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Pear OS is a younger project, and unlike Zorin OS which merely provides a similar interface, Pear OS tries to ape another proprietary OS fully, so of course it falls a bit short of its goals.

WiFi hacking has long been a favorite pastime of hackers, penetration testers, and people too cheap to pay for their own Internet connection.

The Mozilla Public License is one of the most influential software licenses in recent memory. In many respects, it is the basis for alot of modern idea about open source, as opposed to just Free Software and the GPL. This week, the Mozilla Public License 2.0 was officially released - and to be honest, I was caught a little off guard. I've known that work was in progress since at least 2008. In 2010, Mozilla Chief Mitchell Baker let us know that the new MPL 2.0 would remove references to Netscape in the license.

Next week is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. As usual, Linux will have a role an increasing role in the event...

If you think that you can do Linux System administration without cut command, then you are absolutely right. However, mastering this fairly simple command line tool will give you a great advantage when it comes to the efficiency of your work on a user as well administration level. To simply put, cut command is one of many text-filtering command line tools that Linux Operation System has to offer. It filters standard STDIN from another command or input file and sends the filtered output to STDOUT.

I used to have a paperweight sitting on my desk that read something like “Robert H. Lane, appointed President of Commodore Computers....” It was the sort of thing that they gave to executives. A brass plaque of their appointment as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal or the Globe and Mail.

Cinnamon is a very recent addition to the list of desktop environments available for Linux, BSD and other UNIX-like operating systems. It was started by Clement Lefebvre and his crew at Linux Mint and it is an attempt to make the GNOME 3 desktop more user-friendly. If you are not happy with GNOME 3, and are using Fedora 16, that is, the main edition, which uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment, you will find Cinnamon a lot more fun to use. This short tutorial gives the steps on how to install and use it.

Picasa 3.9 was released a while back and among the new features are: share pictures to Google Plus, Picasa name tags for Google Plus, new photo editing effects and side by side editing.

I'm a big fan of iRedMail, which is basically a packaged version of Postfix and the other bits that make Postfix cool, like Spamassassin, greylisting and an LDAP or MySQL backend. One thing I wanted with iRedMail is Mailman, my favourite mailing list server. Integrating the two can be a mission though, so here's some instruction to save you from quite a bit of pain.

Since the late 1980s, Japanese role-playing games or JRPGs have managed to enthrall a wide range of audiences. From Wizardry to Final Fantasy, this genre has garnered a huge fan following not just among the Japanese, but also among Western gamers. Furthermore, since JRPGs have been made for almost every platform that’s out there, our very own Android, which is also a fledgling gaming platform, has seen some great titles in this genre. So, if you’re hankering for a visit to mystical realms and dragon-infested lands, here’s a list of some of the best JRPGs for Android.

Canonical announced last night, January 3rd, that it will present the latest in Desktop, Cloud and Ubuntu One demonstrations, as well as an exclusive Ubuntu concept design, at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) event, in Las Vegas, US.

In writing a blog item several days ago about the naming conventions of some distros, Larry the Free Software Guy gave further thought to the actual names of some distros and FOSS programs themselves, and how some are in desperate need of change. Among a chosen few, one special example would be that X11 window manager with a name that only a urologist could love.

Retrode 2 can turn your Linux box into a retro gaming machine. The little black box allows you to play all your good old SNES and Genesis games legally on your PC. Retrode 2 is a USB adapter for classic 16 bit video games. It includes dual cartridge reader ports and supports original game controllers.

Moving users to the rapid release where Mozilla issues a new version of its browser every six weeks is important to the company, since it still supports the two year old browser with security updates.

If you use Google Documents, you might want to be able to access your files without using a browser. So, I was all set, happy to write a good blog entry about how to mount your Google Documents folder on your Ubuntu. (This is not a very free-software thing to do, granted. But then again, if you are an Ubuntu One user, well, Ubuntu One server isn't free software either. But, it's a service, and interfacing to things is crucial.) So, is it actually possible?

Asus is the second company this week to support the unlocking of bootloaders. HTC faced a consumer backlash in May over the locked bootloaders in its devices, but on December 29 the company released a tool to unlock the bootloaders in some phones and tablets.

It’s a new year, and LibreOffice (the office productivity suite forked from OpenOffice.org) is the new face of open source productivity software. Or is it? And more importantly, will it remain so as OpenOffice is reborn under the Apache Foundation? Here's the update.

Call it “Chromegate.” Just a few weeks after Google Chrome was reported to have overtaken Mozilla Firefox to become the second most popular Web browser in the world, Google’s glory has been tarnished by a “jaw-dropping,” massive online Chrome advertising campaign that would seem to violate Google’s own guidelines, uncovered by SEO Book blogger Aaron Wall. Essentially, Google was caught paying at least one PR company to spam the Web with hundreds of crudely written “sponsored posts” from bloggers promoting Google Chrome — posts comprised of what would seem to be just placeholder text and unsubstantiated pro-Google Chrome statements.

My journey with Linux began in 2009, one week before the release of Ubuntu 9.04. I was a long-time Windows user who knew of nothing else, but what Microsoft had to offer for my computer. Years of frustration culminated with me clicking away on Google to look for an alternative, if there was even one. Boy, did my eyes fill with wonder as I found out about Linux, in general, and more specifically Ubuntu. I read and read about it and came to find out that I could test drive it right from the cd itself. It works! It really works! I was estatic. I was free from the shackles of Microsoft Windows. Ubuntu 9.04 made it’s way onto my computer and I have not looked back since. From that time on, I have come to realize that Linux was all around me and I didn’t even know it.

The Blender Foundation has started a new "Open Movie" project called "Mango", and this one is of particular interest to me for Lunatics, because of the technical goal: motion tracking. Motion tracking is principally about putting animated 3D objects into real footage so that it matches the background "plate" (i.e. the original footage).

Read more at Free Software Magazine.