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In Real View v. 20-20, an "actual damages" copyright infringement case, the Court held that the actual damages for an unauthorized download of a computer program was limited to the cost of an actual license fee

These are good times for users of RPM-based distributions. The two behemoths of RPM-land, OpenSUSE and Fedora, have just released new iterations and here we pit them against each other to see if they have what it takes to win the coveted real estate on your hard disk.

It is essential to have a Web presence for your business, even if it's no more than a simple information page. Your customers will look for a website to learn about your business before they look for a phone book or newspaper ad. You can publish and maintain your website yourself, and with these five open source site builders, it's inexpensive and easy.

GIMX stands for Game Input MultipleXer or Game Input MatriX. GIMX allows us to control video game consoles with a Linux PC. It currently only works with the PS3, but the Xbox 360 is a also targeted. The application gets data from the PC peripherals (mice, keyboards and joysticks) and sends controls to the PS3 over bluetooth or usb. Other controls such as gesture or voice are possible through the emulation of PC peripherals. The application supports Linux out of the box.

Welcome to the 180th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

Here is a little extension I made for Gnome Shell. It removes the Message tray (bottom bar). I recommend to use with gnome-shell-gnome2-notifications extension by rcmorano so that you can see all your notification icons in the top bar. Have fun. DOWNLOAD NOW!

A PC World writer glosses over the naming conventions in Linux distros without going into the detail they rightfully deserve. So Larry the Free Software Guy gives her a hand, expanding on the how and why, from the perspective of digital anthropology, release names are as important as they are humorous.

With the recent release of Bodhi Linux 1.3.0 I've had a few questions as to what our release cycle is exactly. I'd like to take a short moment today to clarify what exactly on current release schedule looks like.

Pear OS is a desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, Desktop, but with a desktop appearance fashioned after the Mac OS X UI. A review of the latest edition, Pear OS Linux Panther 3, has already been published on this website.

This article presents a step-by-step guide on how to dual-boot Pear OS and Windows 7. To start, you need to download Pear OS Panther 3 from here and burn it to a CD or transfer it to a USB stick. The computer used for this article has a 500 GB hard drive with an existing installation of Windows 7, and it is assumed that you will also be attempting this on a computer that also has an existing installation of Windows 7.

Rumour mill predicts high-end iPad 3 and mid-range twin Apple will unveil not one but two iPad 3s on 23 January at the iWorld conference, according to a somewhat unlikely rumour breathlessly reported by gossip pumpers Digitimes.…

Calculate Linux, the popular Gentoo-based Linux distribution from Russia, is out with their 11.12 release...

Alien Arena, an open-source first person shooter that's often overlooked, is out with their 7.53 release. This version brings many enhancements to the alien-themed game...

With 2011 quickly coming to an end, having written more than 1,370 news postings at Phoronix this year, what were the most popular stories?..

Developers need to know the right lingo Open ... and Shut If the last decade was all about open source, the next decade will be about open APIs. However, as with open source, APIs aren't necessarily a guarantee of billions in the bank. They're simply the ante for playing the technology game at scale. That scale will be determined by who gives developers the best access to data, and that access is a function of open APIs.…

The real beauty of open source software isn’t that it’s free; it’s that it’s free to change. Developers can tinker with it, strip it down or build it out, depending on their wants and needs.

In the case of Google’s Android, this increasingly means that we don’t have one Android operating system. Instead, we have a family of different Android forks and flavors.

Even to call Android “fragmented” assumes that it was or ought to be unified and singular from the beginning. It makes more sense to start talking about “Android-compatible” devices, rather than Android.

But, despite the backing of a coalition of powerful tech companies, the bill to amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act was dead on arrival, never even getting a hearing before the committee Leahy heads.

In contrast, another proposal sailed through Leahy’s committee, less than two weeks after Leahy and others floated it at about the same time as his ECPA reform measure. That bill, known as the Protect IP Act, was anti-piracy legislation long sought by Hollywood that dramatically increased the government’s legal power to disrupt and shutter websites “dedicated to infringing activities.”

This dichotomy played itself out over and again in 2011, as lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — turned a blind eye to important civil liberties issues, including Patriot Act reform, and instead paid heed to the content industry’s desires to stop piracy.

One thing that GNU/Linux misses the most is marketing. We never get to know about the new and useful tools which are being added due to the lack of PR muscles. Recently Ubuntu made yet another incredible move which makes the application installation process of Windows look ancient. Ubuntu silently took its apps on-line by launching 'Ubuntu App Directory' (the name can be more attractive like Ubuntu App Shop). The 'Ubuntu App Directory' allows you to browse the apps available in Ubuntu's official repositories and install them with one click. With this move Ubuntu is now catching up with Fedora and openSUSE which already have such online resources where you can search and install applications with one click.

Being new to blog-sphere, I decided to play it safe and write about best desktop distributions in a different way. And there is also some Sandman related humor.

This guide describes how to search YouTube videos on Ubuntu's Unity Dash with the YouTube Lens.

After sharing the most popular Linux stories of 2011 in terms of Phoronix news articles, here is a listing of the most popular featured Phoronix articles from this past calendar year...