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I've been excited about the moving of the Linux Mint GNOME (though there is still a main Ubuntu-based Linux Mint GNOME edition), Xfce, and Fluxbox editions, but less so about the KDE edition moving similarly.

Google announced that iRiver's Story HD e-reader will be available July 17 at Target, and will be the first device to offer Google eBooks support via Wi-Fi. In related e-reader news, the Philadelphia Media Network will offer deeply discounted Android tablets to Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News subscribers, and e-reader/tablet vendor Augen appears to have gone under....

Unix systems may not be all the rage that they were two decades ago, but in nearly eight out of 10 data centers based on them, their use is either holding steady or increasing. That's the assessment of a recent survey of the HP, IBM, and Oracle Unix customer bases by Gabriel Consulting Group, which has just finished up its fifth annual slicing and dicing of Unix customer sentiments.

Journalist, FOSS advocate, feminist - Carla Schroder is all these and more. But more than anything it is her straight talking that marks her out - when she takes a stand on issues she is driven by conviction. This means that often she is at the receiving end but it is something that she can more than handle. The good thing about dealing with her is that she never allows her personal and professional worlds to mix - even her worst enemy will be allowed to have his/her say on a site which she edits. This is indeed a rare trait..

It cannot be denied that there remains a paucity of games for Linux produced by the large well known gaming companies. It is sometimes perceived that part of the reason rests with Linux gamers themselves. Given the number and variety of addictive high quality open source games, it is perhaps understandable that many Linux gamers might not appear to want to pay high ticket prices for games. Further, it is a fact that the markedly smaller Linux user base means that sales of commercial titles will inevitably be lower than games released on many other platforms, making ports to Linux less financially attractive.

Does Microsoft actually hold valid patents being infringed by Android? Who knows? That would be for the courts to decide and, so far, nothing’s gone to court. OEMs are just ponying up and buying MS licenses on the strength of Microsoft threats. So much so that Redmond is evidently making more money on Android than on Windows Phone 7.

GDM3Setup is a simple GUI tool to tweak GDM3 (GNOME3 login screen). Using it, you can change the following GDM3 settings: wallpaper, GTK3 theme, icon theme, logo, disable the login screen user list or restart buttons.

The CentOS community released its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 clone, promising continuous release updates to support RHEL 6.1 security features. In addition to supporting RHEL 6.0 improvements such as faster virtualization, and better scalability, power efficiency, and resource management, CentOS 6.0 is said to offer a completely rebuilt build system and library checks to confirm upstream binary compatibility.

In order for a capitalistic system to work however, people must be allowed to own what they earn. And ownership of a thing means that you must be able to make all of the choices...

8 months ago Nichi Vendola, governor of the Italian Region of Puglia, signed in the same week a proposal for a Free Software regional law and... a partnership with Microsoft, worrying local FOSS activists to the point that they sent Stallman to Puglia to explain what Free SW is. This morning, Vendola declared that the law was recently approved by the Puglia Regional Council, with a press release that, after defining Free Software as "Using computers without licensing costs",leaves unanswered all the questions about FOSS in local schools and businesses asked last year.

There are thousands of excellent open source programs to choose from. Here are 10 of my favorites that rarely get breathless buzz or make top 10 lists, presented in no particular order, rhyme, or reason.

By default, Gnome 3 in Fedora 15 doesn’t leave you with much screen real estate with its huge title bar and persistent menu bar. These settings certainly don’t like the tiny 10 inch screen of my netbook. But with a little tweaking, you can remove the title bar and auto hide the menu bar, maximizing your screen real estate like my screenshot below (yes, that is my WHOLE screen):

The GPL "needs to be replaced with 'free for noncommercial use' so that the hackers can still have a 'free as in beer' OS to hack on, the poor can also have a free OS, but those corps that are actually making money on Linux will HAVE TO contribute some of their profits back into the community," opined Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "... Many of these companies wouldn't be enjoying their massive profits if it wasn't for Linux."

The CentOS development team, through Karanbir Singh, proudly announced last evening, July 10th, the immediate availability for download of the CentOS 6.0 operating system.

Until recently, I had presumed that a Clonk was the sound that my hard drive made just before I realized that I hadn't backed it up properly. However, in this case, a Clonk is a tiny chap who can jump, climb and fire weapons in the service of reaching his goal. OpenClonk runs on Linux and is the latest in a series of side-view platform games that started life as a DOS shareware series.

Ailurus is a great little program to add on to a fresh installation of Fedora 15. I would compare it to something along the lines of Ubuntu Tweak, in which the user is presented with a set of clean up tasks, system information, a package manager, and even a good solid set of repositories to choose from. I only wish I had found it a little earlier than I did as it would have made adding the initial repositories a breeze when I first installed Fedora 15.

One of digiKam’s lesser known features is the ability to link scripts to notifications. At first sight, this may seem like a rather obscure functionality, but it can be put to some clever uses.

Nginx is an open source high-performance web server, which has gained quite some popularity recently. Due to its modular architecture and small footprint, it has been the default choice for a lot of smaller Web 2.0 companies to be used as a load-balancing proxy server. It supports most of the existing backend web protocols such as FCGI, WSGI, and SCGI.

Just over two weeks after the official release of Scientific Linux 5.6, the Scientific Linux (SL) developers have announced the arrival of the LiveCD and LiveDVD variants of version 5.6 of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone. The LiveCD/DVD versions allow users to run the distribution directly from a CD or DVD drive without having to install it. Alternatively, it can also be installed to the local hard disk or users can run the LiveCD image from a USB flash drive.

If you have a big music collection, and you want to have it in only one place, and be able to listen to it using Linux, Windows or Mac clients. Use mt-Daap Linux server. Slackware in this case.