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David Tavares, the French developer behind the jaw-dropping Pear OS Linux operating system is proud to announce today, January 3rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha version of Pear OS Linux Debian Edition.

Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork created by Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: a bottom panel with launchers, GNOME2-like systray and notifications and more.

LinuxQuestions.org is proud to announce that voting for the 2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 31 categories this year, including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Mobile Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, NoSQL Database of the Year and Open Source Game of the Year. The polls will close on February 9th. This is the eleventh annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Previous winners include Red Hat, Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL, Gnome, KDE and Python.

BF Programs has created an app called 'Stream for Android' which brings most of the Steam features to Android. Caveat: It's not an official Steam App. What is basically does is lets you check your Steam's public profile.

For those who became more interested in the PandaBoard ES after it was benchmarked on Phoronix last week, here's some details about the Distributed Codec Engine found on this OMAP4 platform from Texas Instruments.

Fallout is now on Desura for Linux using DosBox! It's the same thing that gog.com does it bundles the game with DosBox (exactly the same on Windows).

Arch Linux has a cult following, and there is a price to pay too – it is one of those operating systems which requires its users to be well versed with the UNIX-like system. You build everything from scratch. There are quite a lot of benefits of using such a system. But, it also means that Arch Linux is not for mere mortals like me. I did install Arch once, reading a manual written by a Muktware author, but then moved back to my secure cocoon. I continue to dream of using Arch one day. Chakra brings me closer to realizing that dream. I may not have compiled the OS for my hardware and gone through the interesting installation process but through Chakra I do get to experience all the goodies of Arch without sweating too much.

Single sign-on is a great technology. Requiring users to login to multiple applications is huge hassle, encourages password reuse and simple passwords. Security needs to focus on usability. If you can make a user's life better while increasing security, everybody wins. In this how-to we will set up the open-source CAS SSO product with the WiKID Strong Authentication Server for two-factor authentication for sessions and mutual https authentication for host authentication. Obviously using two-factor authentication for the login increases security because the user must have the factors to get access, in this case, knowledge of the PIN and possession of the private key embedded in the token. The CAS server is running on Ubuntu 11.04 Server and is using Radius to talk to the WiKID Strong Authentication Server Enterprise Edition.

Being powered by Linux Kernel 3.1, it provides a featureful Xfce 4.8 desktop environment, and the powerful Softmaker office suite, which includes Planmaker, Presentations and Textmaker components but also provides Microsoft Office documents compatibility.

At the end of 2010, I asked some of my friends and Linux Pro Magazine readers to make predictions for 2011. Now as we look back on the year, we get to decide whether our predictions were on target. Year of Linux on the desktop? Well, once again, Linux on the desktop wasn't really the sexy tech news of the year, which turned out to be the year of cloud, mobile, and tablet headlines. Carla Schroder was more on target with her predictions, such as "world governments will try to fence off and control the Internet" while "Linux and Free/Open Source software, and organizations like Wikileaks and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will continue to toil valiantly to protect our dwindling freedoms.”

Over the holidays, noted blogger Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress in which he warned that one of the biggest problems on the technology scene is that control over our computing devices is about to be taken from us. There is a video of the address, called The Coming War on General Computing, available on YouTube. Doctorow warns that the copyright wars are only the beginning of a much bigger set of issues having to do with how much we control our own devices. The address has already drawn much reaction from the open source community, and is, in some ways, a defense of open source principles.

After 20 years, Linux continues to move forward. 2011 was another strong year for Linux as new kernels and distributions continued to advance the state of Linux. It was also a year of challenges as the kernel development community grappled with a security breach at kernel.org, and desktop users cringed as the GNOME Shell and Unity interfaces challenged normal usage paradigms.

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

What is Debian XFCE Live and how does it compare on the market? This is a distribution that we need to respect, because it is stable, universal and reliable. This is valid for anything in the Debian Stable branch, which is currently Squeeze. But usage of the XFCE Desktop Environment on top of Debian Squeeze has its own points, positive and negative.

At first glance, Zentyal seems to be making all the right moves — raising venture capital and building a partner network to promote Linux into the small business server market. But can Zentyal succeed where so many other Linux distributions have failed? Here's a reality check.

Nuclear engineer Brett Legree discusses his desktop Linux setup and his love of the Linux philosophy.

In his very first author interview, Thomas A. Knight gets the opportunity to talk to one of Magic:The Gathering's finest authors, J. Robert King, and discuss his latest work, his life, and publishing in general. Also catch a glimpse into what The Open Source Author has to offer in the coming year!

Because of the nature of Linux, when you boot into the Linux half of a dual-boot system, you can access your data (files and folders) on the Windows side, without rebooting into Windows. And you can even edit those Windows files and save them back to the Windows half. It is a very simple process, and requires very little work on your part. This brief tutorial shows you how it is done when dual-booting a distribution that uses the GNOME or KDE desktop environment.

Gentoo is the empire GNU/Linux distribution which enables a user to compile the entire OS from scratch, optimized for that particular machine. Many users, like me, dream if using Gentoo but can't due to the 'installation' process. However, there is a live version of Gentoo which you can use to test and play with Gentoo without it biting your fingers.

The famed Raspberry Pi Model B Beta Boards are now up for grabs on eBay. The first 10 are being auctioned off 2 at a time and 100% of the proceeds will benefit Raspberry Pi foundation.