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It looks like 2012 is going to be a great year for free culture. Possibly my favorite development is that MusOpen has organized its planned symphony recordings for this January. In September, 2010, the free culture organization raised over $68,000 (several times their $11,000 goal) through a Kickstarter campaign, with the intent of commissioning a "internationally renowned orchestra" to perform the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies.

Cinnamon is another attempt to make the GNOME 3 desktop acceptable to those in the community who have so far refused to have an unpalatable substance rammed down their throats. While MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3 Shell. And though better than the other attempts, it does not really represent a sharp break from GNOME 3 + MGSE. Imagine GNOME 3 + MGSE without the Applications view or menu, and you have Cinnamon.

The incident that prompted Newman and Feldman’s analysis was the removal from the internet of the Sweet 16, a freely available clinical assessment tool used by physicians to screen patients for cognitive problems. The tool was taken down because of legal action by the creators of a similar tool called the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Clinical tools tend to resemble one another, Newman said, “not because their creators are unoriginal, but because the tools are based on the same research and the same science.”

Despite the challenging U.S. economy, Red Hat sure sounds optimistic. The open source company plans to hire roughly 1,000 people in 2012. And this isn’t a pure Linux strategy. Red Hat also continues to invest in virtualization, storage, middleware and cloud computing. Here's the strategy.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the real thread to free software (and I am talking here about software released under a free license, not software that you can download and use for free) is contempt. Proprietary software is a competitor, but not a real threat. Proprietary software cannot really kill free software: no matter how many law suits you start, how many patents you file, how many pre-installed versions of Windows you have, common sense will always win. Contempt, however, the the real danger.

The autonomous region of Extremadura in western Spain, which has pioneered the use of open source solutions in public administrations since 2005, has abandoned the development of its custom LinEx distribution. The Spanish newspaper Público reports that the project was abandoned after control of the Centro de Excelencia de Software José de Espronceda, which was responsible for the development of LinEx and other projects, was handed over to the central Spanish government in Madrid. In May 2011, the Extremadura branch of the Spanish Partido Popular (PP) party won the government elections in the autonomous region.

Canonical will have a presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, from the 10th – 13th January. The booth, in the Upper Level of South Hall 4, is at location 35379 within the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Looking ahead to this new year, "I wish and expect that the world will discover FLOSS, particularly Debian GNU/Linux, to be the rich and efficient software system I have been using for years," said blogger Robert Pogson. "It is as different as night and day from that other OS, with all its restrictions and fragility."

Ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley swears she’s not drinking. Microsoft really is getting ready to enable customers to make Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service. That Microsoft was going to enable users to set up persistent VMs on Azure came as no surprise. While Azure has persistent storage, its inability to keep a VM persistent has annoyed many people, and not just Linux server managers. I know several SharePoint and SQL Server administrators who’ve avoided Azure because of this lack. There are ways to hack your way around the lack of a persistent Azure VM, but they’re not easy.

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.