editor the perfect programming environment. So you must have the following profile for this article to be really useful to you: you know your way around programming, so you subsequently know what you would like in an editor, and you also know your way around vim, preferably more than what we talked about in the article dedicated to it. If you read the customizing emacs article, you already have a good idea on how this article is going to be structured.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" can boot faster... sometimes. If you are not lucky, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS can boot more than twice as slow as Ubuntu 10.04, the previous LTS release. Here are boot performance results of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on six distinct notebooks and comparing the Bootchart results upon clean installations of Ubuntu Linux going back as far as six years from the days of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake" release.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS beta 2 has been released today, this being the last beta before the final Ubuntu 12.04 release. Let's take a look at what's new since beta 1.

When Red Hat (RHT) announced strong quarterly results yesterday, the figures essentially ended a recent debate about Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Ubuntu Server. Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth recently suggested Ubuntu is more popular than RHEL for some server applications. But when it comes down to dollars and cents, business-centric applications, and partner engagement, most evidence still points to Red Hat as the overwhelming Linux market leader. Here's why.

1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day - the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.

The long-awaited and much anticipated 2.8 release of GIMP is right around the corner! Wait, I know, you’ve heard this before. You were expecting it at the end of 2010, and then in 2011, and so on… Well, fear not because it’s really coming in less than 45 days! Want proof? Nothing could be more clear than this infographic.

Christian Ude, the mayor of Munich and occasional political cabaret artist, is trumpeting the cost savings made by switching from Windows to Linux, claiming his city has saved over €4m over the last year alone. Ude claims that Munich's IT department saved about a third of their total budget last year by dumping Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice. Buying new Windows software and upgrading systems so they could actually run it would have cost over €15m, with another €2.8m due in 3 to 4 years of license renewal, according to official figures.

Choosing a highly secure password for your email accounts, social networks, wireless networks and any other applications or websites requires a password became a challenge. So, when you choose a password, think about the possibility of cracking it and how long it will take to crack your password. In this post we will have a look at some tips for choosing a secure and strong passwords as much as possible, and we will check a CLI tool for Linux/Unix will helps you to generate a secure passwords in case you can’t figure one out.

Red Hat is widely expected to crack a billion dollars in revenue in today’s earning call. This achievement will finally put to bed the argument that "nobody can make money with open source." I want to congratulate Red Hat for this incredible achievement. However, I would also like to use this occasion to show that there is significantly more at play here. It isn't just the billion dollars Red Hat is making with open source; there are many more reasons why Linux and open source are fundamental building blocks of the future:

CloudFTP is a bit of a misnomer, as it hasn't much to do with cloud computing per se. In fact, this miniature Linux-powered device is designed to make any USB mass storage device accessible via a wireless connection.

Another session taking place next week at the 6th Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, besides Qualcomm allegedly wanting to kill all proprietary drivers, is two Microsoft engineers talking about their Linux driver development experiences...

As we've learned over the past year or two, devastating disasters can strike anywhere making a disaster plan essential -- and storing your data in the cloud away from your business might be a way to go.

With this name, shortly after the announcement of Steam for Mac, a new Steam group with a request to Valve to release Steam for Linux was established.

Protecting your computer from network and physical attacks should be at the very top of your computing to-do list. And if you are new to Pear Linux Comice OS 4, a Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu Desktop, the network security aspect has been made a little bit easier for you. The network security angle is what needs a little attention.

Complaints aside, Gnome 3.4 is a great improvement. The evolution shows that developers are looking for new ideas and new design. Yes, there are some rough edges, but all this work is not being done by some mega corporation with billions of revenues to be made from it. The great work that we see is done by a community of developers. They don't get a dime from their users. Users don't even know names of these unsung heroes. So kudos to those hard working developers who are making this world a better place by developing free software.